Genres

Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards is perhaps Sierra's most notorious adventure game. While it's not as crafted as their later work, creator Al Lowe managed to make it and its sequels cult classics in the eyes of the many that played the series of adventure titles released in the late 1980s and throughout the '90s.

I love when great games are born from mods. Take Day Z for example, originally a mod for Arma II and is now getting its own standalone title because of its popularity. Cry of Fear is a mod of Half Life 1 but, unlike Day Z, it has its own complete style. What I mean by that is Team Psykskallar, the developers of the game, only used the Half Life source engine and basic code to make Cry of Fear. Everything else in the game (textures, sounds, models) are all made exclusively by Team Psykskallar making the game a very unique experience. If no one told me, I would ...

It would be hard to argue that Magic: the Gathering was not the most popular CCG on the planet. It's been going strong for 20 years now because of the excellent tactical gameplay. While many card games end up being pay-to-win affairs, Magic is balanced in such a way that a good player will nearly always beat a player who has simply spent more money on good cards.

Never a fan of torturous hardcore platformers, Ravenous Games' League of Evil stole my heart in 2011 with its magnificent controls and pixelated graphic style. Not only did it kick off the well-loved (and hated) "retro" trend that captured the App Store for the next year or so, but it also showed that iOS was a serious gaming platform, one capable of precise controls and infectious, original ideas. After ditching the pixel art style and dialing down the difficulty with last year's League of Evil 2, Ravenous returns to the well once again with League of Evil ...

Poor design choices and a fundamentally broken experience leave a queasiness-inducing taste, making this a game should have been tested behind closed doors and never released to the public.

It seems like every game they release these days calls itself a 'survival' game. How many of them actually are? To me, if you are calling a game a survival game, that implies consequence. If you are playing a game and the only consequence of failing to survive is that you have to go back to the last checkpoint, then what you are playing is not a true survival game, in my opinion. I can say one thing with absolute certainty: Don't Starve is a survival game.

High Moon Studios, most notable for their Transformers titles, have taken it upon themselves to finally give Deadpool, Marvel's infamous antihero, a starring role in his very own video game. It's a game that certainly captures the redeeming (and some not so redeeming) qualities of the crazed mercenary, but suffers from design decisions that, while heavy on “brakkabrakka!”, are dated and lack style. Somebody Get This Guy a Straitjacket!

While I've thoroughly enjoyed playing Borderlands 2 like a fiend the last ten months, I never found myself to be fully satisfied with the game. Sure, it feels great to get all the uber-rare weapons and mods and take on all the raid bosses and whatnot - I'm talking about emotionally: if there's one way Borderlands 2 disappointed me, it was how it mostly wasted its opportunity at creating a resonant narrative: even the death of a beloved character didn't provide anything but the most particular story beats.

The Vita, when it was announced, was a machine for FPS games on the go. Although every game benefited from that second stick for camera control, being able to play a shooter without severely hampering the experience was a major plus. The first shooter to be released for the console, Resistance: Burning Skies, came out months after the Vita's launch. That was only mistake number one.

Knights of Pen and Paper is a game designed to take you back to a time when a group of likely slightly smelly individuals would sit around a table, getting engrossed in a story of their own creation. By lovingly combining table top RPG with the gameplay devices of late eighties/early nineties, Behold Studios have created a game that is both nostalgic and fresh, seriously fun and, at times, frustratingly true to its source.