Author: Aleksi Vesanen
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Hardware Special: Namco neGcon VS Microsoft Wireless Speed Wheel
Something old, something new: Two unusual racing controllers go head-to-head!
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A Love Letter to Liberty City’s Portland
If the true protagonist of an open-world game is its setting, then Portland is GTA III’s crown jewel.
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Shantae: Half-Genie Hero
Half-Genie Hero is a gorgeous throwback to the glory days of the Super Nintendo, but Super Metroid it ain’t.
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Is Every Indie Game Independent? Towards the Concept of Independent Game
Exploring the “indie” aesthetic, and what it means to be an independent developer.
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The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land
Forgettable, mindless base-building and turn-based combat.
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Enemy Zero
Forget Dark Souls and Resident Evil: Enemy Zero is the most terrifyingly difficult horror game you will ever play.
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DIEGESIS OR BUST – The Joy of HUDless Gaming
Convenience VS. Diegesis: The battle for immersion, and how playing with the map off makes Assassin’s Creed that much more fun.
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Final Symphony II: Fantastical Philharmonies
A nostalgic walk down memory lane through some cherished adventures… and also Final Fantasy XIII.
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Stayed In Japan: Nintendo Puzzle Collection (ニンテンドーパズルコレクション)
Puzzle fiends, prepare to lose entire weeks of your life to swapping blocks, dropping pills, and cookies. #ProYoCo
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Inspecting Video Game Historiography Through Critical Lens: Etymology of the First-Person Shooter Genre
Charting the etymology of “3D virtual-reality rat’s-eye-view adventures” – or First Person Shooters, as we call them now. #FPS
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SUPERHOT: Move like they do.
SUPERHOT is quality over quantity in every sense of the term.
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One Night Ultimate Werewolf: Party Sleuth
Easy to learn and quick to play, no two sessions of One Night Ultimate Werewolf are ever the same.
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Devil Daggers: Unrelenting
Devil Daggers‘ brilliance is undeniable, but not everyone is going to “get” it. Devil Daggers is simple to explain, but maddening to play: You have an infinite supply of daggers that you can either shoot in a rapid-fire stream or in concentrated blasts, and a never-ending swarm of demons to shoot down. Some of them…
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Cues and insinuations: Indicating affordances of non-player character using visual indicators
How can you tell if an NPC is a guard, a shopkeeper, or just cannon fodder based on how they look? #affordance Author: Henrik Warpefelt, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University Published in: Proceedings of the 2015 DiGRA International Conference, Vol.12 May 2015. Link: http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/cues-and-insinuations-indicating-affordances-of-non-player-character-using-visual-indicators/ Non-player characters (or NPCs for short) are one…
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DOOM – Dead Simple
The early 1990s were truly a great time for challenging, mentally stimulating games. The adventure gaming genre was hitting its peak with Monkey Island and Gabriel Knight, providing engaging and humorous stories with tricky lateral thinking puzzles. Strategy games like UFO: Enemy Unknown asked players to make short-term choices with long-term consequences. Ultima Underworld demanded…
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Exploring Playful Experiences In Social Games
The key elements of Facebook games are Challenge, Completion and Competition #social #casual In spite of the popularity of social games on platforms like Facebook, not a lot of quantitative research has been done on the kinds of play experiences that they specifically offer to players compared to other genres. This study, conducted by University…
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Card Hunter: Roll For Initiative
If you miss playing tabletop roleplaying games with your friends and like fine-tuning your decks, then Card Hunter might just scratch that itch.
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Revisiting GoldenEye: A retrospective
To this day, GoldenEye continues to be a contentious game in many respects: As one of the first major console-exclusive FPS games, it codified many design elements that would define the console FPS, from slower-paced gameplay to generous auto-aiming. However, those very same qualities that made GoldenEye stand out are what earns it scorn from…
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Tearaway Unfolded: Rip In Peace
Tearaway Unfolded is a game I really wanted to like, but sadly that is not the case. Tearaway is a simple 3D platformer set in a papercraft world, where you manipulate the environment yourself alongside exploring it. The charming and cute papercraft style finds a happy medium between high visual fidelity and stylized art direction,…
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No Mastery Without Mystery: Dark Souls and the Ludic Sublime
Dark Souls succeeds partly on imagination: Not because of what it tells the player, but by what it chooses not to. #Kant In this text, Daniel Vella digs into Dark Souls as an example of games that tickle your imagination by refusing to tell you the whole story. Our understanding of the world around us is guided…