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Long-time PC gamer and shorter-time freelance writer, with work at Gamezebo, The Escapist, PC Gamer, Joystiq and parts unknown. Owner of many cats, drinker of fine beers, eater of too much. A steadfast javelin in a flaccid world.
  • Kiwanuka Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    Kiwanuka Review

    By

    Kiwanuka is cute, charming, simple and even a little bit biblical: With nothing but a magical staff and steely determination, you must embark upon a daunting quest to lead your followers to freedom.The people of Kiwanuka need your help! They've somehow managed to trap themselves on floating space rocks, and it's up to the bearer of the magical lightning staff to lead them to the sacred triangle of freedom! That's more or less how it goes, anyway. The bottom line is that you have the staff and that means you call the shots.Your magical staff shoots lightning, but it's not the sort of lightning you use to smite your enemies. Instead, by touching the staff and dragging left or right, you draw an arc of electricity that your avatar and his flock will follow. Things get really interesting when you drag the arc straight up, because that causes your followers to stand on one another's shoulders, forming a column of varying height that you can then tip over and use as a bridge. 
  • Last Inua Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    Last Inua Review

    By

    A father and son battling harsh elements and demonic corruption as they attempt to restore the three guardian spirits of the land: This is Last Inua, a 2D side-scrolling tale of survival in the deep Arctic, a visually stunning game that approaches excellence but ultimately overstays its welcome.Last Inua is an "art-platformer," a term I just now made up to describe platformers with powerful aesthetics and unremarkable gameplay - although calling it "unremarkable" might in some instances be overly harsh. In most cases it's really just simplified, which I suspect is a conscious choice intended to encourage all players, even those of dubious skills, to reach the end and enjoy the entirety of the experience.Last Inua is very much like that. It's the the story of the Inuit Ataataq and his son Hiko, who are racing to restore three guardian spirits in order to foil an attack on the North by the demon Tonrar. Ataataq is a powerful man, able to leap great distances, climb frozen cliffs and shatter massive blocks of ice with a single blow. His son Hiko is sickly and weak, but possesses magical abilities that allow him to walk through the air and travel great distances in the blink of an eye. They must work together to survive and triumph, and you'll switch back and forth between them many times as you play, relying on both Ataataq's strength and Hiko's magic in equal measures.
  • Full Bore Review
    Reviews
    • PC
    Full Bore Review

    By

    Full Bore comes out of the gate looking like just another retro-platformer, and within the first few minutes of play I was already cooking up various "fully boring" puns to use in this review. But then I noticed that an hour had flown by, and then another, and I realized I'd been pulled into the mystery of its strange underground world - and that there's a lot more to this game than first meets the eye.You play Full Bore as either Hildi or Frederick, slightly high-strung boars enjoying a dreamy nap on a warm summer's day. But fate has decided that this day will be more interesting than most, and before you know it you're cast into the bowels of a bizarre, subterranean realm, where you're accused of stealing a hoard of gems belonging to what is apparently a great boar mining magnate. Irritated by your impertinence, he sets you to work in his mine, digging up gems to replace the ones he (mistakenly) believes you've stolen.
  • Four Days, Four Games: The Butterscotch Minis Round-Up
    News
    • Android
    Four Days, Four Games: The Butterscotch Minis Round-Up

    By

    For four not-quite-consecutive Mondays beginning in February, Butterscotch Shenanigans set itself to a rather odd task: Make a game, from start to finish, in a single ten-hour stretch. Four days, four games: Roid Rage, Freeway Mutant, Extreme Burger Defense and Flop Rocket, collectively known as the Butterscotch Minis.The idea was to hone their development skills while simultaneously connecting with their audience by livestreaming each "speedcrafting" session, and while it didn't work out quite as well as they'd hoped, the four games to come out of it are actually quite good.The speedcrafting sessions are now over - the Butterscotch fellas wrote a very interesting post-mortem discussing the various ways in which they succeeded and failed right here - but the games remain. And as quick, simple diversions, they're well worth checking out. So check them out!
  • Sam Coster Is Conquering Cancer, Creating Crashlands
    News
    • Android
    • iOS
    • PC
    Sam Coster Is Conquering Cancer, Creating Crashlands

