Tag

Steam

Browsing

Huntdown is the latest cyberpunk themed 2d side scroller to roll out and it’s absolutely gorgeous. It’s tough and gorgeous and just beautiful, but it can be a bit brutal at times. So here is some tips on surviving the world of Huntdown and keeping your bounty hunter alive. With Huntdown on Steam let’s look at some ways to survive better and make it through this awesome side scrolling masterpiece. Think Contra The game plays in the style of Contra, so if you channel Contra then you should be able to get through a lot of the game pretty well. For instance, move slowly through the city and take on only as many enemies are you’re prepared too. One of the fun things but oft mistakes of playing Contra the first time is running forward full speed. You have to learn the pattern of where the enemies are and how…

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…

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 &…

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! (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.…

The Movies, a business simulator, launched in November 8, 2005 and is still, today, played by an ongoing community who loves not only the fun of building your own movie studio but also the fun things you can do with the movie creation tools. YouTubers Life OMG! is, in so many ways, a modern streamlined version of The Movies, just without the animated movies built in. YouTubers Life takes you into the life of a burgeoning online video star who starts their career with a potato for a PC, mic, webcam and general setup while living with their parents and follows their career house to house as they expand their video making empire. Each video you produce allows you to choose cards to decide outcomes that impact the videos script, acting, editing and sound level. You then go in and edit the video, working in post-production to match scenes together…

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…

Disco Elysium is a RPG with no combat. It’s like Fallout I & 2 or Arcanum but without combat. Imagine if you did all of the town exploration in Arcanum with a Phoenix Wright style exploration mechanic. You basically click on things, talk to folks and explore a world while customizing your character for how you want him to be. One of the biggest helps in understanding the game is that choices seriously matter. There are choices that will open or close various side quests and decisions have permanence. The game tracks most actions in the game and NPCs will treat you based on your current state. Understanding the Writing One of the things about Disco Elysium is that it’s not just written in a sort of artistic way. It’s written from the point of view and perspective of an amnesiac alcoholic cop on a planet that isn’t Earth. Many…