Developers

Iron Harvest is a Beautiful RTS

April 12, 2021 Reviews

Iron Harvest is a dieselpunk RTS based in an alternate 1930s where you get to ride around in giant diesel powered mechs which is pretty cool concept. This is more than welcome considering Rise of Nations was the last memorable steampunk RTS. The graphics, as you can see below are absolutely beautiful: It has a lot working for it. Good textures, very nice graphics and good gameplay built in. It’s actually something fun and unique for 2020. I’m not going to spoil the gameplay or nitpick the game mechanics, which I could do but that’s not really what my point is. The game is good enough that if this is your thing and you were to pick it up, you’d get your money out of it. If the aesthetic and the RTS genre is your thing you should snag it and enjoy the fact it’s something different. If you want…

Let’s Talk GameStop’s Impending Doom

January 18, 2020 Editorials

GameStop is the last vestige of brick and mortar electronic gaming stores. It is a business of acquisitions, claiming most other large competitors and merging them into the fold and is on every YouTube and blog’s “Top 10 Companies Soon to Pull a Blockbuster” for the last six months to a year or so. Are they right? Is GameStop about to go under? I honestly am not some kind of market wizard, I can’t say if their current plans will save them or not, but we can talk about what’s gotten them to this point, in context of video game sales (not the whole who bought who what when and where, lots of that is already out there). So this chart pretty much tells a very, very interesting story. The company went public in 2002 at around $10 USD a share. In 2002, we were still in the world of…

Virtual Reality in 2020 Report

January 14, 2020 Editorials

Modern day VR started back in 2013 with the Oculus Dev Kit 1 (Oculus DK1), which was then updated and re-released in 2014 to backers as the DK2. In 2014 the retail Oculus was released and the Vive and the “Windows Mixed Reality” headsets soon followed. Originally, headsets were plagued by slow refresh screens or a myriad of issues that caused motion sickness in games and skeptical developers who didn’t want to develop for a platform that required $399 or more for a user to play, plus have a beefy PC gaming rig on top of that. So where are we in 2020? Well, in sort of an interesting and weird spot. VR is more alive than ever before, with VR experiences in real life being the “new arcades” and consumer VR headsets reaching mass adoption, but it’s not exactly a success down the line. Consumer VR Headsets (Oculus &…

Ugh, End of Year / Decade Lists – Why We Aren’t Doing an End of the Year / Decade Post

December 30, 2019 Editorials

Game Truth isn’t going to do an end of the year list or end of decade list because they’re just bad and boring. Game of the Year I guess is an alright concept, but only if there is some kind of panel that’s voting on it and it’s not just a single writers trite opinion or based off of some kind data-set pulled off of Steam and even then I honestly don’t care. You shouldn’t care either. Game of the Year is the game you most enjoyed, not some poll or some writer telling you what it is. Likewise, these lists come year after year and are as infectious as those “Top 30 Things You Didn’t Know You Couldn’t Live Without” which are long lists of Amazon referral links designed to get you to buy something, no matter what and then cash in on your other purchases as well. So…

Don’t Die, Minerva! Early Access Coming December 5, 2019

November 26, 2019 News

Don’t Die, Minerva! (Steam / Xbox) has an early access release date: December 5, 2019. This is really cool for a myriad of reasons, the first being that it’s being developed and published by Xaviant, a gaming studio in Dawsonville, GA a short hop / skip / jump (and 3 exits) away from Dot Matrix Media. They’re known for the The Culling series, if you’ve ever heard of it and for being one of the few studios here in Georgia. The other cool thing about the game is that it’s a rouge-lite that takes Luigi’s Mansion and throws it into the spooky adventure horror genre that it belongs. You’ve got procedural generated dungeons, loot and enemies along with difficulty ranging from “I just want to see the pretty graphics and story” to “typical Dark Souls comment.” I mean, Dark Souls is pretty much a difficulty slider setting at this point.…

Luigi’s Mansion 3 is the Perfect Casual “Horror” Game

November 18, 2019 Editorials

I love watching horror games on YouTube, at least ones that don’t rely only on jump scares. Games like Baldi’s Basics, Outlast, Resident Evil 5, etc. are all fun haunts to watch someone else deal with the tension of being chased. Being chased is the primary theme of most horror games. There is a monster, somewhere hidden within the game world and he’s coming for you. Seriously, look at the below: Most horror games involve fear being from the unknown element of a stalker. Something is out there and you could run into it at any given point. Fear is the motivator but Luigi’s mansion is different. It’s creepy and spooky and scary and it has jump scares, plenty of them, but it doesn’t use time as a motivator. It doesn’t make you have to run and hide and constantly test different locations for you to hide in order for…

Games Journalism is Evolving Back to the Community

October 31, 2019 Editorials

This is a difficult topic for me because I believe that games journalism is just such a weird thing to begin with. I’ve been writing in this industry now for over 15 years professionally, as in paid to write and it’s still hard for me to even consider myself a journalist. I’ve sourced stories, been featured on TV shows as someone who predicted World of Warcraft going free-to-play and in general have spent most of my time honestly just writing guides and covering games I liked. Here’s the thing, people look at the folks writing about games who do present themselves as journalists and pass some interesting judgements good and bad about their content, but these days it’s actually really hard as a text based site to matter to the marketing companies that are hired by developers and publishers unless you’re the mainstream media. It started back when video was…

How to Play Outer Worlds for $1 and Not Use the Epic Store

October 26, 2019 Guides

If you want to play Outer Worlds, the new Fallout 3/4-like game by Obsidian, you have a few options. It’s on the PS4, Xbox and on PC via the Epic Games Store. However, instead of buying it full price, you can actually play it (at least for the first month for $1) and not even have to have the Epic Store installed. This “trick” isn’t a trick at all and is an intended play path by the developers. You can get the trial for Xbox Game Pass and install the PC version off of Microsoft’s website (no links – trust no links to it, go to Microsoft yourself to avoid malware). In the games included with the game pass is not only Outer Worlds but other awesome titles like the Gears of War series and Metro. That’s it, all there is to it. Now, you can also buy the game…