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Posted on 11.14.09 by Widge @ 4:04 am
Comments on this: just one. Add your own.  You, like me, have probably spent an undue amount of time wondering to yourself: Is everything exploding? Or is it just me? And by "just me," I mean "just you under the impression that everything is exploding" since, you know, you'd probably notice if you yourself were exploding. Unless you were just as quickly imploding so that you reached a state of uneasy equilibrium. Where was I? Oh yes. You have wondered this, but you don't go on hunches. You want evidence. Jason Nelson, purveyor of games, art and insanity, is here to give you what you have always sought. He does this in the form of the dada game "Evidence of Everything Exploding." You run over pages of text, blocked by your own preconceived notions of meaning (i.e. lines) and try to reach the reach/reach. Upon doing so, you are rewarded with a running exposé of how the Illuminati have been secretly running the world by means of matchbooks--the real reason smoking has been banned most places, to sap them of their ability to pass encoded messages. Or...something. Regardless, it's maniacal brilliance. Or what would have happened if William S. Burroughs and Salvador Dali had been in charge of game design for Konami. Find Jason Nelson and his gallery of surreal nonsense here. And check out the rest of his site. The opening page is like a horror movie about grass scored by Bernard Herrmann being assaulted by a midi machine. Categorized as: Games
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Posted on 08.28.09 by Doc @ 3:01 pm
Comments on this: 2 so far. Add your own. 
Release Date: August 25, 2009 Comic-related video games have a...storied history. They range from the mediocre to the execrable, on the whole, with a tiny number of counter-examples scattered across the pages of game history. In those few bright spots, though, one hero has been consistently under-served: Batman. Attempts have been made to digitize the Dark Knight before, to be sure, and you might find a few copies still lurking in the discount shovelware bins at used game outlets. They're not worth whatever price is marked. From the first teaser images released by Eidos, Batman: Arkham Asylum was clearly in a different league. Using Epic's Unreal Engine, the game's designers deliver a less cartoonish caped crusader and a truly disturbing rogue's gallery of classic villains, all through the twisted lens one would expect with the title's invocation of Gotham's disturbing sanitarium. The end result is a tense, atmospheric chess game between Bats and his most notorious foe, the Joker. Along the way, you'll square off against several other long-time adversaries of Batman, including the game's most memorable (and disturbing) sequences against Scarecrow and Batman's own darkest fears. Categorized as: Games and Reviews
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Posted on 08.26.09 by Doc @ 1:24 pm
Comments on this: just one. Add your own. 
Release Date: August 19, 2009 If you had told me six months ago that a downloadable arcade title was going to be one of the best releases for the Xbox this summer, I'd have laughed at you. Of course, the summer release schedule originally looked a little more impressive than it actually turned out to be, but still. Even with only a couple of premiere titles shipping, an Arcade title as top spot? And not a port of some platinum-clad champion title of old, but an original property? No chance. So imagine my surprise when, ten minutes into playing the free demo of Shadow Complex, I was punching in digits to get my full download. Adding to the amazement is the game's genre: it's a 2D sidescrolling platformer, a genre that had its heyday when this year's college freshmen were in diapers. In the mold of the classic Metroid and Castlevania titles, it's a sort of "open-world" platformer, with a massive map meant to be explored piecemeal as you level up your little jumpy dude and find new pieces of equipment that help you bypass various color-coded doors and obstacles. Along the way, you bash, shoot, kick, and explode a variety of enemies, all of whom will respawn in short order after you leave their room. Categorized as: Games and Reviews
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Posted on 07.26.09 by Oblique Red @ 6:28 pm
Comments on this: 7 so far. Add your own.  I'm about to make a confession that may shock you. I have never played a tabletop role-playing game. I know, I know, it's hard to believe! I put up a good front, after all, cracking "saving roll" and "initiative" jokes with my geek friends, referring to things as "chaotic neutral," making appreciative comments about d20 earrings in the dealer room at cons...but it is all a hollow lie. People have a hard time believing this when I tell them. After all, am I not the queen of the console RPG, both Japanese and Western? Do I not do all the sidequests on my Final Fantasy games, even the really annoying and tedious ones? Did I not, as a young lass, round up the neighbor children, dress them up, assign them roles, and lead them on various quests in a sort of baby LARP? (Favorite themes: Narnia (I was Lucy), GI Joe (I was Scarlett) and Princess Escaping From Evil Wizard (I was the Princess. Duh.)) Yes, gentle reader. I am all these things. And yet I somehow missed out on the grand progenitor of them all. How could this be? Categorized as: Games
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Posted on 05.31.09 by Widge @ 7:35 am
Comments on this: 2 so far. Add your own. 
Release Date: May 5, 2009 Publisher: PopCap Games There might be a backstory to the game, but if there is, I didn't bother to find it out. If there was one, it might be something like this, in a nutshell. Zombie holocaust. In your neighborhood, at least. And you're some kind of mad vegetarian Dr. Moreau, because you've got an army of seeds that will sprout plants to defend your home from the undead. That's really all you need to know. It's quite possibly the perfect storm of addictive games, which is why I'm going ahead and reviewing the goddamn thing so I can uninstall it before I spend any more time with it. First, it's tower defense--which, for non-gamers like me, basically means you set up items that have distinct qualities that enable you to defend yourself against increasingly specialized attacking forces. If you haven't played a game like this, seriously, don't. Because it is a timesuck of the highest order. Second, it's zombies. And you know how we are on this site about zombies. Categorized as: Games and Reviews
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