Thursday Review: Dishonored

I went into Dishonored with high expectations, and found them matched. However, I discovered quickly that while I truly enjoyed the game, it ran into some pretty major issues before too long in. Quite frankly, when I made it through the first three levels, I was thinking “This game reminds me a lot of Deus Ex, in a good way.” and by the time I got to the last my thoughts had been shifted to “Well, some of these textures do look like they’re from 2000″. Continue reading “Thursday Review: Dishonored”

Thursday Review: Tomb Raider (2013)

Tomb Raider is always one of those franchises I’ve avoided because of its perception; Lara Croft prior to recent developments had always been a video game sex symbol, but was handled in a way that I found somewhat offensive. She’d become an object of a brand rather than a living breathing character, and while she certainly wasn’t the worst example of how women are treated in video games, she wasn’t a character so much as an image. However, having heard good things about Lara’s new direction in character development, and the general gameplay of the series reboot, I picked it up and gave it a shot. Continue reading “Thursday Review: Tomb Raider (2013)”

Thursday Review: War of the Roses

War of the Roses is by no means a new game, but it’s one that I only finally got around to playing after getting it as a gift. It’s a multiplayer-only medieval combat game with a heavy focus on action and which takes place in the English civil war between the Lancastrian and Yorkist factions. It is, to a degree, historically accurate, though the fact that it’s an action-oriented video game means that it’s not exactly going to be winning any prizes for realism. Continue reading “Thursday Review: War of the Roses”

Thursday Review: The Game Master

Tobiah Q. Panshin’s The Game Master is an interesting book from front to back, one which is both wonderful and cringe-worthy at the same time. Of all things, perhaps its worst is its inconsistency; verging from academic-styled formal writing to wonderfully light informal prose, it does few things explicitly wrong but doesn’t seem to know where it is. Nonetheless, it’s something that I would recommend, with a caveat. Continue reading “Thursday Review: The Game Master”

Thursday Review: 44: A Game of Automatic Fear

Normally I try to keep my reviews pretty up-to-date, but recently I’ve been running with a hectic schedule and a release log that doesn’t give me the flexibility I’d like to do long reviews, so I’ve been going through and reading some of the games that have been recommended to me but which I never really gave enough attention or never really gave my thoughts about. This week it’s 44: A Game of Automatic Fear which has fallen under my microscope. Continue reading “Thursday Review: 44: A Game of Automatic Fear”

Sunday Extra: Eclipse Phase: Transhuman Reviewed

Eclipse Phase is one of my favorite games, but I’m not beyond admitting that it has its faults, some of them pretty serious. For one thing, although there was a great range of morphs and the game really felt like it vibrantly embraced the question of not only transhumanism but the practicality of a diverse and exotic range of morphs, it didn’t really feel like the rules did. Transhuman, which could best be described as their player’s guide, does a great job of fixing a lot of those issues, and introduces a lot of new content. Continue reading “Sunday Extra: Eclipse Phase: Transhuman Reviewed”

Sunday Extra: The Void Reviewed

I know I’ve been doing a lot of reviews recently, but I’ve had a lot of family issues going on and I’ve been reading in the downtime between stuff going on, so I’ve just been voraciously going at anything that I can get my hands on that looks interesting. The Void looked pretty interesting to me when I first saw it, and it wasn’t disappointing. The fact that it’s Creative Commons licensed and available as pay-what-you want was particularly interesting, as I’ve always been a fan of open licensing, and even though in the past such games as Eclipse Phase have done major releases in CC they haven’t made themselves widely available for free. Continue reading “Sunday Extra: The Void Reviewed”

Thursday (Bonus) Review: BattleTech: Alpha Strike

I’m a long-time fan of BattleTech, in part because I grew up playing the MechWarrior video games and quickly fell in love with the wargame as soon as I discovered it. Alpha Strike is a bit of an oddity; on one hand, it attempts to include all the features and complications in BattleTech, but do so in a way that minimizes bookkeeping and allows for a faster form of play. Continue reading “Thursday (Bonus) Review: BattleTech: Alpha Strike”

Thursday Review: Rocket Age)

Rocket Age is a game that sort of came out of the blue for me; I don’t tend to keep up on forthcoming games until they’ve released (I find that being unhyped about something I’m not familiar with makes me more objective), unless it’s something that I’ve explicitly been waiting for like a game in a franchise I’ve loved previously. Rocket Age coming into my inbox out of the blue quickly became a bit of a pleasant surprise. Continue reading “Thursday Review: Rocket Age)”

Thursday Review: Shadowrun: Sprawl Wilds

Shadowrun: Sprawl Wilds is a collection of adventures that are intriguing and provide a good starting point for prospective Shadowrun GM’s. They focus more on a complex mission rather than a simple one; they’ll take a fair deal of getting familiar with to run, and they involve fewer felonies than the average shadowrun, but not only do they show off SR5’s new things well and serve as a decent starting-off point for Shadowrun players. Unfortunately, they are not quite perfect, but they’re pretty good in general. Continue reading “Thursday Review: Shadowrun: Sprawl Wilds”