Real Life Isn’t That Great
The MechWarrior series, a video game spin-off of the popular table-top war game BattleTech, has been around for decades, and for the first time in 10 years, it is receiving a new title in the form of Piranha Game’s MechWarrior Online, essentially a remastered version of the last MW game, but this time modelled after the increasingly popular...
Sick Week
Having been sick for half a week now, I’ll probably still be sick by the time this gets published, thus making this Monday the worst I have had in a long time. I had a whole column typed out about all the many things I hate about The New Super Mario Bros 2, only to...
Moderate Your Games!
Back in the day, you needed some heavy duty software to play games online. And I don’t mean the sorts of flash games you find on your web browser- no, I am referring to the glorious Multi-User Dungeon, appropriately abbreviated MUD. For those of you unfamiliar with MUDs, they are a lot like old-school Dungeons & Dragons, in that...
8 Bits are Enough
By now, word has gone down the grapevine that Christopher Hartmann, head of 2K Games, thinks you can’t convey emotions unless you do so through photorealistic graphics. Of course most people know that this is completely absurd, but it does lend us an opportunity to look into the mind of a triple-A developer. For those not familiar...
Telling a Story with Cards
With my long holiday finally over, it’s time to get back to work in wonderful world of video games, and what better way to do so than completely side step the entire medium? This week, instead, I’ll be on about the popular card game Magic: The Gathering. One does not even need to play it...
Artist Interview: Orca Team
Orca Team is a small band from Oregon in the US; with a somewhat simplistic sounds to them, the trio writes light, nearly shoegazing tracks that are, at the very least, soothing to listen to. Last week, I had the pleasure of conducting a brief interview with the members Leif, Jessica, and Dwayne. So where...
Video Games as the Patchwork Art
Art, to me, is wonderful because it has no rules; when you start to add rules to art, I feel it cripples what you can do. -Jim Sterling I have spoken before of Bioware’s Mass Effect 1 & 2 in generally high esteem. In addition to having well balanced, evolving gameplay, it featured Bioware’s usual...
Dawn of the Digital Dinosaurs
The release of Bioware’s Sci-Fi RPG, Mass Effect Three, was met by the mainstream media with generally positive feedback. However, in addition to marking a milestone in Bioware’s history, it has become a popular icon of the dawning age of Computer-Centric Games. As anniversary upon anniversary rolls past the ever-popular PlayStation Three and X-Box Three-Sixty,...
The Universal Status of Online Games
I bought Blizzard Studio’s seemingly ancient title Starcraft about two years ago. The game itself was a major hit at the time and reshaped much of the way Real Time Strategy games are made even today. A multitude of professional tournaments have been held in East Asia and a three-part sequel began episodic release nearly a...
