Tag: hearthstone

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

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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

Farewell, Blizzard

Warning!  This is long and ranty and link heavy!  [Links will open in new tabs]

I remember Silicon and Synapse.  You might not, but I do.  They weren't big enough to work on their own projects, so they did ports of other games to various other consoles.  None of these ports were particularly big, but they established the company as detail-oriented and good at what they did.  And a key element from those days has stayed with Blizzard:  they know how to refine.

Which is at least some of what I want to talk about.  But the other thing I want to talk about is how distant Silicon and Synapse are from the Blizzard we have today and why - after almost twenty five years of playing Blizzard's games, I am going to slowly start winding down Blizzard projects I'm still pursuing. Read more

Hearthstone: League of Explorers Review: BRB. Dodging A Collapsing Temple.

Hearthstone's solo adventures are always a pleasant change of pace. Instead of beating up on other people, we're beating up on imaginary bosses. These bosses are generally thematically linked through some crumbs of story that get doled out as each wing of the adventure unlocks.

In the case of League of Explorers, the story's wrapped around a kind of Indiana Jones-like concept, where you help both prominent Warcraft lore figures and newcomers alike to banish a thief named Rafaam from the current dig you're on.

It's simple and fun - for the most part. It also introduces new adventure mechanics, new cards with thematic ideas and my very favourite Murloc - something I thought I'd never say - in the form of Sir Finley Mrrgglton.

So, as Peter Molyneux might ask...what's inside the box? Read more