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[img width=700 height=393]http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/702856771735716697/15FD9B6CA58579F27D5266A59BE33230FC8A8D65/[/img]
Last Summer I published an article here that chronicled the current state of sports games available on PC. I decided to revisit this concept for 2015 because there's actually been some interesting developments since last year. So I don't know... maybe this will be an annual thing? So grab your favorite game-time snacks and big foam finger and let's explore the world of PC sports games in 2015 together after the break! (Spoiler: Still no new Madden game.)
Continue reading The State Of PC Sports Games, 2015
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Posted on Jun 14th 2015 at 12:00:00 PM by ( noiseredux) Posted under PC |
[img width=603 height=517]http://www.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2014-10-23-image-21.jpg[/img]
Gamers who grew up with consoles have been lucky over the years as far as nostalgia goes. In the last decade or two, we've seen a rise in and have been stuffed-to-the-gills with compilations of old console games. We've seen celebrations of the Atari 2600 and it's been shouted out loud that "Intellivision Lives!" We've gotten collections of Genesis carts and plenty of various arcade era releases.
But what if you are nostalgic for early PC gaming? Certainly there's plenty out there to explore. Services like GOG and DotEmu do a great job of bringing old games to a newer generation of gamers. And heck, if you know your way around DOSBox or Windows compatability settings, there's usually very little stopping you from finding old CD-ROMs or even 3.5" floppy discs of your favorites titles of yesteryear. Yet having said all that, it's nice to see a publisher throwing a bunch of their classics together and offering them up in a nice bundle. And that's just what the 3D Realms Anthology is.
Continue reading Review: 3D Realms Anthology
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Posted on May 25th 2015 at 04:00:00 AM by ( noiseredux) Posted under PC |
[img width=700 height=393]http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/535144889617156435/6AEC91D407BF050699415B6F799569E27BE987DE/[/img]
Toren is a game I've been looking forward to for quite some time. We might as well get the Ico comparisons out of the way now, since Team Ico's influence on this game is a big part of why I was anticipating it so much. In tone, story (or lack thereof) and setting, the likeness to Ico is undeniable. But thankfully, Toren never feels like a rip-off, nor does it try too hard to be like a Team Ico title. The developer Swordtales has done a commendable job in creating a unique experience here. But does it succeed at being an enjoyable game? Well, yes and no.
Continue reading Review: Toren
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Posted on May 7th 2015 at 04:00:00 AM by ( noiseredux) Posted under PC |
[img width=700 height=393]http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/35243245659977860/064E44ADC899EFCCA30A8752A93CBA90C671CE98/[/img]
We PC gamers had to wait a long time for Grand Theft Auto V to come to our platform of choice, but it became immediately clear that it was worth the wait. I'm not going to bore you with all the additions made to this version, as it's been well-documented in every review out there. In fact, I'm not even going to review the game. It doesn't need that from me. Neither does Rockstar. Instead I want to talk about the beauty of games about nothing.
Now don't get the wrong impression here. GTA V is about something in the sense that it has a story. Actually it has a whole lot of story. But as good (or bad) as that story may be, this is a game that is justifiably celebrated just as much by everything you can do, even if you ignore the story. This is game that you can spend hundreds of hours on without actually playing the game itself. If you want to play the campaign, it's there for you. If you want to ignore it and just do 'nothing,' that can be an even more satisfying experience.
Continue reading Grand Theft Auto V And Games About Nothing
[img width=700 height=393]http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/534015537654975671/1ACE0FAC81ECD88711EA4728C6BE9D06F4F66EE9/[/img]
Dead Or Alive has long been my favorite 3-D fighting game series. While subsequent sequels constantly improved, for years the second game remained my favorite. That was until Dead Or Alive 5 was released and completely blew me away. It looked gorgeous, played fluidly, had an impressively huge roster and implemented a wonderfully ridiculous Story Mode that delivered so much fun and fan service for long time players. Yes, what made Dead Or Alive 5 so perfect to me was that it basically rendered its predecessors obsolete. Sure, I still loved Dead Or Alive II; I just couldn't think of any real reason to play it over this one.
