#thatsnotarealword #itsagamenotabook Old-school RPGs are coming back in a big way, thanks in part to the success of the games Project Eternity and Wasteland 2 on Kickstarter. But let’s not forget, even before Kickstarter exploded onto the gaming scene, there has always been a cadre of indie developers pumping out old-school RPGs for a small but loyal fan base. Basilisk [...]

Don’t Starve I’m pretty sure this is a completely new genre: Burtonesque-survival-rogue-like-like with anthropomorphic pigs, or BSRLLAP for short. It’s only a matter of time before the name catches on. But whatever you want to call it, Don’t Starve, is something new and horribly addictive to boot. The player takes control of a scientist, stuck in a strange wilderness. The [...]

Veteran developer Ken Levine is back… …with the long awaited follow up to 2007′s Bioshock. But how does Bioshock Infinite hold up compared to its critically acclaimed predecessor? The short answer is: pretty damn well. I can tell you straight away that if you are a fan of the original Bioshock, you should probably get this game. Bioshock Infinite retains [...]

Roguelikes! Now there’s a funny genre. It’s like playing a game that hates you. I’m not talking about playing a game that’s a little bit frustrating. No. Roguelikes really, actually hate you. It’s like you ran over their dog or something. At least that’s what it always used to be like. Things have changed over the last few years with [...]

Why am I reviewing a 14-year-old game you ask? Because it’s only just been released. Well… okay, System Shock 2 was released once before, 14 years ago. But the game swiftly went out of production when developers Look Glass went out of business in 2000. The rights to publish the game disappeared into a legal black hole and the game [...]

The last few years have seen the rise of a totally new type of computer game: games about music. The 2008 title Audiosurf built levels based on whatever piece of music you gave it and let you ‘play’ through your favourite songs. 2010′s Chime went in the opposite direction and generated music based on the player’s actions in the game. [...]

Are you in need of a cheap way of procrastinating? Want to play computer games without breaking the bank? Then I have good news. Those clever folks at gog.com have been re-releasing classic PC games, updated to run on modern computers, and selling them dirt cheap. Better still, these games are old enough that they should run on even the [...]

How can something so good be so bad?   Or, to put it another way: How can something so bad be so good? Few games have left me quite so conflicted as the latest instalment in the Far Cry series. First the good: Far Cry 3 pushes the series’ characteristic open level design and emergent gameplay further than ever before. [...]

There have been a slew of free-to-play shooters released over the last year: some of them good, some of them… less so. Thankfully, I can say with some certainty that Planetside 2 is an example of the former, despite a few teething problems. Planetside 2 has been described as an MMOFPS, or an FPS-MMO if that’s your thing. If you [...]

Every so often, a game will come along that makes me realise just how rigid the genre conventions in gaming have become. Not because the game in question conforms rigidly to genre conventions you understand, but rather because the game manages to be innovative in a such a simple and retrospectively obvious way that I’m left wondering why nobody had [...]