    By

    "Cancer: Sam Has It." With those four words, Butterscotch Shenanigans revealed to the world that Sam Coster, one half of the brotherly game development duo, had been stricken by the dreaded disease: a "startlingly aggressive strain" of T-Cell rich Large B Cell lymphoma, diagnosed at stage four - the highest (which is to say, worst) possible. His prognosis was around 65 percent, although he believes his youth, good physical condition and irrepressible optimism gave him better odds than the average. All things considered, he said his chances were "pretty dang good" overall.Even so, a cancer diagnosis has a way of changing a person's perspective on just about everything, and in Sam's case that included his attitude toward the games that he makes alongside his brother Seth. Confronted with his illness, he decided he wanted to make a game that meant something, a game with depth and durability; "I want people to be able to play in a world I made when I no longer get to play in this one," he said. Or as he rather more succinctly put it to his brother, "I don't want Extreme Slothcycling to be the last game I make before I die."And with that, the Costers revealed Crashlands to the world.Crashlands is big. It's ambitious. It is in every meaningful way the complete opposite of the Butterscotch Minis they've been cranking out on a weekly basis over the past month or so. "It's essentially what you'd get if you combined the huge amount of content in Towelfight 2 with the polished mechanics and gameplay of Quadropus Rampage, and then blew it out to epic proportions," Coster explained. "Both of those games took about 10 weeks to make, and we're now on about week 20 with Crashlands."
  • Butterscotch Shenanigans and the Art of Speedcrafting
    News
    • Android
    • iOS
    Butterscotch Shenanigans and the Art of Speedcrafting

    By

    Butterscotch Shenanigans first appeared on my radar thanks to Gerblins, a cute little puzzle game that was both simple to play and shot through with personality. I liked it quite a bit, but as fun as it was, it didn't inspire me to think of the Butterscotch boys as a potential force in the field of mobile game development. That didn't happen until the March 2013 release of Towelfight 2: The Monocle of Destiny, a game I literally did not stop playing until May of that year, when Quadropus Rampage turned up and sent me on a quest to destroy Pete, the Mad God of the Sea. I'm still playing that one.I don't want to say that Sam and Seth Coster are a strange pair, but the games they create do make me wonder what's in the water they drink and where I can get some. And now they're in the midst of an even more unusual project: "Speedcrafting," a sort of weekly game jam in which they give themselves ten hours to develop a small but complete game - a "Butterscotch Mini" - from start to finish."Our current plan for production is eight Minis, one every Monday, though that's only to give us something to shoot toward should things get difficult. It's much easier to motivate yourself to do another one if there's an end in sight," Sam Coster recently explained. "However, they've been so useful (and fun to make) that we expect we'll be doing these until our blood runs cold."
  • Warhammer 40,000: Storm of Vengeance Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    • PC
    Warhammer 40,000: Storm of Vengeance Review

    By

    Warhammer 40,000: Storm of Vengeance is something called a "lane strategy game," and yes, that's "lane," not "lame," although truth be told... well, never mind. I don't want to spoil any surprises, and it's not an awful game by any stretch. It's just not very good, as either a strategy game or a Warhammer title."Lane strategy games," as far as I can tell, are those in which enemy forces approach one another on a battlefield composed of - you guessed it - lanes, meeting and clashing in a kind of a "Showdown at the O.K. Bowling Alley." Plants vs. Zombies is probably the best-known (and quite possibly the only known) example of the genre, and it's the game that most quickly springs to mind as a comparison. Sadly, that's not because Storm of Vengeance shares that game's wit, artistry or excitement - it doesn't. The resemblance is purely mechanical and, as I soon discovered, somewhat superficial.Rather than an attack-and-defend scenario, in this game the player and the AI-controlled enemy send forces against each other, one side representing the Dark Angel Space Marines and the other the Ork Waaagh!, each occupying opposite ends of a battlefield composed of five lanes. Units are created by collecting and spending resources - Redemption for the Space Marines, Teef for the Orks - and can be immediately sent on their way or stored, in very limited numbers, for later use.
  • Escape Goat 2 Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    • PC
    Escape Goat 2 Review

    By

    Released in late 2011 for the Xbox 360 and then in the summer of 2012 for the PC, Escape Goat was a quirky puzzle-platformer about both a goat imprisoned in a deadly, trapped-filled dungeon for the crime of practicing witchcraft, and an immortal, magical mouse who helps him escape. Quirky, and also very good if you like that sort of thing, although not particularly easy on the eyes: I noted in my review that the retro-style graphics were "adequate for the task but not much else."Escape Goat 2 is "problem solved," as they say. It's essentially the original Escape Goat all over again, but with more puzzles - more than 100 in total - and a very pleasing visual update. The Goat is back, imprisoned again along with his magic Mouse buddy and a flock of not-terribly-motivated sheep, this time deep within the Stronghold of Toragos. None have ever escaped - but you're the Escape Goat!