Category: Editorials

What Were You Playing 20 Years Ago?

Lately I've been seeing a lot articles on the good ol' interwebs about certain iconic PC titles that will be turning 20 this year. That got me thinking: I've been a gamer for a pretty long time now. What was I playing some 20 years back? What were some of the other guys from Twinstiq playing then? So I'm going to talk briefly about a couple of titles that really cemented me into the PC gamer category, And we'll hear from a few of the crew about what they had going on from that era as well. Join me in my and a few of the crew's ramblings below. 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

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