I’m sitting in an extremely busy airport, assaulted with the scent of Cinnabon, three hours early for my two-and-a-half-hour flight. So what is there to do? I could play Terra Battle, that sounds good. Oh wait, my boarding pass is on my phone, and my battery is terrible. If I do that, I might not be able to even get on the plane in the first place. I can write this article, sure, but not everyone is willing to lug around a laptop like me. And this is a gaming laptop, so the battery life is for shit anyway; it’ll die just before boarding. If only there was something that I could play games on that I wouldn’t have to worry about if the battery ran out. Why aren’t things like that relevant anymore? Continue reading Handheld Games Are Still Important, Shut Up
Tag Archives: opinion
A Bit Of Opinion: Apotheon
The level of critical acclaim for what in my eyes is one of the worst games of 2015 so far is puzzling me like nothing in even The Talos Principle ever did. Apotheon is receiving virtually no serious negative press – Steam reviews are at 96% positive, it’s receiving ratings upwards of 7 across the board, and hell, Destructoid has declared it “apotheonestly great”.
Are they being hypnotized by some kind of swinging pendulum hidden in the game’s stylish pottery art design that only affects professional journalists? They must be, just as they are every time an indie with spunk comes bounding down the aisles of the digital store, and explodes all over every shelf in the vicinity.
This game is a hot fucking mess. A sometimes fine, sometimes knee-deep layer of baffling design and broken interactivity has seeped all the way through to the bottom of Apotheon. Next to no facets of the game are spared from the onslaught of unpolished gameplay.
A Bit Of Opinion: Peggle 2
Playing Peggle 2 is a bit like listening to modern Maroon 5. Early Maroon 5 is something no one should be ashamed to admit they like. It’s great music. The same goes for the original Peggle, a humble little game with just the right amount of everything it’s possible to have too much of. It was just the right balance of challenging and relaxing, its humor didn’t come off as shitty video game humor and was instead merely charming, and it didn’t feel like a million dollars was poured into it.
Clearing levels in Peggle 2, however, is the equivalent of hearing Adam Levine’s vocals whine over Maroon 5’s latest electropop turd – it’s catchy, it works, but it leaves me wondering “Where’s the funk?”. Continue reading A Bit Of Opinion: Peggle 2
Brothers: Narratively Self-Satisfied, Narratively Bankrupt
Fifteen dollars for a gorgeous, varied, and engaging platformer may not seem like anything special in 2015 (you can look at Steam for five minutes and find a few games that check at least two of those boxes), but few of them are the same sort of thing as Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons. Brothers is more like a film than any platformer I’ve played, for better or for worse, and in more ways than one. It doesn’t seem to know what to do with its story ambitions however, and despite having an extremely solid footing when it comes to core gameplay, still reaches for that extra boost of narrative excellence that always evades its grasp.
Henceforth: Spoilers.
Continue reading Brothers: Narratively Self-Satisfied, Narratively Bankrupt
A Bit Of Opinion: Song of the Myrne: What Lies Beneath
I have a fascination with buying some mediocre-looking game just to see what it is, and what happens when a person buys it. Song of the Myrne: What Lies Beneath is something of a weird case, because from the screenshots I could tell immediately that this wasn’t going to be Game of the Year material. But my male intuition told me that this game was probably pretty cool, and after playing a fair bit of it, I think it sort of is…
Song of the Myrne is many things. Flawed, simplistic, and cheaply made to be sure, but it’s also an ambitious, seemingly sprawling RPG with many things people praised Divinity: Original Sin for reminding the world of in back in June.
Continue reading A Bit Of Opinion: Song of the Myrne: What Lies Beneath
A Bit Of Opinion: Gemini Strike
A couple of months ago I posted about a wonderful app I’d found, Terra Battle, that was the only really good phone game I had played since Jetpack Joyride. Well, in a burst of emotion and for reasons I can’t recall, I deleted the app. I’ve decided that I’m just going to wait until I get an Android phone to restart that game, and in the meantime I’ve been on the hunt for something to tide me over. Gemini Strike seems cool. Continue reading A Bit Of Opinion: Gemini Strike
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