This War of Mine: The Review You Can Use [TM]

This War of Mine is the hardest PC game I've ever played. I do not mean that it's difficult, although it is. I mean that some of the most heart-wrenching moments I've ever experienced in gaming occurred while I was playing it. This War of Mine is a fairly simple premise: you control a group…

Thoughts on Stellaris and game design

It's been out now for about two weeks, but this is the first chance I've had to write about Stellaris, the space 4X/grand strategy developed by Paradox Development Studios. If you haven't played a PDS game yet, Stellaris is very accessible, more so than almost any other game PDS has ever done (Crusader Kings II…

A Gaming Year in Review: 2015

As always, these games are games I played in 2015, not that necessarily came out in 2015. This list is not intended to be exhaustive, merely representative. I am also including only games I finished or played a lot of (for games that can't be finished). I've written about some of these before. There's a search function, use…

My desert island games

As you might expect, I had a difficult time with Kevin's thought experiment. Limiting myself to only 10 games means I have to pick a decent variety of games, with an emphasis on replayability. XCOM (+ all DLC). This is my choice for tactical RPG. In a year or two, I might replace this with XCOM…

Meet the 2015 class of the Video Game Hall of Fame

I wrote about the Video Game Hall of Fame and its inaugural class a few weeks ago. Here are your results. I was right on four of them, the four I thought were slam dunks: Tetris, Pac-Man, Pong, and Super Mario Bros. I assumed there'd be five winners; my #5 pick was the Sims, based on…

Early thoughts on the PS4

So, a few days ago, we upgraded from a PS3 to a PS4. It's a very slick design and reminds of Johnny Five's feet, so there's that! It does seem to be much faster and supports downloading more than one thing at once, in the sense that you can download something while you stream. I…

Final thoughts on Dragon Age: Inquisition (so far)

As I write this post, I finished my first playthrough of Dragon Age: Inquisition. I'm actually kind of pleased that there's plenty of content I missed (because the game tricked me, but whatever). I've uninstalled it for now, but this is less a function of the game being bad (which it wasn't) but my SSD…

Another Hall of Fame to complain about! Yay!

As I learned from the AV Club, Video Games are getting their very own Hall of Fame (as part of the National Toy Museum in Rochester, NY. There are fifteen nominees. Although the balloting process is not clear, AV Club says that the panel will be composed of "journalists, scholars, and other video game experts."…

Early thoughts on Dragon Age Inquisition

I've started playing Dragon Age: Inquisition over the last couple of days. I'm not going to talk much about the plot, but I figure a brief discussion of the mechanics won't hurt. After the prologue, you find yourself in charge of something called the Inquisition (you don't say). In order to support this enterprise to…

Final thoughts on Assassin’s Creed Unity

I finished Unity yesterday. On my new PC, it ran beautifully -- there was a tiny bit of stuttering that a patch fixed. Good stuff. The game itself, however, was something of a mixed bag. It did combat very well; in a comment to a friend online, I remarked that the hardest Assassin's Creed games…