Reviews PC

Computer games are a conspiracy to make consumers buy new hardware.

Review – The Sims 3

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The Sims 3 was released to the masses today (note: it is no longer today) and being the good little Sims whore that I am, I went to my local pixel merchant and picked up my copy. I am slightly surprised with myself because I have played through both sequels and every lame Stuff and Expansion pack they have crammed down my eager gullet, yet here I am, all hot and bothered to play the third iteration of this game. Having not played the game a great deal since I picked it up a few hours ago, I can’t say this article is a complete review of The Sims 3, more so a summary of my initial impressions of the game.

Slow install times for computer games are the bane of my existence. →  Read the rest

Review – Rise of the Argonauts

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I’m not really sure what I think of Rise of the Argonauts. On one hand, the game suffers from some poor design choices that can really slow the pace to an insufferable crawl and frustrate the player immensely … so I wouldn’t recommend it. On the other hand, the exciting combat sequences, engrossing story, fine voice acting and art direction made the game quite enjoyable … so I’d totally recommend it.

On another hand, the developer calls this game an RPG, which it totally isn’t. Yeah, you can choose new abilities and change your outfits, but both aspects are so limited that you can’t really call it a full-blown RPG … so we’re back to not recommending it again (for RPG players). And on the final hand, that limiting of options actually works in the game’s favor, because coupling intricate inventory management with sometimes slow story progression would kill this thing outright … so is that a plus? →  Read the rest

Review – Dwarf Fortress

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Freedom, sweet freedom. Hours disappear, days melt away, weeks pass in a blur.

Having returned to a society that is busy imploding into an apocalyptic mess that any supervillain would be proud to have caused, I find myself spending my few sober hours preparing for the end of the world. And also playing video games.

I have been busy stockpiling bottlecaps, because we all know that bottlecaps are the currency of a world gone wrong. My stupid neighbor downstairs has taken a lesson from my fevered preparations and has begun to create his own stash of pop can tabs, but this is wrong. He will be penniless and alone in the wastelands of the near future while I will be king of all I survey. There will be no shotgun ammo that I cannot buy, no can of beans out of my reach. →  Read the rest

Review – Space War Commander

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As many of you know, I am the Master of the 4X Universe here at videolamer (self proclaimed, patent pending). The echoing of these proclamations is so great, it reverberated from my mom’s basement where I live and into Dreamspike Studios and so they sent over a copy of Space War Commander to review.

Poking around the manual and the website, I was intrigued by the presence of starports, cruisers, interceptors and destroyers, along with asteroids to capture and harvest, and began eagerly looking forward to a sort of Spaceward Ho-esque game. I began to get excited, but I also had this vague nagging feeling in the back of my head that something wasn’t quite right.

You sunk my battle ship.

This feeling was correctly placed: although you have the usual things to expect in a game titled Space War Commander, including seven different ship types to build, asteroids and planets to control and enemies to slaughter, Space War Commander is not actually a 4X game. →  Read the rest

Review – EVE Online: Apocrypha

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Apocrypha, the latest expansion of Eve Online – my gaming mistress with whom I continually flirt, tease, and occasionally enjoy for hours on end to the exclusion of all else – was recently released. Unlike many other MMOs, Eve expansions are free, with typically 2-3 major expansions released a year. Apocrypha is the latest, and perhaps one of the most ambitious expansions produced yet, with a variety of features for new and old players alike.

Most notable for new players is a revamping of the Eve character creation experience. In earlier versions, the character creation experience involved choosing a variety of broad traits for your character which would translate into attributes and starting skills. This process was extremely opaque, particularly for a new player, resulting in many players being confused with their starting attributes, often with a variety of worthless skills that prevented them from enjoying the game immediately. →  Read the rest

Review – World of Goo

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What a strange and intriguing little beast this is. I’m hesitant to call it a game. It most certainly is a game in the sense that it places a series of challenges before you, with rewards meted out along the way, and then a credit sequence plays. But in some ways that are intangible, and other that are, it doesn’t quite feel like a game. Before I go off on some bizarre experiential recollection of my time spent with it, I will give you a more straightforward recounting of what I felt about the game. I believe in times past they were called “reviews”.

There is a lot to like about World of Goo.

