Month: June 2016

Simon the Sorcerer Review: When Greywolfe Met Pixels

So, I'm going to confess to something right away:

I was intensely worried about replaying this game, twenty years along.

I was worried about it because I'd played a bit [and got stuck] a couple of years ago.  And I remembered the conversation with the Billy Goats Gruff.

Essentially, it turns the fable into a commentary on worker's rights - and that - really - says all you need to know about the first game.  It's in a somewhat surreal and slightly twisted High Fantasy world. Read more

WRUPXIT

Ah-ah-ah-aha! Sorry, I can’t stop laughing about the Brits. Especially David Cameron, who really fucked himself for a change (yes, this is a Pig joke). And all the self-assured half-knowledge and stupidity that’s still going around, on both sides. I just can’t worry about any possible consequences right now, since it’s too funny a situation and things are too chaotic at the moment for any serious predictions anyway. I mean, they voted “Leave” without having any clue on what to do afterwards! AHAHAHA! They wanted a strong, independent United Kingdom and now it might dissolve itself completely! AHAHAHAHAH! Shit, games, right. Hey, if you live inside fortress Europe, you can import some cheap games from the UK right now, while the Pound is still weak. It’s like a Steam Sale for console games! Speaking of, there is an actual Steam Sale going on as well.

So, what’s everyone playing over the weekend? Read more

Why I Can’t Take E3 [Or Any Trade Convention] Seriously

It happens every year.  Every year, without fail, at around this time, "real" news [and I use the word in inverted commas, because really - game releases and hints at game releases aren't really "news" at all.  They're - at best - terrible product placement] drops right off the radar.

Why?  Because some PR drone way up on high has decided that nothing can leak out prior to E3.  And that results in what fans generally call "lots of slow news days."  While that's a problem, E3 - and shows like it - have a far bigger issue that I want to tackle.

They're pageants. Read more

Witcher 3: Blood and Wine – Goodbye is Spectacular: A Review From Scroo

Wow guys, I've been chomping at the bit to play Blood and Wine for a long time now and my goodness was it ever worth the wait. CDPRed has put a story together set in a large and beautiful world that gives us fans a pretty solid 30 hours of game play; and they call it an expansion. This, folks, is what expansions should be. An actual fully built, big addition with new content that really matters. Blood and Wine could have just as easily been sold as a stand-alone title and would have been just as satisfying to play. All the props to CDPRed. Read more

Spellweaver Review: It’s Magic, Jim, But Not As We Know It

Links open in new pages

Magic:  The Gathering is a great game with a troubling digital history.  In one sense, it's really sad, because Hearthstone is immeasurably polished - a thing that Blizzard is absurdly good at.  And where Blizzard have gone, others have attempted to follow, because surely, if they can make it work to the tune of a silly number of people throwing money at imaginary cards that they're never going to really own [because the servers will go down and then you'll be left with nothing] then someone else has to be able to share the pot, right?

Probably.  But a lot of that is going to depend on lots of little factors.  And where Spellweaver comes up strong in some of those factors, it's just kind of bland and uninteresting for a lot of the rest. Read more

WRUPing Class struggle

As we all know by now, there are microtransactions in Overwatch. There was a bit of outrage about this fact, but that’s just a variation of rule 34: If it exists, there is outrage on the internet about it. In reality, those microtransactions are some of the fairest we’ve seen so far. They don’t give you power, they don’t feature any exclusive content at all and they offer so little value in return, that the incentive to buy them is near zero.
Doesn’t mean they are consumer friendly, dear TotalBiscuit, self-proclaimed defender of consumer-rights. Read more