Viewing entries tagged
controls
When I was younger, I had dreams of writing and drawing my own comic book (or 'graphic novel' if you will), but it always seemed like more work than I was willing to put in. I wasn't the fastest artist in the land and producing that much art regularly and quickly enough to keep the whole thing moving was a bit overwhelming. Although, I'm not one to be put off so easily, and I tried out a few alternate methods, which came with their own levels of success and complication.
Oh how I love a good twin-stick shooter. The simplicity of the mechanics, the awe of the aesthetics, and the challenge of the moment-to-moment gameplay. All of these things make up one of the purest and most satisfying gaming experiences you can get, so why do people keep insisting on adding lore into the mix?!
It's very rare that I get to spend any amount of time with a game that focuses primarily on couch multiplayer. You might already know that I don't spend a lot of time playing multiplayer games in general, let alone local multiplayer. So I'm pretty stoked to be able to talk about Starwhal at all, let alone actually having played it.
Sometimes I wonder if a good game is actually not that good, but I have some irrational interest in one tiny element that makes it worth playing. Other times I wonder if I dislike a game that's actually brilliant, but there's one key part that ruins it completely. All of me knows that both of these things are true, so let's try not to think too hard about it.
I always think it must be difficult to carve out a visual identity for a game development studio, as it kind of puts the cart before the horse in a lot of ways. After all not every game will fit into the same style guide, unless their scope remains limited as well. Is it worth giving up a little bit of depth to retain a strong identity? I'm still not sold either way.
It never ceases to amaze me that mobile gaming is often more popular than any other platform these days. I guess I might just be behind the times, but using my phone for playing games always seemed a bit pointless. The combination between awful touch controls and exploitative micro-transaction models has kept me far from mobile games for a long time.
These days it seems like there's another game being re-released or remastered every second. It seems like publishers have decided that cashing in on old classics is a much better idea than making something new and interesting. Unsurprisingly, I'm often sceptical when I see an acclaimed title getting the re-release treatment, and Shadow Of The Colossus (2018) was no different.
After the success of Grand Theft Auto V and the previous Red Dead Redemption game, the avalanche of Red Dead Redemption 2 hype was not unexpected. It seems like whenever Rockstar get around to releasing another game, there's reason to be excited. Few publishers manage to carry that kind of reputation, but is the weight of previous success beginning to weigh them down.
Across all forms of media, a reboot can be a risky undertaking. The good ones revitalise an idea and bring it up to date with modern techniques and technologies. While the bad ones leave fans of the original betrayed and wronged for having their beloved art bastardised into something else. Unfortunately it seems like a lot of reboots fall into the bad category, but I actually enjoy rebooted video games for a number of key reasons.
If you haven't had the pleasure of seeing or playing Divekick, then go get it straight away. This is the kind of game that everyone needs to have in their life. It's the perfect mix of competition and fun, which in turn equals entertainment for all. Divekick is basically faultless.
Straight up, I've never played the first Azkend and I only gave this one a go because it was a Playstation Plus game at some point. It's easy to try something that just shows up in your library unexpectedly, but I like this match-three adventure enough to write something about it.
In the last decade we've seen a lot of indie darlings make a splash for being small little creative games that big studios wouldn't even bother thinking about. It's been an awesome period in gaming, as we've seen smaller games have a bit of a boom, which has introduced some truly unique experiences, and even defied traditional genre definitions. At the same time though, there's been a flood of games that piece together seemingly random elements to form another eye-rolling attempt at grabbing the hype for a few minutes of success.
As time goes on, the difference between PC and console hardware has grown smaller and smaller. While technologies continue to improve and iterate, they lower in cost and general accessibility. I think it's fair to say that even though PC technologies will always surpass the locked-down console capabilities, it's becoming much more difficult to find a noticeable difference in the quality of games made for those systems.
