Here's a question for everyone reading right now: if you were stranded on a deserted island for a year and could only bring three video games with you to help pass the time, which ones would you choose? I forgot to mention that the deserted island conveniently has a fully charged iPad on the beach and a higher-end gaming PC made out of coconuts and palm trees.Well as for me, I would probably bring a handful of great iOS games, a couple of my favorite Double Fine adventures, and maybe even a bundle of indie games or two as well. Okay, so I guess that was WAY more than three games. But at least it's a good thing that we're not stranded on a deserted island, and that all of these things and more are currently experiencing some awesome price cuts all across the internet!"And as always, if your deserted island happens to come with a really long extension cord or some extra-large data storage capacity, please let us know of any other gaming deals we may have missed this week down in the replies!
Episodic games are all the rage this season, and the odds are good that you're probably somewhere in the middle of playing one right now. Almost all of the big story-driven mobile games are adopting the episodic formula these days, with most recent examples like In Fear I Trust and République just getting started with their own respective journeys. On the surface, making an episodic game is a great idea. You get to put the first installment out into the world up front and gauge your players' feedback before fine-tuning the episodes that follow. But there's one potential risk that could actually end up harming these pre-planned episodic games: the lengthy and sometimes unavoidable delays or wait times between each individual episode.Take Telltale Games for example, the studio that effectively brought the idea of episodic games into the mainstream of our industry. "Faith," the first episode of Telltale's The Wolf Among Us, was originally released for PC on October 11, 2013, and with the second episode "Smoke and Mirrors" finally debuting this week, this puts the amount of wait time between these two episodes at just under four months. At this rate, we may very well have to wait until early 2015 to see how Bigby Wolf's adventure ends: especially considering the crazy amount of new projects that Telltale has decided to juggle all at once."There are a number of reasons for varying delays in releasing the subsequent installments of an episodic game, and none of them are exactly ideal for the studio, or for the player, at that. Over the last few weeks, you could almost feel the growing frustration of gamers towards The Wolf Among Us everywhere online, with some early Season Pass adopters even afraid they might never get the next portion of the game they already paid for. And for those that do start playing Episode 2 this week, will you have a hard time picking up where you left off after such an extensive break?
Spells spew fire and sparks; minions swipe at each other with invisible claws; a newly summoned warrior lets out a cry, taunting the enemy to face him and him alone.In most trading card games these concepts are imagined - a byproduct of card art and flavor text spooling through the players' minds. Hearthstone, however, has the luxury of being a digital card game with graphics and the like to tickle you fancy and give the old imagination a rest.Now in open beta on PC and Mac, Hearthstone makes a solid first impression.At first I was dazzled, just as I'm sure Blizzard wanted. Then I was worried. Blizzard is a crucible; taking ideas that work in other places and other spaces and boiling them down to their most essential. Card games have certainly been around for an age and a half, but digital card games -- ones designed from the ground up for screens and clicks -- are relatively new. I wondered; did the company have enough original spirit to make those essentials from whole-cloth?
Do you like video games? What about… parties? What about the unbearably bitter cold of a Canadian winter? If you said yes to all three of these, you're going to want to clear your schedule on February 21st. The Fancy Videogame Party is coming.Thanks to its thriving indie scene, Toronto has tons of great events for gamers - and yet Fancy Videogame Party is like the perfect storm of gaming events in Toronto. It's not one, not two, but three celebrations in one.First, it's a celebration of The Hand Eye Society's fifth birthday. The Hand Eye Society, for those not in the know, is a Toronto-based indie gaming collective that holds a variety of events all year long to help spread the word about great Toronto games.
You know what's cooler than getting one new piece of kit? Getting two. That's why we've bundled up a pretty sweet deal that should appeal to gamers of all walks of life: an awesome PC/Mac USB pixel art controller, and a gaming headset that's just as usable in the living room as it is at your desktop.And the cost? You can pick up these beauties bundled together for only $48, including shipping. For more information (and to order), check out this offer at deals.gamezebo.com.
While I'm not usually one for sports, I've always been a bit of a sucker for football. I don't follow a team or watch every Sunday, mind you, but if there's a game on and I'm in the room, my eyes will probably be glued to the screen. And when there's a big game like the Superbowl or Grey Cup (Canadians know what I'm talking about), I'm happy to carve an evening out of my schedule to watch.Last night's blowout was no exception.The big story from last night, it would seem, is of the Broncos complete and utter meltdown that started with the first play of the game, and the absolute trouncing delivered to Payton and his boys by Seattle's Legion of Boom (which includes former Grey Cup winner Brandon Browner, in case you Canadians are keeping score at home) that followed. Also, Percy Harvin.But if you ask me, there's a much bigger story from last night than utter annihilation of the Denver Broncos. It's the story of technology's growing relationship with events, how our love affair with gadgets perfectly blends with football, and, well… Flappy Bird.But we'll get to that in a moment.
Zos is a full-fledged adventure game brought directly to your web browser courtesy of developer 8bitSkull. Based in a surprisingly rich science fiction universe, Zos has players completing objectives, talking to characters, and platforming across a variety of colorful planets. What is essentially a giant space monster is slowly consuming the universe, and it is up to the player to find the artifacts called 'The Essences' that are capable of stopping the beast. Of course, The Essences are scattered all across the galaxy.As the player adventures through the planets, they can interact with the inhabitants of whatever planet they are on. Zos has surprisingly well-developed alien cultures, and it was always interesting to go and interact with the NPCs that were encountered along the way.
With over 18,000 backers and (as of this writing) £571,108 (roughly, $938,613), Warhorse's upcoming medieval RPG, Kingdom Come, is on-track to be one of 2014's biggest Kickstarter campaigns. Warhorse was founded in 2011 by game industry veterans who have previously worked on games like Operation Flashpoint, Mafia, Forza Horizons, Crysis 3, and more. Kingdom Come is being developed with CryENGINE 3, and Warhorse is anticipating a quarter four, 2015 release date.Kingdom Come is a first-person medieval warfare game set in Medieval Europe that features a non-linear story where players can end up the hero, or the villain. The world of Kingdom Come is planned to be three-and-a-half square miles large, and Warhorse estimates that gameplay will last for over seventy hours.