Gaming is one of the pillars of crowdfunding, so we’ve decided to start up a weekly roundup of crowdfunding projects to watch. This week: tactical RPG starship sim the Mandate, the optionally violent Bloom, Project Sen‘s thighs, Myst successor Obduction and funding outcomes good and bad for Night in the Woods and Raindrop respectively.
What names does your mind jump to when asked to pick the titles that shaped our current indie gaming landscape? I suspect Minecraft and Braid will be joined by a few personal favourites for most of you, but in my case the association is strongest with Darwinia: a game so entirely beautiful despite being so daringly lo-fi, that promised amazing new ideas could come from small, left-field teams and rank among a list of the best things you played that year.
Even though planning your latest IP as a trilogy has been a fashionable thing to do during this console generation, Mass Effect 3 is a game that has truly been anticipated by some for the best part of half a decade. Despite of the needlessly late release of Mass Effect 3, many of the team have spent this weekend picking up where they left off, with the characters and choices they’ve carried forward from the two preceding games. Here are their thoughts and first…
So, it’s Mass Effect 3 release week. Stick around for a team-wide first impressions article this weekend, with Kevin’s review to follow sometime later. But for now, here’s a little pre-release rage.
I’ve been quietly fuming away for the best part of 2 years over the pricing of Mass Effect 2‘s mission DLC. At 2480 of their intentionally obtuse ‘Bioware points’, you’re expected to pay about twice what the 40-hour base game costs itself these days. Which is how DLC typically works, but at least there’s usually a discount for those of us who’re never going to be fanatical enough to cough up that kind of money. Not in the case of…
One evening this winter, a piano-playing friend of mine invited me along to a concert and ‘artistic installation’ he was involved in, held inside a quaint little medieval church in Hove. The place was lit with candlelight, with fake trees positioned to cast flickering shadows about this strange village church in a busy city. Handed a little plastic cup of mulled wine, I sat listening to my pianist friend, debating with another friend whether ‘this was it’.
Soul Calibur V releases in Europe today, having been available in North America and Japan for most of this week. It came away with a headshot in Tuesday’s Soul Calibur V review, and if you’re thinking of joining the fight you’ll need to do some catching up to the rest of the world, especially as my main criticism was of how the game doesn’t do quite enough to get you up to speed on its new systems and massive move…
Don’t let the dashing, hooded Italian on Soul Calibur V‘s boxart fool you. Namco and their rivals aren’t in the business of trying to squeeze a big release out every single year. They understand the value of leaving land fallow. It has been nearly three years since the last Tekken, dead on three years since we entered the fourth Street Fighter era. And Soul Calibur IV? Nearly four years old. The Soul series’ sixth instalment arrives this week, and it’s…
Well, something had to be left off the list: there were simply too many games. From August onwards we were buried under a huge pile of games that were not just hugely exciting, but typically expansive and demanding in review terms. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception was as exciting a prospect as the rest, but it slipped through the net anyway. But then, in this generation of scant exclusives, Uncharted is the single well established bragging point for Playstation owners: the…
Assassin’s Creed Revelations is precisely the kind of product that makes you question if it’s worth reviewing game sequels. Even though the asking price troubles the comparison, intentionally missing out on playing Revelations would be like missing out on the latest episode of a TV drama – you’re only not going to play this game if you’re planning to rage quit on the entire series. And aside from a somewhat lacking sense of forward momentum in the series right now…