I wanted to write a 2012 predictions piece about how uncertain I am about what gaming in 2012 will look like.  Unfortunately, I wasn't exactly sure how I wanted to format such an article.  By sheer coincidence, Tim Bray recently wrote a similar piece on his personal blog (albeit about topics much more serious than gaming).  I liked his approach so much that I had to unashamedly use it as a template for my own attempt.  Here then are my Bray inspired 2012 Gaming Uncertainties. Playstation Vita - Will the West embrace it as tepidly as they did the PSP?  And will it perform as well in Japan as everyone thinks (and hopes) it will? ...

Former VL writer and Powerhead Games designman Matt recently posted a question on Twitter, to which I responded as succinctly as a I could.  All told, it's an interesting topic, so I wanted to elaborate on it a bit more in a meatier blog post. Matt's initial question was the following: With so many new games being released every single day, what does that do to a player's appreciation for a single title? I'm not exactly sure what, if anything, he is getting at with the question, but I know what it means to me.  My response was this: honestly? It makes me appreciate that title more, if I've come to see most of those new games as "noise" ...

If there is one game I could say that everyone should play at least once, it would have to be Pac-Pix. It showcases the DS in a fantastic way, and it is a really fun game. But sadly, it sold very poorly, and got only average review scores. Basically, everyone put on their "stupid caps" and didn't pay any attention to the game. The major reason for this was the time it was released. It came out in the first six months of the DS's lifetime. Everyone was still waiting for that one game to justify their purchase for the system, and Pac-Pix didn't live up to that. If ...

Last time I did a year end retrospective, it posted two months after the end of the year.  I won't make the same mistake twice in a row.  Here now are the highs and lows from my 2011 in games.  Note, as always, that this is not a "best games of 2011" list, nor did all of the games actually come out this year.  These are simply the best (and "worst") titles I played within the last twelve months. The Tops Async Corp I actually posted my review of Async Corp. months after the initial draft was first written. and in the intervening months, I hadn't actually played the game that much.  When I sat down to ...

Async Corp is the latest, and probably last release from indie developer house Powerhead Games.  There are many reasons to mourn Powerhead's departure, the biggest of which is that Async Corp. is a marked improvement over Glow Artisan, its award winning predecessor.  While Glow was a wonderful concept, Async demonstrates some of the fundamental qualities of the all time classic puzzle games. In Async Corp, players are given two wells filled with squares of three different colors. Players select one square on each side to swap with each other in order to form a packet.  Packets are generated whenever some number of same-colored squares are arranged ...

What we have already played shapes our opinions of new games. To an SRPG fan, a game like Luminous Arc is old hat. Yet people new to the genre may be taken in by the musical score, voice acting, interesting story and quality breast-focused character art. Without knowing what has come before, the game seems competent enough and can provide some good strategic fun. The experienced SRPG fan likely sees Luminous Arc in a very different light. Its serviceable gameplay is often boring and it does very little to distinguish itself from older SRPGs beyond the innovative addition of painful load times between character turns. If you have ...