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Thoughts on games, books, movies, and other random points of interest.
Monday, March 27, 2017
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Friday, February 21, 2014
Steel Battalion
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Crusader Kings II
At some point in the last year or so my tastes in gaming underwent a sea-change. For a long time I enjoyed quantity of games over depth of play, favoring short, easily mastered games that could be finished and traded in quickly. Creative shooters like Bulletstorm, or action-adventure titles like Tomb Raider fit the bill perfectly-- games I could finish in 10-12 hours, trade in, and move on the next experience. It's not that I shunned difficulty, it was just that I wanted games that gave me relaxation and entertainment over a steep mental challenge. Plus, I had a big backlog of games I wanted to play and I valued the ability to have a multitude of experiences.
Lately, however, I have been drawn to deep, dense, highly complex games that take hours and hours just to learn the base gameplay, let alone experience the fullness of what they have to offer. Games that scoff at words like "accessibility" and "user-friendly," that punish you for your mistakes but reward patience and hard work. Games that test your patience and your skills, but forge you into a better gamer on the cold, hard anvil of their difficulty. Crusader Kings II is such a game and I have sunk many, many hours into plumbing its depths.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Gunpoint
I picked this up for $5.99 during the Steam Summer sale, and it's in the running for the best six dollars I've spent all year. Thanks to Summer Sale bargains and Humble Indie Bundles, my Steam library has grown to epic proportions; my list of unplayed games has nearly caught up with my Netflix queue. I truly despair of catching up (I know, #firstworldproblems). But Gunpoint stands out like a shining star, so much so that as soon as I finished the game I started over and played it all over again.
Remember the early days of video gaming, when a couple guys with thick glasses and poor hygiene could crank out a hit game by toiling away in a basement? For a while there, it seemed like those days were long gone, subsumed by the monster budgets of the AAA development cycle. But between cheap, user-friendly creation tools like the Unity and Game Maker, and the limitless crowd resources of the Internet, the game industry has come full circle back to the days of garage development. Case in point, Gunpoint was created by an editor at PC Gamer with no programming experience experimenting in his spare time. Designer Tom Frances built a working prototype, got some outside help with art assets and music (which he recruited via his blog), and voilĂ - a hit was born.
Total development cost? $30.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Tomb Raider 2013
Anyways, I sped through Tomb Raider in record time, completing the campaign in just over a week. I intentionally sped through the game as quickly as possible to maximize trade-in value, but honestly I would have finished it that quickly anyways-- I could not put the controller down from start to finish. It's a damn good game, and a welcome return for gaming's most recognizable female lead.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Voiding Warranties: Refurbishing the NES
Ah, the NES! Who in our generation doesn't have fond memories of the fabled grey box? I was fortunate enough to have an ex-coworker give me and old NES she found in her attic (thanks Donna!). Of course I was super excited. But who doesn't also have memories of cajoling said grey box to work properly? Power flashes, blue screens, grey screens, a mesh of pixels...The old gal could be finicky. When I tried plugging it into my TV, I got this:
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