Welcome, one and all to a new year and a new February. Last year, I didn't do very well at all, so this year, I'm going to try my utmost to actually vanquish four games off of my tottering pile of games that I've collected over the last forty+ years. Read more
And I was still playing Saint's Row 3.
And I have grown to seriously not like the hostage diversion.
I'd been messing around with stealing cars, because you have to do that to get through the big list of stuff that entails a "perfect game." and along the way, i'd taken twenty hostages. these were all mostly innocent bystanders. i just wanted the cars, you see, so i could rack up the requisite number [150] for the achievement.
But then I had to sit down and actually slog through getting hostages.
And that's super tedious. Allow me to explain:
To take a car, you go up to the car and you hit a button. Not a problem. If there's a bonus person in the car, you can take them as a hostage. But not everyone's on board with being a hostage, so while the car is being stolen, they will typically tumble out before the hostage notification can be posted. OK. Fine. There's a faster way of stealing a car where you can run along the tarmac and "jump" into the car from a distance. Only this will SOMETIMES eject everyone else out the car. Did it have two people in it [a driver and a potential hostage?] Well, great, now they're on the floor spazzing out.
The game also randomizes cars and how many people are in them. See a car that - one time - had a driver and two hostages? The next time, it might only have a driver.
It's tedious. And you have to get 50 [!] of these. No wonder I've been leaving these for last [well, these and the backbreakingly stupid Heli-Assault missions.]
So. Gentle Reader. In the pursuit of a "perfect game" what achievements and/or actions have you had to perform that you ended up disliking?
And with that, let's find out what the rest of the Twinstiq crew are playing: Read more
I have been playing games for many years, but actually reviewing them is a new-ish practice for me. I figured it would be useful to my readers to know how I go about reviewing the media I present here. Read more
Sometimes, a game comes along that does something extra-ordinary.
Before you play it, you can't help but wonder if you're going to like it - exactly because of it's differences - but once you have played it, you see the world just a little bit differently. The game opens new possibilities, new vistas.
Loom's story isn't wholly original, but given it's run time and the themes it's trying to convey to the player, that's just fine. What is masterful is the way it presents this story. Read more
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
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
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
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
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
The Hex Player Versus Environment game is awesome and I wish more card games would do it. There. Review done. Read more
