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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.
  • Eon Altar Preview
    Upcoming
    • Android
    • iOS
    Eon Altar Preview

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    Eon Altar is one of those ideas that immediately makes you wonder why somebody didn't think of it ages ago. As most such ideas are, it is both ingenious and remarkably simple: a tabletop/video game RPG hybrid, played with smartphones that are linked to a central tablet serving as the "game board," through which the story is told. The machines crunch the numbers, handle the character management, perform the virtual dice rolls and more, but the experience is more akin to an old-school pencil-and-paper RPG session - the best of both worlds.Eon Altar supports face-to-face gaming in groups of two to five, with each player accessing the game through an iOS, Android, or Windows smartphone. Each phone in the group is connected via Wi-Fi to a tablet or PC which displays the game world, combat, and other cinematic aspects of the action, and also saves the progress of the campaign, which will unfold episodically over nine modular "adventures." Each adventure contains enough content for at least three sessions, and will be released every four to six weeks after the game launches.""Once we are finished [with] our first story, over nine adventures, we'll evaluate and see where we want to take it - whether we'll continue the same characters in further adventures within Eon Altar itself as further campaigns in the same structure and engine, or if it'll be time to do an overhaul of the game itself and evolve it into an Eon Altar 2," Edward J. Douglas, the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Vancouver-based Flying Helmet Games, said. "It will really depend on where the technology is at and how players enjoy using it. It moves so fast! Our world is large and we have a lot of story planned after this first campaign, lots of challenges ahead for these characters."
  • Stasis Preview
    Upcoming
    • PC
    Stasis Preview

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    I recently played through the Stasis alpha demo, and I can tell you two things about it. First, a great deal of work remains to be done: path finding is extremely wonky, character models look like mannequins and appear to glide weightlessly when they walk, interactivity and feedback is very limited, and it's just "rough," in various ways, to varying degrees. Second, and more important, it is absolutely overflowing with potential. Even in its brief and incomplete state, it left me very much wanting more.Stasis is a point-and-click sci-fi horror adventure set aboard the research vessel Groomlake, which has suffered some sort of catastrophe that's left it nearly derelict, with most of its crew dead or missing. Systems are shut down and signs of struggle are everywhere; it also slowly becomes clear that the ship's crew was inflicting horrors of its own, long before disaster struck, as part of its mission. Figuring out why, and what role you played in it, will be an important part of understanding what went wrong.""Stasis really is an amalgamation of everything I love about science fiction," creator Chris Bischoff told me. "Alien, Event Horizon, Sunshine, Dead Space, The Dig, System Shock... they all have some element of DNA in the game. From a gameplay point of view, System Shock's way of telling its story through audio logs, video logs, and ghosted re-enactments is a heavy influence on Stasis."Bischoff is the lone developer on the game, handling everything from programming to graphics and animations, although his brother recently signed on as "the business mind" of their indie game studio, handling things like the Stasis website, community management, and contracts with voice actors. He's also involved in crafting the story, and they discuss, refine, and discard ideas on a daily basis.
  • Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! Part 2 Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! Part 2 Review

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    I'm going to save you minutes of precious time by cutting right to the chase: Steve Jackson's Sorcery! Part 2 is fantastic and you should buy it. There, that's it, this review is over. Go get your iThing, hit the App Store and grab it. That's S-O-R-C-E-R-Y, and you can probably find it alright without the exclamation point. Post your kudos in the comments when you're done.Seriously, people, I'm not kidding here. I suppose I can't stop you if you insist on reading this instead of playing the game, which is what you should be doing, but hey, it's your nickel.On the surface, Steve Jackson's Sorcery! Part 2 is almost indistinguishable from the opening chapter, but there are actually a few tweaks and improvements. The first thing you'll notice is that you may now play with a female avatar instead of a male, and the magic system has been upgraded as well, making it easier to use and to discover new spells. Part 2 will also import your saved games from Part 1, allowing for a direct continuation of that adventure for those who had the foresight to keep their saves around."The story picks up just outside the south gate of Kharé, a great, walled cityport and veritable hive of scum and villainy that you must traverse in order to continue on your journey. Getting in is tricky, as the looming gates of the city are guarded against outsiders, but it's a snap compared to getting out. As one character in the early part of the game explains, the walls weren't built to keep people out, but to keep them in. In fact, in order to make your escape through the North Gate and continue on your quest to recover the Crown of Kings, you'll need to collect the parts of a secret enchantment held by the city's nobles: no small task by any measure.
  • Super Roman Conquest Preview
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    • iOS
    • PC
    Super Roman Conquest Preview

