There are very few things cooler than robots and ninjas. This is universally understood. Yet certain characters and archetypes do come close, and periodically rise with the cultural tide. Just look at werewolves and vampires. Those dudes are killingit. Cowboys are doing pretty well, too. But what about our beloved, scurvy-ridden friends, the pirates? Sure, they had a good run with that whole Caribbean gig, but has their ship of awesomeness finally left hip harbor? Have they walked the plank of relevance? Are we shamelessly fishing for analogies?
As space programs around the world continue to make advancements towards expanding the reach of the human race beyond the stars, have they ever thought about the repercussions, or the potential threat of an all-out space war? Well now might be the time to start planning ahead. Freefall Tournament is a frantic web-based third-person shooter, set in the throes of space, where no one is safe from a rogue laser blast.
Sometimes a developer is so eager to get their game out to the public, they can be a little too quick on the draw. When the trailer for No Time to Explain was released in early 2011, and gathered huge interest online, studio tinyBuild Games had a game on its hands that wasn't really fixed up very well at all. The game was released in summer 2011, and was an awfully buggy mess.
In a deep jungle, adorable floating idols are threatened by a purple blob-like creature that threatens to eat them all and destroy the fabric of space-time. At least, that's what we've guessed is going on in Rolling Idols, as this beautiful match-three game comes with little in the way of a storyline, and is fairly hit or miss when it comes to its actual gameplay.
Just when you think you've played every imaginable permutation of a match three game, along comes Tower of Elements. The creative concept from Frogdice couples a tile-swapping puzzle game with some light defense ingredients, allowing you to put your Bejeweled skills to use to defend helpless villagers from an invading army of evil.
When you've played as many adventure games as I have, you just about do a dance of joy when a developer makes one that's not about ghosts or fairies or Victorian Times. You also want to do a little jig when they employ logic in their design and don't rely on unlikely contrivances. In making Nightmare Adventures: The Turning Thorn, Ghost Ship Studios has given people like us cause to happy-dance the night away by giving us a tightly-constructed adventure game that's fresh in setting, story and execution.
If you've never played Stratego before, well friend, you're a little late to the party. It's a classic board game of capture the flag that's simple enough to learn quickly, but full of subtle strategies. While it's been around for ages, it's never been given a treatment like Jumbo and Keesing Games just put together, playable on iPad or any web browser and with plenty of great new features.
A funny thing happened about halfway through the second installation of Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller: it stopped being terrible. I actually almost started to think that I could possibly end up maybe kind of enjoying it. It was still clunky, overwrought and flat-out silly, but somewhere off in the distance I saw a glimmer of something I honestly did not expect: hope.