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Stealth Gameplay Isn’t Enough: Give Me the Thrill of the Hunt
I finally finished Crytek’s Crysis 2 last week and surprised myself by immediately firing up a new game and starting it over from the beginning. Sure, Crysis 2 is a slick, well-made first-person shooter, but it’s fairly unremarkable on the surface. So why, when I had so many other games I could (or should) be…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 15, 2011 -
Upcoming Adventure Game To The Moon Will Be One Part Eternal Sunshine, One Part Chrono Trigger, Three Parts Raw Emotion
“When a video game can make us cry,” the saying goes, “that is when we will know that games are art.” But what if a video game trailer can make us cry? Test the strength of your stoic resolve by watching the painfully nostalgic trailer for Kan Gao’s upcoming indie adventure game To The Moon.…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 15, 2011 -
The Latest Video From Extra Credits Takes On the Massively Multiplayer RTS
The informative video series Extra Credits is back on YouTube, and in their latest episode, they take on the concept of the MMORTS—the massively multiplayer real-time strategy game. (Though at no point in the video do they refer to the genre as “Memortis,” even though that is a pretty sweet name, and way easier to…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 15, 2011 -
Republican Presidential Candidate Herman Cain Doesn’t Want You to Know About His Pokémons
You’ve gotta hand it to Republican Presidential Candidate Herman Cain. One minute the guy is proposing a three-page limit on bills in Washington, then he’s calling Jon Stewart a racist, and now… well, now he’s breaking out the inadvertent Pokémon references. In his closing statement during last night’s Republican Primary debate, Cain got all deep…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 12, 2011 -
Terrifically Tactical Frozen Synapse Gets Demo, Half-Price Weekend on Steam
I’m only just now getting around to Frozen Synapse, which was released back in May and about which a bunch of people I know have had only nice things to say. So far, it’s like some glorious combination of X-Com and Tron with maybe a touch of Rainbow Six and Ubisoft’s fantastic 3DS game Ghost…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 12, 2011 -
Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet Takes You on a Weird, Wild Tour of Metroidvainia-land
The recently released XBLA side-scroller Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet wears each of its various influences proudly on its sleeve. You’ll probably see them if you play it, but if I had to list them all, I’d take a deep breath and say: A moderately tripped-out short from Fantasia grafted onto PixelJunk Shooter through the lens…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 12, 2011 -
Spoiler Alert: People Like Spoilers
We live in an era of extreme spoiler-phobia. Be it television, movies, novels, or video games, the speedy connectivity of social media has conditioned us to live in fear of ruining one another’s fun. We add spoiler warnings to even the most mundane details, even when the subject of the discussion is years old. I…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 11, 2011 -
End of Nations Will Be Free-To-Play
Peteroglyph Games’s upcoming real-time strategy MMO End of Nations will be the latest game to hop on the free-to-play train. At a San Francisco press event yesterday, publisher Trion Worlds’s VP of 3rd Party Development Dave Luehmann and Senior Vice President of Publishing David Reid confirmed that End of Nations would be available for free…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 11, 2011 -
I’ve Played Deus Ex. She Hasn’t. Now We’re Playing It Together
Earlier this year, games journalist-about-town (and Kotaku columnist) Leigh Alexander and I did a little experiment—I had never played the classic JRPG Final Fantasy VII, a game that she counts among her very favorites. The idea was that I would play the game for the first time, and as I went through it, we’d write…
Kirk Hamilton & Leigh Alexander Published August 10, 2011 -
That Awesome “Revenge of the Jedi” Moment in Bioshock Infinite? That Came from a Game We’ll Never See
Near the beginning of the E3 demo of Irrational Games’ Bioshock Infinite, there’s a moment when… well, it’s the sort of thing that when you talk to other people who have seen it you say, “You know… that part?” And they nod knowingly and say, “Oh yeah. That part. That was awesome.” It starts when…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 10, 2011 -
The Stanley Parable Turns Video Game Storytelling On Its Head
Is it a game? Is it a manifesto? An artsy-fartsy waste of time? A story-within-a-story, an exercise in branching plotlines, meta-humor, and video game commentary? The provocative new Half-Life 2 mod The Stanley Parable is perhaps all of those things. Or maybe none of them. The game and its designer hope only that you’ll draw…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 9, 2011 -
The Sims Facebook Game I Wanted isn’t the Sims Facebook Game I’m Getting
I’m not much for Facebook games; I’ve played FarmVille a bit, but it’s never quite gotten its hooks into me. Part of the reason for is that most of my friends don’t play either, and so I’ve never felt the social pressure that contributes to the game’s addictiveness. You know: “Dang, David’s barn is so…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 9, 2011 -
You’ve Been Playing GTA IV Wrong
When Grand Theft Auto IV came out, I was swept away. The scope, depth, and scale of the game were almost too much to take in. It seemed like a game in which anything was possible, like a parallel reality, re-created. Three years, two expansions, and countless hours of vehicular manslaughter have provided some much-needed…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 8, 2011 -
Wait, What The Heck Are The Elder Scrolls?
With all the hullabaloo that’s broken out over The Elder Scrolls creator Bethesda’s legal threats against Minecraft creator Marcus Persson regarding the title of his upcoming game Scrolls, it’s easy to overlook the fact that it’s not entirely clear what The Elder Scrolls themselves really are. I’m not talking about the fact that we don’t…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 5, 2011 -
Ryu and Ken Go To Town In This Unbelievable Stop-Motion Street Fighter Short
Another day, another ridiculously great YouTube video. This time, it’s John Huang’s shockingly well-directed fight sequence between Street Fighter stars Ryu and Ken. Well, more accurately, the fight is between two Ryu and Ken dolls. (It’s a hell of a lot more exciting than it sounds.) The whole thing is stop-motion animated, shot frame-by-frame using,…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 5, 2011 -
Mass Effect 3 Dev: Games Would Benefit From More Diversity
In a refreshingly frank interview with Gamasutra, Mass Effect 3 senior designer Manveer Heir shared his hopes that games can embrace more racial diversity and in doing so, tell better stories. The number one argument I hear against it is, especially, what I just said, worrying about offending people. “Why do we have to put…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 5, 2011 -
EA2D Studio Is Now BioWare San Francisco
Electronic Arts has converted their EA2D studio, the developers behind social games such as Dragon Age Legends, Dragon Age Journeys, and Fancy Pants Adventures into BioWare San Francisco. The San Francisco branch will join BioWare’s other locations in Montreal, Austin, Edmonton, Virginia, and Ireland. [Gamasutra]
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 5, 2011 -
Skyrim Chief: More Games Should Cost $29, But Not Skyrim
It’s a safe bet that Bethesda’s upcoming RPG Skyrim will offer enough hours of gameplay to merit its $60 price tag. However, while speaking to PSM3, Skyrim director Todd Howard shared his belief that while his game will be worth every penny, many other games are not. “I do think industry-wide we would benefit from…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 4, 2011 -
Watch Game of Thrones in Magnificent 16-Bit
There is a fair amount of overlap between “Video Game Fan” and “Game of Thrones Fan” on the venn diagram of life, and so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that someone has merged the two to great effect. College Humor has posted a truly fantastic video called “Game of Thrones RPG,” which re-creates the…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 4, 2011 -
Uncover a Twisting Tale in this Brilliant, Deceptively Deep Half-Life 2 Mod
Branching storylines have become quite the thing in games lately, but most games don’t take the idea much farther than “choose option A to get ending A, choose option B to get ending B.” That’s not the case with The Stanley Parable, a smart, twisty new Half-Life 2 mod by Davey Wreden. The first time…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 4, 2011
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