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Jillian will play any game with cute characters or an isometric perspective, but her favorites are Fallout 3, Secret of Mana, and Harvest Moon. Her PC suffers from permanent cat-on-keyboard syndrome, which she blames for most deaths in Don’t Starve. She occasionally stops gaming long enough to eat waffles and rewatch Battlestar Galactica.
  • Jazzpunk Review
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    • PC
    Jazzpunk Review

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    Jazzpunk is different.  When its mother says it's a special and unique snowflake, that the other games only make fun of it because they have gout, that deformed ducklings are actually beautiful pigeons, she's right. If we had to categorize Jazzpunk in a "normal" genre so it can go to regular school instead of one with crocodile grades, it would be a first-person adventure.  But that's just a disguise.  Jazzpunk doesn't fit neatly into any classification, except something like "joke sandbox," of which it is the pioneering and only one of its kind. "And yet, it is still very much a game.  It looks like a game, it feels like a game, and it rewards its players like a game.  In fact, it's actually a lot of games: a yard sale assortment of almost-recognizable titles with strangers' names scrawled across them in black Sharpie, dropped in a one-price-for-all box someone decided to round out with whoopee cushions and books of Russian brain teasers.  This box is familiar and foreign, and while you can't possibly appreciate everything that's inside, you take it home and sort through the spoils, giggling at nostalgic discoveries of sticky hands and foam dinosaur pills.So what's actually in the box labeled "Jazzpunk"?  There's a 1950s spy motif, splashed across an alternate Cold War era reality where technology has evolved to the point of robot butlers but not past the point of banana phones.  This world is painted by a colorful, cartoonish brush that elicits memories of everything from Team Fortress 2 to Viewtiful Joe.  The characters that populate this 3D-but-at-times-2D land fit the strange anti-dimensionality well, as armless creatures that acknowledge they—or at least you, the player—look like bathroom symbols.
  • Naughty Kitties Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    Naughty Kitties Review

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    Naughty Kitties is an adorable, energetic mash-up of two genres that excel on mobile: endless runner and tower defense.  It's a unique pairing that works surprisingly well.  The nonstop obstacles of the ever-scrolling runner have become targets that must be destroyed instead of dodged.  The strategic unit positioning and between-game level-ups of tower defense offer more activities than your standard jump, duck, dive.  The kitties are icing on the already delicious gameplay fishcake.Unfortunately, despite a strong base and charming theme, Naughty Kitties falls short of revolutionary.  Runs are often repetitive and unbalanced, crawling through boring spans of enemy-free territory until you hit an overly aggressive and indefensible attack.  Its freemium model forces frequent downtime on players through an easily-emptied energy meter.  Kitties are expensive and difficult to unlock, resulting in replaying levels with the same units again and again.  The result is a game that's great fun for the first dozen or so runs, but inevitably grind-heavy for players who don't wish to shell out real clams."Each run pits your crew of artillery-laden attack cats against a never-ending invasion of robot-piloting aliens.  These amorphous fiends are trying to take over the Cat's Planet, and only the kitty army and their rundown spaceship can stop them.  Luckily, the cats that inhabit this world have mastered the art of spray-and-pray, and have an unlimited arsenal of weaponry at their disposal. Naughty Kitties' endless runner heritage has your catship hurtling through space as the aliens come at you nonstop, shooting and slamming into your ship for damage.  Your run ends when the ship's health bar reaches zero, and your score is tied to the distance you managed to travel.  The tower defense portion comes from what you'll actually be doing as all this automatic action takes place: assigning and managing kitty defenders who man the ship and retaliate against the alien onslaught.
  • NOWHERE Preview
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    • PC
    NOWHERE Preview