I’m going to get the look and feel out of the way first, because it’s pretty much perfect. →  Read the rest

Review – Prince of Persia

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The games and film industries are currently obsessed with the concept of reboots. While this is not a new concept, traditionally reboots are greenlit for franchises that are fairly old, and only when the IP holder feels that it will remain commercially viable after a modern facelift. Certain entities in the gaming world have bucked this trend, prescribing reboots for series that are still currently popular, and have likely had at least one new entry in the last five or so years. From a theoretical standpoint, this makes sense. If you are choosing something to to reboot from a list of modern franchises, it is much easier to determine their viability when your audience still remembers them. It also allows a publisher to continue churning out sequels at a steady clip without the new entries feeling immediately stale. →  Read the rest

Review – Waxworks

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If you haven’t heard of Waxworks before then allow me to describe it. It’s not a new game, having been released in 1992, but it was just recently re-released by GOG.com and this makes it new for many people, including me. Waxworks is part point and click adventure, part puzzle solver, part hack and slash, and a lot of fucked up shit. In case you weren’t tipped off by the fact that the developer’s name is Horrorsoft, Waxworks isn’t exactly about sunshine and rainbows.

The first thing any modern player will notice about Waxworks is the fact that it’s old, and in some ways hasn’t aged well. But considering it’s sold by a site called “Good Old Games” I assume that this should be a given. I had never played it before and was able to enjoy it, so despite the decrepit technology it must have an appeal in something besides nostalgia. →  Read the rest

Review – Call of Duty: World at War

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As expected, Activision has pimped the hell out of 2008’s yearly Call of Duty release, World at War. The savvier gamers out there have not been fooled, and have spent their energies trashing it before it even got a chance to prove itself. They know that WaW was developed not by series creator Infinity Ward, but by Treyarch, whose two game Call of Duty pedigree has been viewed as less than stellar.

I assert that this judgment was unfair. Big Red One was developed for last gen platforms, and managed to be very clever given its hardware limitations. As for CoD3, the snarky blog commenters betrayed their true lack of intelligence. It should have been obvious to anyone that the game was a stopgap, a way for Activision to “exploit” a favorite moneymaker with a yearly release. →  Read the rest

Review – Left 4 Dead

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In an industry where cooperative gameplay is tacked onto nearly every game just for the hell of it, it’s refreshing to see a game where it is the primary focus. All too often, coop is given the short end of the stick – added merely to grab a few more sales from suckers like me. In Left 4 Dead, Valve has created a cooperative FPS with their traditional polish and balance. The versus mode, whether originally intended to be “tacked on” or not, is surprisingly fun, making it a good game for small versus games as well.

Left 4 Dead is what I’d call a running-survival game. In a location filled with zombies, a team of four survivors must make their way from point A to point B. In between the points, there are a few safe houses, which break up the action. →  Read the rest

Review – Fallout 3

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Writer’s note: At the time of this writing, Fallout 3 is a bit buggy on all platforms, and extra buggy on the PS3. I do not wish to neglect these issues, but for the time being they are not featured in the review. If the first patch for the game does not fix many of these issues, I will bring them up in a future piece, but I wish to avoid talking about bugs at the moment as it takes away some of the timelessness of a review. Fallout 2 was broken in many ways upon release, and no one talks about that these days.

We here at videolamer strive to provide timely reviews for major releases. The bad news is that juggling real life responsibilities and funding our own gaming budgets makes this a challenge. →  Read the rest

Final Review – Mount&Blade

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It’s been a long time since I first looked at Mount&Blade. This game was my first review subject here at videolamer over two years ago, and it has held my attention for hundreds of hours. It’s progressed a great deal since its original release and my “review update” for .903, and in fact had its final release some weeks ago. As of this writing, Mount&Blade 1.011 has just been released with a demo on Steam, where I hope many prospective gamers will try it out. It’s currently the #5 seller – it’s selling better than Team Fortress 2! – but that spot is very well-deserved.

The improvements over the previous version I reviewed are myriad. Movement, weaponry, and armor are all much more realistic than they were before, and one of the best additions is a completely revamped soundtrack – with 70+ songs that are almost always played in the right situation – trumpet-filled battle themes that play as you clash with your foes, light melodic tracks while making your way through the countryside, and so on. →  Read the rest

Review – World of Goo

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Do you like puzzle games? Do you enjoy gooey things? If so, you should try World of Goo. This blob-based puzzler is one of the latest indie games to be released via Steam (or Wiiware, for the console-inclined). It’s filled with brain-twisting, goo-placing goodness.

Puzzles in World of Goo generally revolve around building structures out of blobs. Each level has a pipe you are trying to reach; once you have reached it, the goo-blobs remaining on your structure shuffle their way into the pipe. There is a simple goal (say, 4 blobs) to complete the level, and a more difficult “OCD” goal (save a lot of goo, complete the level quickly or in very few moves). Any extra blobs you get go into a pool to be used in the tower-building “free” game. →  Read the rest

Review – Civilization 4: Colonization?

