Clark wrote up an excellent review of Fire Emblem Awakening recently, and if you have not yet had a chance to read it, you can find it here. I shared a lot of Clark’s sentiments but still had a few of my own thoughts I wanted to post in this…
Read MoreI know I am in for a bad time with a game when I quit out of the tutorial in frustration. Welcome to Real Heroes: Firefighter 3D. Firefighting is an interesting concept for a FPS-style experience. It’s bloodless (which is a nice change for a genre that typically rewards headshot…
Read MoreFishing is not the world’s most entertaining activity. With all due respect to the sport, you need to be a special kind of person to be able to sit down all day throwing a wire into the water and hoping that something you can’t see grabs on. I’m a terrible…
Read MoreFire Emblem Awakening marks the first “new” game in the series since 2007’s Radiant Dawn on the Wii. As such, it seems reasonable to expect greater ambition from the folks at Intelligent Systems. …but not so much on casual mode If ambition is what you seek, Awakening delivers it in…
Read MoreMany of the finest games focus on two aspects of their design; scoring and entertaining mechanics. Scoring is beautifully pure; doing certain actions rewards the player with points that increase a score. This score is most often either used to gauge the skill of a player or used to give…
Read MoreSinister things are happening in Atlantic City. Crime rules the streets. Smoky dives serve home-brewed hooch in china cups. Order is maintained through the swing of a baseball bat. Cops count their money and look the other way. And, behind everything, there’s the sound of the city. There’s despair in…
Read MoreWhen I start playing a horror game I have a few very, very basic requirements in order to have a good time. Firstly, I expect to be frightened. Secondly, I expect to be challenged. After all, it’s a little hard to achieve my first requirement if I feel like I’m…
Read MoreI don’t really understand why Tecmo Koei let the Kessen franchise fade into obscurity. There was so much potential in the basic idea of meshing Warriors-style action with a more cerebral strategy game, and as Kessen III proves, that formula is still genuine fun today. Perhaps it was the commercial…
Read MoreNext in the series of games as art is the somewhat minimalist Proteus recently released on the Steam store. The game can, and must inexorably be compared to Dear Esther. Why Zane would you compare a game against another right off the bat you might ask? To do that is…
Read MoreThe Disgaea series has always been renowned for one reason above all others: its incredible depth. The good news is that unlike previous-gen visuals and antiquated gameplay conventions, raw depth is something that doesn’t age, so when it comes to re-experiencing the Disgaea games as PlayStation 2 Classics, they are…
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