Author: greywolfe

Greywolfe is a curmudgeon who likes old games, long walks on the beach and also bear form in World of Warcraft. He sends his regards from the Lonely Island where he does nothing but play King's Quest and write opinion pieces all day.

Twinstiq Gameclub Plays: Beneath A Steel Sky

Welcome, everyone to another edition of game club.  Game club is not at all like Fight Club.  We absolutely encourage you to talk about it.

As ever, we go in rounds and for this particular round, I’ve picked the stellar adventure game Beneath A Steel Sky.

Read on past the break to find out how this is going to work and what you need to do to get the game. Read more

To The Moon Review: Memories Of The Way We Were

Last week, we talked a little about Brothers and games very like it.  These titles are often experiences more than they are games.  You get into them and you direct a protagonist, but you don’t do much actual video gaming:  there’s no one to kill, there’s no score to beat and – most tellingly, often, no way to really fail.

There’s just you, the story and whatever medium the story passes through as it unfolds.  Sometimes, this is a walking simulator, [you are in a 3d environment where you can roam around and encounter the story] sometimes, it’s a text-driven experience where the narrative unfolds as a collection of still pictures and verbose writing, but sometimes – as is the case with To The Moon – the entire affair is top-down and looks remarkably like an old-school 16 bit RPG.

At first, that sounds like a supremely odd thing to do, but it works here.  It works because a lot of the story is conveyed by dialogue and RPG’s can sometimes by very dialogue heavy. Read more

Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons Review: You Put Your Left Stick In

Gaming is largely made up of two big landmasses.

On the one hand, we have games that are truly games – with systems and high scores and scores of people to kill.

On the other, there are experiences.  The industry hasn’t been kind to these, calling them walking simulators and then writing them off, but these experiences are part of the glue-that-binds.  You see, there are just things that cannot be done in a book or movie form.  You can only have them as games.

Brothers is a game like this.  It straddles a quite-fine line between experience/walking simulator and “game” but it thrives exactly because it’s on that knife edge.

And, in one short play through, it has become one of my very favourite games of 2016. Read more

King’s Quest 6: An Era Ends

This.

This is the moment the King's Quest series has been leading up to.

Not 7 - because seven is an animated Disney travesty.

And certainly not 8 - because 8 was just barely a King's Quest at all.

But this.

This is - effectively, the series swan song.  And it does a lot of things so, so right.  But then, you know, in typical Roberta Williams style, it tends to screw it all up on occasion.

So let's talk about the "grand finale" game of the King's Quest series, King's Quest 6. Read more

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

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