A star is born Let’s be honest, Dogmeat is not a terribly efficient companion. He’s kind of a bullet sponge, he certainly distracts the enemy, but beyond being a loud melee unit, albeit a charming one, he simply doesn’t do enough to make keeping him as your companion a worthwhile option. I’ll admit that I…
Month: September 2016
Playing different genres: is it worth it?
Are genres an evolution of gameplay or just different types? The mobile market has come a long way from the tap intensive, twitch gameplay it started with. With the inclusion of persistent worlds within mobile games the player can play for bits at a time while the game world continues to develop in the background. However,…
Available Space: why physical formats are still relevant
In a conversation I had with my girlfriend’s mother and her friend I was asked about how games were distributed. They didn’t have people in their lives who were up to date with video gaming thus their question, in earnest, was about whether or not they were still cartridges, or CDs, or within the console…
TerraGenesis: transforming failure into success
Building a world or just passing through? The immersiveness of TerraGenesis comes from the striking change that can be observed from transforming a world through gameplay. The first moment you notice clouds after building an atmosphere for an entire day in real time. Spotting water on the planet’s surface, carving out continents after a week of…
Reduction: how mobile can bridge the gap between casual and hardcore
A casual beginning At the advent of mobile games, the development community focused on simple games to entertain casual players interested in a momentary diversion. Marketed and developed as a casual form of video games; the expectation of mobile games was that they would be entertaining but not immersive. (Snake, on the Nokia 5110, featured simple graphics…
Bowmasters: cartoonish satire and gratuitous violence
Blood and gore have long been a point of contention in games; the use for violence is one thing, since violence and conflict often go hand in hand. However, gore is something that has often been omitted from games and other media even in cases where it would be expected; shootouts, swordfights, etc, in an…
Falling Sand: cause and effect toys
Video games have grown and evolved over time to include certain core features; the most recent to be seen as a requirement for a successful game is a compelling narrative. Almost all games in some form or another have implemented narrative elements; even games as simple in concept as Angry Birds feature heavily developed stories for the player to…
Turtling: the fearful, the arrogant, and the lucky
Within RTS games there is a strategy known as turtling; in which the player builds a formidable base and waits for their opponent’s assault. The idea is that when the player has survived the onslaught of their opponent’s aggression the player can then easily counter attack while their enemy is busy rebuilding their army. However,…
League of War: Mercenaries: squad building done right
League of War: Mercenaries, developed by MunkyFun Inc., lured me in with it’s 3D models and 3D combat space, I saw tanks, infantrymen, and helicopters all fighting on a battlefield together. It actually looked like the combat so many other games such as Mobile Strike promise in their ads but fail to deliver in gameplay. The…
Skating just cause: the pitfalls of demos
Demos came into fashion at the end of the rental era for video games; where players would primarily figure out if they liked a game by going to their local video store and renting the game for a week. Game companies began putting out demo discs within magazines to let players get a taste of…
Gravity 2.0: playing with orbits and Kepler’s Laws
Physics games often focus on the exaggeration of effects to make the visual appearance of force and motion a gratifying experience. Yet few games truly illustrate the fundamentals of the system they are representing. Gravity 2.0 is an unassuming title, with simple graphics and interface, however its design is where it shines. It distills the process of measuring…
Mobile Strike: complexity vs depth
Mobile Strike touts “Nonstop Action’, yet the pace of the game is more of a soldier’s low crawl than that of the jets flying overhead in its commercials. It gets bogged down with the builder elements and sits the player down in front of resource spreadsheets, quest logs, and timers instead of battlefields. (Mobile Strike ad,…
Play Professor 