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    After spending a collective 16 years at storied game developer LucasArts, the studio behind games like Full Throttle, Sam and Max Hit the Road, the Monkey Island series, and of course a truckload of Star Wars titles, Matt Boland and Tim Temmerman found themselves cast adrift when George Lucas sold the ranch to Disney, which sadly decided to shut it down. Rather than move on to other big studios to work on other big games, they decided to roll the dice on the indie life, combining their love of history and older strategy releases like Myth II: Soulblighter and the SNES cartridge King Arthur's World into a new project called Super Roman Conquest."We settled on Rome as a setting for the game because Tim and I are both big fans of history, especially the history of Rome," Boland explained. "I'm a HUGE fan of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast and he did an excellent multi-part podcast on the fall of the Roman Republic called, 'Death Throes of the Republic.' It's a ridiculously fascinating and engaging narration of everything that went into the eventual collapse of the Roman Republic and rise of the Empire. These people lived in a governmental system shockingly similar to our own in the United States and faced many of the same problems we do today. After listening to Hardcore History, I honestly felt a strong connection to these people who lived thousands of years ago and wanted to create a game that could serve to highlight some of these similarities for people who maybe weren't aware of them.""On the surface, Super Roman Conquest looks like more like a side-scrolling arcade game than anything else, but it is in fact a strategy game. It won't feature territory management, taxation, or other such components found in strategy heavyweights like Crusader Kings; instead, the intent is to allow fans of the genre to "scratch the itch" without getting bogged down in multi-layered menus and obtuse UIs."We want people to be able to pick up Super Roman Conquest and enjoy themselves, but also want more experienced users to use the tricks they've learned to manipulate the various systems we've built," Boland said. "Essentially we want the gameplay of SRC to boil down our favorite strategy games to the essence of what we feel are their greatest strengths: epic, tactics-filled battles and dynamic, game altering decisions."
  • Rakuen Preview
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    • PC
    Rakuen Preview

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    Laura Shigihara is probably best known to gamers as the musician behind "Zombies On Your Lawn," the award-winning (and wickedly infectious) theme song from the mega-hit Plants vs. Zombies. But these days she's hard at work on something of a more personal project: Rakuen, a story-based adventure about a sick little boy living in a hospital. Every day his mother reads to him from his favorite book, about a child in a far-away world who embarks upon a great adventure to be reunited with his tribe. Tired of his hospital life, he asks his mother to take him on the same quest, and so they set off together to discover the Forest Guardian of the story, an adventure that will lead them to learn more about the other patients in the hospital and the secrets and struggles that tie them to it."Rakuen's story actually grew out of a song that I wrote called 'Jump,'" Shigihara recently explained. "I wrote it a few years back but didn't end up arranging/producing it until I was asked to submit a track for the Play for Japan album Akira Yamaoka organized after the Tohoku earthquake. When I wrote the song, I thought about two things: I thought about how in life, we often have to go forward and hope for the best, even though we don't know how things will turn out; we don't know if we'll fly or fall. Sometimes we can't do anything at all but hope for the best, and jump. I also thought about how we all have a child inside of us that just wants to be told that everything is going to be alright. Sometimes when your Mom says, 'Don't worry, everything's gonna be alright,' she can't explain how or why it will be, but just hearing it makes you feel better. That's what this song is about. "That's kind of what Rakuen is about, too. I imagined a little boy living in the hospital, coming to terms with his problems by helping others," she continued. "Perhaps others who are too old to have a Mom, or who are carrying too much on their shoulders to ask someone to be there for them. The boy's Mom gives him the gift of hope, and through his adventures, he's able to pass that on to those around him. Through his actions, he's able to tell them, 'Everything's gonna be alright,' so that they don't have to be afraid to jump."
  • Combat Monsters Review
    Reviews
    • Android
    • iOS
    • PC
    Combat Monsters Review

