Scalebound and Platinum
As many of you already know, a few weeks ago, Microsoft cancelled Scalebound, a title that at first had me united until its disastrous E3 showing this last year that made the game look like the worst kind of generic action, calling back unfortunate memories of Lost Planet as I watched. I had a moment after the announcement of the cancellation where I realized something. The Platinum Games name doesn’t really mean much to me anymore. And of course I’ll offer this disclaimer that we haven’t yet seen Nier: Automata and I truly hope that it blows me out of the water and makes this whole post worthless.
The Backlog - Wolfenstein: The New Order
It’s way too easy to fall way too far behind on games. They simply ask for too much of your time and money to be able to keep up with all the ones that look interesting. Thankfully, almost entirely due to online sales, eventually you’re able to get most games for a five dollar bill and an afternoon of free time.
Wolfenstein: The New Order is about 10 hours of ups and downs.
I’ve been wanting to play Wolfenstein: The New Order since its initial release, and as many complaints as I’ve had about the experience, I genuinely enjoyed my time with the game.
The Backlog - Peggle 2
I have a confession to make. Like many of you reading this, I have a list of games that I’ve been meaning play for years. I have way too many games on Steam, and a stack of cases sitting next to my TV. Close to five hundred games now. Maybe more. It makes me feel guilty. I haven’t touched 90% of them in one way or another. I need to fix that. So this week, I dug deep into my backlog and pulled out a game. I want to play all of them; I’ve just never had the chance. Now’s the time.
There is something about the Peggle games that I have always loved. They are so simple, yet so amazingly satisfying and fun to play. The games have character in the purest sense of the word. And a few years back, I bought Peggle 2 on the day that it was launched. But somehow it quickly fell to the bottom of a very long stack of games that I’ve been trying to work through. It has been installed since then, just waiting for me to come back and finish what I started.
The Backlog - DOOM
I have a confession to make. Like many of you reading this, I have a list of games that I’ve been meaning play for years. I have way too many games on Steam, and a stack of cases sitting next to my TV. Close to five hundred games now. Maybe more. It makes me feel guilty. I haven’t touched 90% of them in one way or another. I need to fix that. So this week, I dug deep into my backlog and pulled out a game. I want to play all of them; I’ve just never had the chance. Now’s the time.
I really wish I had played DOOM closer to when it came out. I had picked up a copy for my brother for Christmas and after getting a chance to try it out with my family, much to my mother’s horror, I knew I had to pick it up. In many ways, it is one of the best shooters that I’ve played in a long time. You shoot a lot of things in DOOM. It looks really cool, and it feels really good, and that’s kind of it. In the purest sense of the word, it is a game; you kill demons to unlock upgrades to kill demon faster.
Stardew Valley - Review
Stardew Valley is an addiction waiting to happen.
Coming from over a decade of experience with a wide variety of games, ranging from classic one-more-level platformers to prolific time sinks like Diablo and World of Warcraft, I can easily say that Stardew Valley has the most refined gameplay loop of any game I’ve ever played.
Violence
It is dark outside and a pair of headphones wrap around my head. I can’t hear my family, but I can see them standing next to me. On screen, I watch as my gloved fingers sink into the top of a demon’s skull and split it in half like an apple. My brother laughs, my mother gasps. I had gotten him DOOM for Christmas, and he insisted that I try it out on his new TV. My dad used to play the original with us when we were kids until our mom made him stop after one of us got too enthusiastic about the usage of a chainsaw.
The Backlog - Payday 2: The Heist
I have a confession to make. Like many of you reading this, I have a list of games that I’ve been meaning play for years. I have way too many games on Steam, and a stack of cases sitting next to my TV. Close to five hundred games now. Maybe more. It makes me feel guilty. I haven’t touched 90% of them in one way or another. I need to fix that. So this week, I dug deep into my backlog and pulled out a game. I want to play all of them; I’ve just never had the chance. Now’s the time.
I fell down a deep, dark hole this last week. For some reason, I found myself sitting down with Payday 2: The Heist. I probably should have been spending more time with my family, but instead I held “F” a lot as I picked open safety deposit boxes and got kicked out of matches for being inexperienced. There is a lot that I like about the game, but there is also a deep, dark hole at the center that I really, really hate.
Politics of Play - Games with an Agenda
Video games can be a powerful tool. They are unique in media in that they allow you to directly interact with the text in a way quite unlike anything else. And as time goes on, we are seeing games being leveraged in entirely different ways than we might have imagined when we first got our hands on the text adventures of the 1980’s. Instead of trying to make a game “fun”, creators are making games with messages. By allowing players to interact with the work in a meaningful way, the message carries so much more impact. Read More…