In the pantheon of ideas whose time has come, a social sports betting game ranks pretty high. Now it's a reality in the form of the simply named Sports Casino by RocketPlay, a company made up of social gaming and gambling industry veterans. Available on both Facebook and Zynga.com as part of Zynga's initiative to publish games from other developers, it's got the potential to draw in people who wouldn't ordinarily touch social games.
It's a story with which we can all relate: Guy hits on king's daughter, king promises the daughter's hand in marriage if the guy can clear out a land full of monsters. You know, everyday stuff. This story plays out as a high energy action game with liberal doses of laughs in Guy vs The Wicked and Nefarious Land, a test of reflexes and wits from developer Cog Monkeys.
Everyone's got their baggage. That uncle you don't really want to talk about. Teenage years as a bullied nerd. The father that may or may not have been involved in committing you to a mental asylum, leaving you with only your frayed mind and sentient stuffed rabbit to keep you company...all with the hopes that you can use flashes of your past to recover memories necessary to escape and make sense of it all. Okay, that's the kind of baggage reserved for Edna & Harvey: The Breakout.
The TimeBuilders: Pyramid Rising 2 sees players heading back to ancient Egypt, as the architect Senmut has been healed from his illness only to be greeted with another curse: if his people can't construct or repair a series of once beautiful statues, the empire is doomed to failure for upsetting the Gods.
If the They Bleed Pixels experience can be summed up in a single word, that word would be "humbling." Despite my valiant efforts to the contrary, I wasn't able to finish the whole game before writing this review. In fact, I don't even think I was able to finish half of it. That's not because it's a big game, or because I'm a terribly inconsiderate writer - it's simply because of this: They Bleed Pixels is a brutally difficult game.
If you travel in indie gaming circles, there's a pretty good chance you've heard the name Edmund McMillen. He's the man behind such hits as Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac. But have you ever wondered what he did before these modern marvels of fun? Well he made more games, of course!
For the last few months, the games coming out of ERS Game Studios have been going steadily downhill. ERS cranks games out at breakneck speed, and it's possible that at this point, the pace of development has begun to negatively affect product quality. The company's last two releases, Redemption Cemetery: Grave Testimony and Dark Alleys: Penumbra Motel were both far from amazing, and its latest release, Gothic Fiction: Dark Saga, is the weakest yet seen.
Never in a million years did I ever think the text adventure game genre would make a comeback. I mean, it's sort of ridiculous. While I have many fond memories of navigating my way through Zork, those games are by all accounts antiquated. They were a product of their time, certainly, but with desktop computers now more powerful than the shuttle that delivered men to the moon, why would we choose to play a text adventure game? Cabinet Noir and the StoryNexus system makes a compelling case.