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    You're floating in space.  Not the recognizable expanse of Milky Way planets and stars, but another region, populated by gently rounded masses that pulse with a neon glow.  It's abstract but also familiar, with invitingly warm colors and caves just begging to be explored.  The surface of these masses appear soft, clay-like, and tactile; if you could reach out, they would mold around your hand like a foam mattress.You can reach out.  You have a long, tentacle tether that snakes easily towards the landscape before you, latching on almost magnetically.  This is all you have.  The tether connects you to the terrain, allowing you to casually rope-swing around the pulsating colors, keeping you from floating into the black emptiness beyond.  You can weave through the caves, but there's nothing to find.  You're alone, save the ever-present electronic beat and the sense that something big is about to happen. That something is Nowhere, the in-development open world adventure visible in alpha snippets like the one just described.  While the current version is minimalistic and focused on sharing the sense of movement in thegame's gravity-free space, the ideas behind Nowhere and its long-term goals are much larger than even its vast environment demonstrates.  We spoke with Leonard Ritter, one-half of the husband-and-wife development team Duangle, about where Nowhere is headed.  
  • Broken Age: Act 1 Walkthrough
    Walkthroughs
    • iOS
    • PC
    Broken Age: Act 1 Walkthrough

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    Broken Age: Act 1 is a point-and-click adventure game developed by Double Fine.  In this game, you take on the role of a young, sacrificed woman named Vella and a space station-bound boy named Shay as they face their individual fates in separate, yet somehow connected lives.  Gamezebo's walkthrough will provide you with detailed images, tips, information, and hints on how to play your best game."
  • The Game Journo Guides Series: An Interview on Interviewing with Nathan Meunier
    News
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    • iOS
    • PC
    The Game Journo Guides Series: An Interview on Interviewing with Nathan Meunier

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    When we last spoke with Nathan Meunier, freelance writer and video game journalist extraordinaire, he had just published the first entry in what was to become a series of guidebooks for hopefuls looking to follow in his inky footsteps.  That book, Up Up Down Down Left WRITE: The Freelance Guide to Video Game Journalism, covered a plethora of topics that are bound to hound the would-be journalist, including composing pitches, covering gaming conventions, and even getting your pajama-clad daily routine in order. His next entry in the series, Interview Fu: The Game Journo Guide to Conducting Killer Interviews, explores one of UUDDLW's many topics in greater depth and is already available for purchase in print or Kindle formats.  We soaked up all of the knowledge present in this new guidebook and used it to pry even more wisdom from the mind of 10-year writing veteran Meunier."While interviewing is covered at a high level in UUDDLW, Interview Fu provides a hyper-focused expansion of the topic that was previously confined to a single chapter.  Meunier also expanded the section on pitches into a longer, specialized PDF titled "12 Ways to Improve Your Pitches" after readers responded with overwhelming positivity to its coverage in UUDDLW.  "Interview Fu wasn't driven as much by reader response as it was by my own desire to fill an inadvertent void in UUDDLW," Meunier told Gamezebo.  "It's one of several areas that I didn't get into very deeply in the first book, in-part because it's a big enough topic to merit an entire separate book.  It's also a subject that's near and dear to me, as readers of the book will discover." 
  • Naughty Kitties Preview
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    • iOS
    Naughty Kitties Preview

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    On the distant Cat's Planet, a war is waging.  An army of blobby alien invaders, cozy and confident in their heavily-armed spaceships, are attempting to invade.  While they've come equipped with lasers, mines, and missiles, the cats refuse to surrender.  In an attempt to protect their home world and everything they hold dear—naps and snacks—the cats take to the air and fight back.This fight is the basis for Coconut Island's upcoming strategic runner, Naughty Kitties.  One part tower defense, one part endless runner, and all parts adorable, Naughty Kitties successfully combines twitchy reaction gaming with a need for pre-planning and forethought.  Each play is a distance-scored run graded by how many kilometers your kitties' ship manages to fly before being destroyed.  On the destroying end of that equation are the alien attackers, flying at and into your ship with guns blazing and bombs exploding, continuously reducing your ship's health meter with each direct hit."The defense comes from your band of kitties, who are outnumbered but far from outgunned.  Kitty units are stationed on the ever-hurtling spaceship by dragging them from the deck at the bottom of the screen to one of the artillery posts on the ship's hull.  There are always three kitties available to choose from, so long as you didn't just assign a kitty—if so, you'll have to wait a few seconds for that unit to reload with a new, randomly selected feline.  You can also discard from the deck by swiping a kitty aside, but you'll still have to wait for his spot to refresh.Each type of kitty is a specific class, and you have to pick your available units before going into flight.  Kitties' specialties vary from firing missiles to ship repair, but all have a place in battle.  Michale, the Rambo-wannabe orange tabby, fires eggs from a machine gun at high speed.  Catzilla, usually half-asleep in his favorite pot, launches powerful-yet-slow fish-bone bombs.  Chou-chou, the always-essential mechanic, is actually an alpaca who believes he is a cat, but that's close enough for the nondiscriminatory cat army.
  • Across Age 2 Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    Across Age 2 Review

