by Chezni Heheh. Ahaha… Aheheheh…. Ahahahah…. AHAHAH…. AHAHHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHA–
Oh we’ve got a winner here friends. A powerful winner. Something so strong that Topware Interactive made sure to protect it not only with a CD key, but with a limited activation via internet, or phone (international calls only please, for your convenience of course).
by LepcisMagna 
I think this is the second game I’m going to put into Tier Four (Plankton doesn’t count – it was less of a game than Mountain). Part of this decision is that it was part of a 7-day challenge to make an FPS – and from that perspective it is an interesting exploration of some FPS concepts – but nobody should actually spend money on this.
by Chezni
Ever wanted to be a girl in PJ’s who has a talking dog, sarcastic cat and fights dragons made out of pirate ship flags in her dreams? Ah, then you too must know about…
Let’s get the dirty out of the way first. Sweet Lilly Dreams is a an RPG Maker game. SLD has custom-made art that sometimes looks like it came out of someone’s colored pencil art book. Yes it has… a talking dog with a flower and sends out red flags for furry po–…. –ocket… book. Sketches. After you accept all these things, it’s not too bad.
by Chezni
So here’s the funny part. I have this game installed. I have a computer that can run it just fine. I have my controller plugged in. I even know how to deal with Uplay’s/Ubisoft’s bullcrap in order to get the game to run. The thing is? I can’t stomach the thought of running this executable. It literally makes me sick when I think about it. I’ve played this game. I’ve played this game 3 damn times already. How do I know that? 5 years ago, I bought this game to play with my wife. She was excited that the multiplayer allowed you to play as a female assassin. So for two hours, we ran, jumped and stabbed our way through several multiplayer games until we got bored and never turned on the game again since… 07/13/2012 apparently.
The novelty of being a female assassin quickly wore off for my wife and she lost interest. “Hey, it’s cool that they’re letting be a female assassin, but we’re just kind of doing the same thing over and over.” Similarly, from the moment I turned on Revelations and we began to play (at this point in my life, having only played the original Assassin’s Creed) I thought to myself, “Hey, it’s cool that the controls and gameplay are so similar to the original that I know exactly how to do everything.” Then I stopped and in a dead-pan mental voice said, “Oh my word. The controls and gameplay are so similar to the original that I know exactly how to do everything.”
by Chezni
Okay, so I’m going to cheat on this one a bit. To start off, Lepcis sort of already nailed this one in a fantastic article about the first BIT.TRIP runner game found here. Secondly, I’ve watched my wife play and beat BIT.TRIP Presents… Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien (hereon referred to in this article as BT2 because that title is ridiculously long even in acronym form). Add to this that I myself have beaten the original BT, I feel fairly justified in just giving this a review after a meager 3 minutes of play.
Continue reading “BIT.TRIP Presents… Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien”
by Chezni
Some days I wonder if RPGs are dead. Sometimes I worry the future of RPGs are relegated to only ones with the words “Bioware” appearing on the screen as I turn them on. Apparently I just need to try more games, because either I’m an idiot, or the Divinity series is freaking awesome.
by LepcisMagna 
Made by the same people as RymdResa, imprint-X is a puzzle game. When they said this was a game about pushing 700 buttons, I thought they were being whimsical. But no. After a very long cutscene intro about aliens destroying an asteroid base and enslaving the population or something (which sounds way cooler than it was), you are asked to push buttons in a specific order. The camera moves about even though the entire puzzle fits in the screen, and the girl/android in the bottom right makes squeaking noises every time you push a button – which isn’t annoying at all. Tier Three.
by LepcisMagna 
RymdResa is a game about floating in space. That space is mostly empty. I’ve been trying to come up with a blanket term for games that try this – like Sunless Sea, Kentucky Route 0, or Voyageur, and to an extent FTL. These are games where mechanics are usually simple but interact well, the focus is on the exploration of an other-worldly place, there’s typically a lot more text or audio clips than NPCs, and the music (if it exists) is solidly in the “ambient” category. I’ve settled on the term “sublime-like”, but it doesn’t quite have the ring to it that I’d like. In any event, being a sublime-like is a tough mood to pull off. RymdResa tries, but doesn’t quite make it, I think.
At first, RymdResa had potential. You float through mostly empty space looking for a new home – avoiding asteroids and suns. You can explore planets and locations you come across for a chance at resources. This is a solid start, but there just isn’t enough variety in the random generation to make things interesting. Worse, when you die, it’s usually out of your control: when an asteroid comes flying at you ten times faster than you could ever hope to fly, there’s little you can do. What really rubbed me the wrong way was the lack of a real sense of space. Asteroids with WWII-era planes ten times larger than you embedded in them float by right after you flew over a galaxy only twenty times larger than you. But worst of all is that there are immovable walls in space – an unforgivable sin in a space game.
by Chezni
I’ve been looking forward to this one. In circles of fans of Deus Ex, E.Y.E. and similar titles I’ve always heard whispers of a game called…
Daikatana is another fast-paced FPS wrought in what some might consider the golden age of FPS’s. Quake, Unreal, Goldeneye, Heretic, Hexen, DOOM, Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior–it was a time of exciting level design, frantic gunfights and weapons that ranged from realistic to ridiculous. Daikatana fits right in with this and potentially on a more brutal level. Daikatana is brutal. Expecting it to be about on par difficulty-wise with the aforementioned FPS’s, (and having beaten most of the aforementioned FPS’s) I didn’t anticipate much resistance from the game. I was wrong. After dying a few times on the second section of level 1, I decided I should probably start trying. So I did. And I kept dying. So I decided to try harder. I still kept dying. I decided to give the game my full attention, using every piece of information available to me in order to achieve success. I did not beat level 1.
by Chezni Maxis/Fraxis… is there nothing you won’t simulate? Are you not even limited by…
Okay, Civilization/Alpha Centauri games notwithstanding, Sid Meier’s other titles have been pretty… lackluster. True you could spend your day running over cows in Sim Farm, but Ace Patrol was overtly simplistic and strategically unfulfilling, Railroads! was a lesson in making a completely unbearable concept even more unbearable, and Colonization was training on how to be the world’s biggest racist prick. Without surprise, I had very little confidence going into Pirates!.