Continue reading Review: Dead Or Alive 5: Last Round
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Posted on Apr 8th 2015 at 01:01:35 PM by ( noiseredux) Posted under PC |
[img width=700 height=393]http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/534014905947022758/8CAAA26409A8A3F24CC33C6B67DB12F9947EA943/[/img]
The first quarter of 2015 has been relatively quiet for PC gamers like me. I say relatively quiet because this is PC gaming, and as we speak another several thousand or so games are probably arriving on Steam, Desura, Newgrounds and so on. However, it felt like a slow start to me because there have been no really "big" releases that I had been looking forward to coming out yet. For instance, Grand Theft Auto V saw two delays in its release date on PC this year. As a result, most of the new releases that I've been playing have been smaller, indie titles and re-releases of old games. That's all well and good, but to kill time until the next big time-suck comes out, I started going through my own library of stuff I had yet to even install. And that's how I accidentally fell in love with Dragon Age.
Continue reading Finally Installed: Dragon Age Origins
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Posted on Mar 23rd 2015 at 04:00:00 AM by ( noiseredux) Posted under PC |
[img width=600 height=375]http://nomadgames.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Dwarf_At_Hidden_Valley.jpg[/img]
In the past year I've put a lot of time and money into upgrading my PC so that it can play the newest "hotness." I've upgraded my motherboard and CPU to make overclocking available. I've upgraded my GPU so that the latest, graphically intensive games are no sweat. I've upgraded my RAM and my SSD so that everything moves along quicker. And yet, the game I've spent the most time with in 2015 so far is a digital remake of a board game. In fact, while recently going through my Steam wishlist, I realized that the game I was most excited about was actually an expansion to Talisman: Digital Edition. Sure, bigger titles have been released like Evolve and Elder Scrolls Online, but I really just wanted to add another little piece of the board to Talisman.
Continue reading Talisman And The Art Of Digital Board Games
[img width=700 height=393]http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/532885921340280539/39D1D4CD07FC269A8C3A849CA8F8D58847908F49/[/img]
Fahrenheit (or Indigo Prophecy as we had always known it here in the States) was the second game released by developer Quantic Dream, all the way back in 2005. Alright, so that really wasn't all that long ago. Perhaps it seems odd to 'remaster' a ten year old game, but for this game, I think there's some justification. While the visuals were already great, Indigo Prophecy has had a history of censorship outside of Europe as well as a clumsily handled PC port if you wanted to play with a controller (which was the control type that the game really seemed designed for). So on its ten year anniversary, let's take a look at this cult classic. But be forewarned, it's pretty tough to talk about a game like Indigo Prophecy without some spoilers and potentially NSFW discussion thrown in (though both are avoided for the purposes of this article).
Continue reading Review: Fahrenheit Indigo Prophecy Remastered
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Posted on Feb 7th 2015 at 05:00:00 AM by ( noiseredux) Posted under PC |
[img width=460 height=215]http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/314150/header.jpg?t=1421341290[/img]
Nostalgia can be cruel. We've all been there. You know that game that you swear you loved back in the day? And then you play it years later and almost wish it had just remained a quaint memory that you used to have. That's a little bit how I feel right now about the Double Dragon Trilogy, the new PC re-release of the first three arcade games. But to be fair, these aren't awful games. Well, at least two of them aren't. So let's take a closer look.
Continue reading Review: Double Dragon Trilogy
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Posted on Jan 25th 2015 at 05:00:00 AM by ( noiseredux) Posted under PC |
[img width=552 height=367]http://www.troll.me/images/first-world-problems-ii/steam-wishlist-sale.jpg[/img]
While 2014 was a great year for new games, it was also a great year for old games. As a PC gamer it's been great seeing all the retro love making its way onto my platform of choice recently. In fact, we've seen so many games of yesteryear re-emerge on Steam, GOG and the likes, that it's almost been tough to keep track of them all. But as much as I've made the conversion over to pretty exclusively gaming on PC, there's still plenty of console games out there that never made it to PC. I could easily list hundreds of games I'd love to see brought over to PC. Heck, my secret fantasy is that Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft would all take a cue from Sega and just become software developers so that all games were on the same platform. But that sort of wishful thinking is borderline fan-fiction, so instead I'd like talk about console games that I'd like to see ported to PC because these games would specifically benefit from the platform itself.