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    Combat Monsters, the virtual card battle game with echoes of Magic: The Gathering is now in full release, and if you played and enjoyed it during the beta period, you'll be pleased to know that very little has changed over the past couple of months. And if you haven't, you probably should - it's a fun, challenging strategy card game, and while some of the multiplayer features are lacking, it gets the free-to-play formula right, a rare accomplishment these days.Even if you have only a basic idea of what Magic: The Gathering is, there's no mistaking the similarities between that famous card game and Combat Monsters. In fact, Paul Johnson, the co-founder of Rubicon Development is an "avid player" of Magic, but wanted a video game with a more tactical experience. Thus, Combat Monsters, in which you not only collect virtual cards of various types and abilities and deploy them in single and multiplayer duels, but also maneuver on a 3D game board, complete with special hexes that can amplify your powers - or your enemy's."Combat Monsters is very much an "easy to learn, tough to master" game. You begin by choosing a hero - a warrior, an archer, or a mage - who will serve as your personal avatar, and are then given a basic starting deck with which to play. The bulk of your deck will, initially at least, be composed of various fantasy monsters like orcs, minotaurs, elves, zombies and so forth, each of which belongs to one of the three character classes; there are also cards for weapons, armor, equipment, spells, and magical runes. Some "supplemental" cards only work with specific races or classes, and some monster cards have special abilities that manifest under the right conditions: zombies gain health whenever a monster on the board dies, for instance, while orcs gain an attack bonus for every friendly orc in play.
  • D&D: Arena of War Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    D&D: Arena of War Review

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    D&D: Arena of War looks great, it sounds great, and who doesn't relish the idea of battling their way across the fabled Sword Coast of Faerun during the world-changing events of the Sundering? But in the end, it's a deep disappointment, brought low by the absence of one fundamental component necessary to any good D&D game: the actual D&D.My time with D&D: Arena of War did not start well, as the game struggled with a post-install asset download that took much longer than expected and timed out twice, but I started to feel some optimism once things got going. It's a tad cramped on an iPhone screen, but even so it looks fantastic; and while the initial character creation is dramatically simplified - you can select from a number of pre-made race/class combinations (although some of the more exotic combos must be unlocked before they can be used) and adjust gender, hair color, armor, and gauntlets - that's not necessarily surprising in a combat-focused mobile game.My excitement grew as I started to play. D&D: Arena of War is set on the Sword Coast, a region of Faerun that will be pleasingly familiar to veterans of the famed computer RPG Baldur's Gate. Your adventures begin with a simple quest against some Kobold troublemakers in Beregost, a town that makes an early appearance in Baldur's Gate, and I was very much looking forward to the opportunity to once again walk its streets.
  • The Inner World Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    • PC
    The Inner World Review

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    I strongly suspect that The Inner World is going to be one of those games that very cleanly divides adventure fans between those who enjoy its unapologetically old-school sensibilities, and those who find it unnecessarily drawn out and even tedious. It's quirky, cute, sometimes charming, and occasionally even clever, but it's also a paper-thin tale that's utterly, and somewhat tiresomely, dedicated to the warped conventions of "adventure game logic."The Inner World takes place on the inside-out world of Asposia, a hollow "planet" in a universe composed entirely of soil. The air that gives it life comes in through three great "wind fountains," and while the actual origin of the wind is a mystery, one thing is certain: it is slowly dying out. Only one wind fountain remains functional, guarded by the Abbott Conroy and his young assistant Robert. But things go  haywire when Robert, a rather simple sort of fellow, befriends a pigeon; the pigeon makes off with the Abbott's most treasured possession and before he can be stopped, Robert takes off in pursuit - his first-ever journey beyond the castle's protective walls."The opening sequence very quickly sets the tone for the game, with simple yet surprisingly emotive hand-drawn graphics and excellent voice acting; and if there's any question as to the gravitas of the narrative, it's answered immediately by the Abbott's baritone command following Robert's surprise departure: "Bring me the hedgehog!" I was smiling throughout the introduction and laughed out loud at that line, but as I dug into the game I found that it wasn't able to maintain that level of sweet (and wonderfully strange) charm.