[Editor’s Note:Â Â For those that don’t know, I’m on staff performing freelance reviews for a web-based game site. I get titles sent to me on a recurring basis and am charged with playing and reviewing them. The upside is free games and exposure. The downside – no pay and some dreadful games from time to…
I grew up among the Greatest Generation of video gamers – those who spent their time in the trenches waging war with antiquated technology like the Atari 2600 – fighting the good fight while trying to peer through the fog of war (represented by a monochromatic mass of pixels) in hopes that something beautiful rested…
Braid is the single most important game released this year. Ever since technology caught up with our hobby and evolved it from simple beeps and blips and tests of hand-eye coordination into a medium capable of spinning a decent yarn and taking the player away to awe-inspiring worlds of wonder, the argument of ‘Games as…
With its unique ability to offer players more tactile control over their onscreen avatars, thus further selling the illusion that you’re in the game, the Wii has been a prime destination for sports titles. This is the system that was arguably sold based on the strength of its pack-in Sports-themed minigame compilation – and since…
Some days I feel this war is never going to end. Every time I think my tour of duty is coming to its end, along comes another assignment to guide the Greatest Generation through another World War II game. While it has become cliché to rail against the proliferation of World War II themed first…
There’s a great line in Robert Altman’s 1992 Hollywood satire, The Player, where a desperate screenwriter pitches potential projects as mash-ups of established properties, “It’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s meets Psychoâ€, each more ludicrous than the last. The point being that audiences crave the familiar, rejecting anything new and innovative. The game industry isn’t immune to…
For a sport that single-handedly grandfathered the entire video game bloodline following the release of Pong, tennis seems to get short shrift in gaming these days. Sure, there are a smattering of games released each year – usually timed to coincide with Wimbledon – but compared to the vast iterations of baseball, hockey and of…
For some, the Washington political scene can be as wild as the Amazon. Conniving snakes slither through the grass, looking to sidle up with equally loathsome lobbyists. Blowhard senator swine curry favor among their constituency while wallowing in the mud with the special interests. And when poor, defenseless votes are spotted in the great, wide…
Timed to coincide with the real world UEFA EURO 2008 competition in Austria and Switzerland, EA has released their latest entry in the soccer field, UEFA Euro. While EA is also the developer behind the venerable FIFA series, UEFA differs quite a bit and offers up its own compelling sports package even if it seems…
The old maxim goes – “It’s a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.†And then there are places like Crisis City – the chaotically out-of-control burg at the center of Codemaster’s new Wii release, Emergency Mayhem. The question is – would you want to play there? With a name like…