Read on for an utterly biased wish list for 2015...
Continue reading PC Gaming Wish List, 2015
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Posted on Jan 3rd 2015 at 05:19:25 AM by ( noiseredux) Posted under PC |
[img width=700 height=393]http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/81379041814729752/12BC476ACA162A61A0ED8B6E6E23BDFE3A4F9A61/[/img]
Whenever I compile a year-end list like this one, I feel the need to run with the same sort of disclosure. That is to say that really these aren't the games that I'm announcing as being "The Best" of the year, but rather the games that I enjoyed the most. There may be games on this list that I think are technically worse than games I left off of here. And though I do try to play every game that truly interests me each year, it's hard to keep up. Not to mention, there are the ones that slip through your fingers. There's always a chance that come January, I'll discover a game released the previous year that I end up loving, though I had no idea it would interest me at all. At the end of the day, I've got to make this my honest list of what I really had the most fun playing this year. So here we go...
(WARNING: Possible spoilers ahead!)
Continue reading noiseredux's Top 10 Games of 2014
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The Wolf Among Us
Telltale Games, 2014
I've been a fan of Telltale's adventure games for a while now. In a sense, their adventure games not only reinvigorated the genre - they redefined it. You could almost start talking about adventure games in a Pre- and Post-Telltale way. And though they had plenty of good and interesting games leading up to it, it's hard to not point at The Walking Dead as the moment where they fully nailed the formula. In The Walking Dead, the user interface was as equally as well-designed for a controller as it was a mouse. The story was strongly written with characters you could care about and who you felt like you got to know well. And most importantly, your decisions seemed to matter, and actually shaped the rest of the story going forward. This device seemed even more important when Season Two of The Walking Dead was released and you realized that many of your decisions and experiences carried over from the first game if you had a save installed.
The Walking Dead: Season Two and The Wolf Among Us finished up their episodic runs and saw retail releases as finished products around the same time this past year. And truth be told, I was far more interested in the former title. I couldn't help but want to see what happened next to Clem, and I figured that a game about a zombie apocalypse would interest me far more than one about fairytales. How wrong I was. [Disclaimer: It is nearly impossible to discuss a Telltale game without any sort of spoilers being involved. Though this review will stay clear of divulging anything that feels like it would truly 'spoil' the game, just mentioning characters, settings and the tiniest of plot points will indeed be spoilers to some. You've been warned!]
Continue reading Review: The Wolf Among Us
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Last year Nvidia released their first serious attempt at getting into the mobile gaming market. And though it's not gotten nearly the attention of the 3DS or even the Vita, the Shield Portable is actually a pretty amazing piece of tech. Although it received a revised model in the form of this year's Shield Tablet (which seems to be an iPad competitor), I actually think that those of you out there looking to spend the bulk of your time gaming on the go are going to be far more interested in the (cheaper) Shield Portable.
Continue reading Review: Nvidia Shield Portable
[img width=642 height=336]http://indie-love.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/IndieBox_Sticker-642x336.png[/img]
Digital distribution is a touchy subject, especially on a website that's home to so many collectors. But in fairness, downloads have been great for some of us. There's no denying the certain rush that comes from instant gratification. In fact, thanks to digital distribution, I've vastly cut down on my game purchases. The thought that a game is (generally) going to be available to purchase and play whenever I'm ready to play it seems to trump even the allure of stocking up during sales. And there's certainly no denying that this cheaper form of distribution means that many games by smaller developers are finding their way into the hands and hard drives of gamers that would be near impossible otherwise.
Continue reading The Secret Renaissance of PC Game Boxes
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Falling Skies: The Game
Little Orbit, 2014
I've just hit ten hours in a game that I can't really say anything positive about. It's an odd place to be. Everything that my rational brain tells me is that this game just isn't very good, and yet I can't seem to stop myself from continuing on. And no, masochism has nothing to do with it. I'm not forcing myself through something unenjoyable, quite the contrary. Instead, I'm having fun playing a bad game.
Continue reading Review: Falling Skies The Game
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