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I can’t even figure out exactly what the name of the Colonization remake is, so we’ll just call it Colonization 2. In an attempt to drive sales, it has Civ 4 mixed in the title, since the game leverages the Civ 4 engine (and more importantly the Civilization brand name), but you don’t actually need Civ 4 to play. Despite the confusing title, the game itself is not confusing.

Like every Firaxis effort for the past two years or so, it’s a game with a great deal of promise and terrible QA testing that is largely carried by a talented and extremely forgiving community that does Firaxis’ work for them. Interestingly, this might be why Civ Revs is currently covered in “This game sucks” threads; the community cannot mod an Xbox 360 game. →  Read the rest

Review – The Spirit Engine 2

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Five years ago, as a younger lad with a small budget and an unending hankering for good games, I would scour the internet searching for quality freeware. Generally my searches ended in failure; though such games existed, they often had no story and little depth. One of the few games that caught my attention, though, was The Spirit Engine. It looked polished (for the time) and had the feel of a late SNES RPG – the perfect combination. Although my interest waned over the course of several hours, and I did not complete it (though I now intend to), it was a refreshing experience for the same reasons for which I will now laud its successor.

On finding out The Spirit Engine 2 even existed several days ago, nostalgia for the original drove me to look into it. →  Read the rest

Review – Spore

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I am not sure how to introduce this review so I am going to start gently. If I were the kind of guy that was into fellating people to get what I want, there would be a short list of people that I would be willing to drop to my knees for. Right off the top of my head, I can only actually think of two men, the first being Trent Reznor if he promised to give me another album equal to or greater than The Downward Spiral; the second guy is Will Wright.

I can’t think of what I would ask Will Wright for in exchange for orally pleasing him but if he were into bartering, I am sure I could come up with something. I have always liked Will Wright because, thankfully for my succulent lips, he gives me what I want without forcing me to choose to spit or swallow. →  Read the rest

Review – Seven Kingdoms: Conquest

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Imagine throwing the major pre-gunpowder empires in history into a grand free-for-all. The Japanese would have samurai and ninja, Vikings would have axethrowers and berserkers, Normans would have crossbowmen and knights, and so on. Now imagine adding in random demon lairs that attack human settlements. This is the setting of Seven Kingdoms, an RTS with several fairly deep mechanics, including unit loyalty, economy balancing, and a great espionage system. Its sequel would go on to refine each of these, adding more civilizations and the ability to play as the demonic races of the Fryhtans. Both have a deep complexity that keeps me playing when other RTS games start to feel too shallow.

Unfortunately, I am reviewing neither of these games here.

Seven Kingdoms: Conquest appears, at first glance, to be a continuation of the first two games. →  Read the rest

Review – Knights & Merchants

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Knights & Merchants is a sim’s sim. In fact, it’s a sim’s sim’s sim. They don’t come much simmier than this.

It’s not a new game, but it’s hardly well-known. The game is said to be quite popular in its homeland of Germany, but knowing no German nor Germans, I cannot say for sure. I came across it many years ago, and after actually doing research for an article, found that it is nearly 10 years old. An expansion, The Peasants’ Rebellion, came out in English more recently, although non-German resources on it are hard to find. For its age, Knights & Merchants does its job quite well. Depending on who you ask, that job could be creating a living and breathing city, sucking your time away like a sponge, or boring you completely out of your mind. →  Read the rest

Review – Eve Online Empyrean Age

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Every so often, Eve does a major patch, introduces new goodies, and calls it an expansion. Normally I’d mock such marketing tactics, but since Eve doesn’t charge for these expansions, I will instead laud them. The last patch, Trinity, finally updated the ancient Eve graphics engine, setting the bar high for any future add-ons. Empyrean Age focuses around in-game content, specifically “faction warfare.” Faction warfare is one of those things that developers talk about for a long time but nothing ever comes of, sort of like World of Warcraft’s “Hero Classes,” which took two expansions (and the second isn’t out yet) for an underwhelming single class. Accordingly, the Eve community was skeptical of this mythical “faction warfare.”

Fortunately, the Empyrean Age brings one of the more seamless and thoroughly entertaining integrations of player vs. →  Read the rest

Review – Sam & Max: Night of the Raving Dead

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I’ll be honest with you. When I started writing this review, I was only doing it to get this game out of the way. I really wanted to review episodes 4 and 5, and it just didn’t seem right to skip this tale of the emo undead, no matter how mediocre I may have found it upon first playthrough. As I began writing, however, I realized that this game taught me something. It taught me why I play Sam and Max. Not a deep, meaningful life lesson by any means, but a lesson nonetheless.

To catch people up who haven’t played the game already, New York is invaded by hoards of zombies, and Sam and Max must travel to Stuttgart in order to stop them at their source: a castle-turned-goth-club called “The Zombie Factory.” →  Read the rest