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    Across Age 2 has a lot to live up to.  Its predecessor is one of iOS's earliest action-RPG success stories.  Despite a shaky start upon its 2010 release, subsequent updates and expansions—in the form of Across Age DX—improved the original's controls and added an entirely new dungeon to the 10-hour+ adventure.  Its combination of character-switching, time-traveling, and 16-bit-era charm formed the basis for a series that would pride itself on nearly non-stop action interrupted only by the occasional switch puzzle or drunken pirate quest.All of these features have returned to duty in Across Age 2, along with a number of upgrades that improve upon even Across Age DX.  The story is richer and less cut-and-paste "collect the items and stop the bad guy" linear; characters are deeper and not limited to Ceska, Ales, or one-off caricatures; and gameplay has been expanded through additional items, puzzles, and strategies.  While these enhancements technically make Across Age 2 the best entry in the series, they are minor changes in a game that relies heavily on its predecessor's features, too intimidated by its success to fall far from the tree.  The result feels more like Across Age DX2 rather than a brand new game in an expanding series."The story of Across Age 2 picks up immediately after the end of the original: Prince Ales and Mage Ceska have thwarted Count Agrean and altered the course of time to save the future.  Because they changed history itself, no one remembers their heroic deeds save the two of them, and life returns to a peaceful normal.  Meanwhile, 25 years into the future, an evil king and queen have taken over Ales's kingdom, openly killing subjects who defy them.  Lily, a member of the rebellion against the despotic rulers, uses the power of Across Age to travel to Ales's and Ceska's present, intending to kill the monarchs before they come to power.  She runs into our newly minted heroes and the three set out to save the future once again.While the monarchs could easily have become the next Count Agrean, Across Age 2 utilizes a bait-and-switch technique that makes most dungeons and dangers feel of the utmost importance.  Instead of traveling around in search of clocks to prepare for the impending final battle, there are multiple "final battles" and big bosses throughout the journey, and the true danger to the world is often yet to be revealed.  This is a popular tactic in Super Nintendo-era RPGs like Final Fantasy VI—which requires a cataclysmic event to reveal the true big baddie—and it keeps Across Age 2 exciting and surprising.
  • LYNE Review
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    • PC
    LYNE Review

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    The core gameplay of minimalist puzzler LYNE is reminiscent of classic Arukone: connect two like shapes anchored at different spots on a grid via a single, unbroken line.  There are multiple shapes on the board that must be connected—triangle to triangle, square to square—without their distinctly-colored lines crossing each other.  But LYNE expands upon this basic rule in a number of ways to enhance the challenge, depth, and ingenuity of an initially simple puzzle foundation.   The most obvious of these changes is that LYNE takes place on a graph paper-like grid, allowing lines to be drawn diagonally.  In more standard Arukone games, such as Flow Free or Trainyard, each move fills an entire block and can only be dragged horizontally or vertically.  LYNE's added dimension doubles the potential moves and strategies available, creating seemingly endless options on even small game boards.To both challenge players further and guide them toward the correct path of the many available, colored spaces that match the end shapes are scattered about the grid.  Each of these must be passed through when connecting their related shapes, and can only be touched by their like-colored lines.  This means a blue square's line cannot intersect a green diamond's, but you also cannot block off access to the diamond since the green line must reach it.  The result is often long, roundabout loops where a line circles the screen before returning to an end shape only one block away, and unexpected solutions to seemingly simple challenges.