Lots of good games in 2011, and this portion of the list has some of the best. Picking up where I left off on Monday, Bastion is a game I took no notice of during its previews during Pax East 2011 when I was there, despite my friends’ enthusiasm over the game. […]

Read the rest of The Games of 2011: Part II

The end of the year is approaching, and this year I’ve actually cataloged the names every game I’ve played. By my count, that’s 38 games. Rather than write up one mega-article like I did in 2010, I’m going to split this thing up into a dozen pieces and finish with an article about my favorite games […]

Read the rest of The Games of 2011: Part I

When the first Trine game came out, I waited forever. It was supposed to release in the Spring, and by the time it actually came out, it had passed. [insert haiku about days of summer passing] This time, the complete opposite is true: I just found out this morning that Trine 2 is going to […]

Read the rest of Release Date Ambush: Trine 2

Well, I’m finished with Bastion and I’m playing Skyrim – my Bosmer elf Leroy is already 11th level. But enough about Skyrim – I want to talk a bit about Bastion. I’ll say right out that I loved the game. Its music is one of the best parts of the game, but I also enjoyed […]

Read the rest of Bastion Postmortem

  Where to begin? Back in 2009 when I first heard of Batman: Arkham Asylum, I totally wrote it off, like a dumbass. I was at the time in talks with a videogame distributor because I was considering opening up a small-town video game retail store in Colorado, and I remember scoffing. I scoffed. Pfft. […]

Read the rest of Batman: Arkham City Postmortem

It wasn’t until I lost my internet connection for two weeks as part of the Connecticut Snow Apocalypse 2011 that I was really bothered by single-player games that function only when connected to the cloud. It started when I was playing Atom Zombie Smasher. It’s a steam game, so it was constantly trying to sync […]

Read the rest of No Offline Mode

This year, it’s not necessarily the sheer number of games that’s got me pinned down, it’s the fact that there are three big ones, and they’re all huge. I’m already 10% of the way into Batman: Arkham City, and I’m really enjoying it. They’ve integrated some of the fighting moves so well that I find […]

Read the rest of Autumn Gaming: The Heavyweights

I’m a fan of the Humble Indie bundles. I received the first two as a gift from a friend, and not long ago bought the third for myself. For those of you unfamiliar with the Humble Indie Bundle phenomenon, each is a grouping of games created by small independent developers and sold for a pay-what-you-want […]

Read the rest of On Humble Bundles and Smashing Zombies

Assassination. No, I’m not talking about the classic college campus game, I’m talking about assassination within the context of tabletop role-playing games. It’s really hard to do well. This is the subject of this month’s RPG Blog Carnival. There’s something fundemental about assassination that doesn’t gel with games. In reality, assassination is just about the […]

Read the rest of The Assassination Game

I’m a huge fan of games that have tactical combat. I’ve been playing these types of games since Ultima III, Ogre, and Pool of Radiance. But other than Dragon Age: Origins, I haven’t seen a game with good strategic combat in years. Dungeons & Dragons: Tactics was released four years ago, in 2007. But having […]

Read the rest of Dungeons and Dragons: Tactics