Posts By Charles Battersby

If you like video games and live theater, there's a festival of plays opening this July in New York where all of the shows are inspired by video games. Notable among them is That Cute Radioactive Couple which is written by Games Reviews writer Charles Battersby.

As a manly man, I like my games to be very manly. But every now and then I'll set aside my lumberjack simulators to play something on the girly side. Among the girliest of games was American McGee's Alice which came out as a PC exclusive over ten years ago. After a decade of fans demanding more, Electronic Arts finally relented and released the much-anticipated sequel. That was two years ago, when fan expectations were incredibly high, and the game released to ...

How can God be omnipotent and benevolent yet the world be filled with constant war and unending suffering? Perhaps there is a greater god out there who wants nothing more than to sit back and watch as humanity wages meaningless conflict just for the amusement of a callous divine being! That's basically the premise behind Skyward Collapse, a new turn-based strategy game from Arcen Games in which players control both sides in a battle where the hapless combatants ...

The Curse of Nordic Cove is an unabashed indie game. The graphics are primitive, the controls are frustrating, it is filled with “What the hell am I supposed to do NOW?” moments, and much of the time the damned game engine just plain doesn't work. The list of things wrong with this game is nigh-endless, but it still deserves a closer look because the development team was clearly dedicated to creating something new and different.

In 2004 Hugh Jackman made a movie called Van Helsing where he fights vampires and werewolves. There was a tie-in game based on it, but neither the game or the movie were worth remembering nine years later. The new indie game The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing has no official relation to that movie, but it does use the film’s clever idea of re-imagining the character of Van Helsing as a tough monster-hunter in a world overrun by gothic horrors. It ...

There’s a line of dialog in Metal Gear Solid where the character Otacon points out that the villainess Sniper Wolf likes dogs and he says that no one who likes dogs can be entirely evil. Sure, that might be Stokholm Syndrome, but it’s also another way of saying that

Grey-bearded old gamers love to spin tales of the glorious days back when playing a game meant running text adventures on a university mainframe. Good times indeed, grandpa, but there’s a slightly less-grizzled generation of gamers who are too young to remember sneaking in a game of Zork between computer science classes. This generation can still recall the many attempts to simulate computer adventure games, but without actually using a computer. These often ...

The first Zeno Clash game could be easily summed up as “A game where you get punched in the back of the head every ten seconds.” That’s both a literal description of the gameplay, and the effect of the visual design and story. It was a weird little indie game that focused on hand-to-hand combat from the first-person perspective, and put the Player inside a distorted fantasy world filled with bizarre creatures. People who loved their brief journey through the ...

Papo & Yo is a puzzler platformer, but only on the most superficial level. Players do push blocks around and jump over things, but Papo & Yo will also force players to wrestle with emotional issues like childhood abuse, alcoholism, and poverty in the Third World.

When Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance came out a few months ago it sparked a debate over quality versus quantity. It is a game that can be beaten in about seven hours, although players have plenty of incentive to replay the short experience over and over again. The first chunk of DLC for the 360 version of the game will ignite that debate all over again. Jetstream is short; one of the achievements is for beating it in under an hour. Unfortunately, few players ...