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
Tragedy has struck America. Leonard Cohen is dead. What do you mean with “He was Canadian?” Was he? Well, guess everything is fine then in the US.
Anyway, we at Twinstiq talk about videogames and I can’t think of any connection between him and those right now, so how about a very short review of Motorsport Manager? Read more
Hey. You guys ever play the Lost Planet games? I never played the first one but I did play the second. Heads up, it's aged like Melanie Griffith. But the third installment wasn't half bad. Stick around and I'll tell you why it could be worth going back to now. Read more
Recently we did a play through of Alan Wake for Twinstiq Game Club and after it was over I had an itch for a good fast paced shooter. I had played Doom not too long ago and as good as it was, I didn't want to start that over again quite yet. I Considered Rage: It was fun and it had some cool elements even if it was hampered by poor texture resolution and lots of pop-ins. Then I saw a rumor going around that there was likely going to be a remaster of Bulletstorm in 2017. "That could be fun" I thought "I haven't played it since it was new". And guess what? It holds up pretty well. Be forewarned that this article contains some bad language... because it's about Bulletstorm. 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
Every now and then something pretty special makes it to gaming that is able to share something real with the world. Song of the Deep is one of those games and if you'll stick with me I'll tell you a little about it and my experience playing. 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
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