Overwatch came along at a perfect time for me. Star Wars: Battlefront had just taught me that online gaming with strangers may not be as masochistic as I initially feared. And now arrived a much-hyped, colorful online multiplayer game that seemed hellbent on maintaining a friendly, positive community.… Read the rest
Lara Croft has it tough. Not only does she have some serious parental issues, but also a lot of her friends end up in mortal peril and/or turn Evil. The mystical artifacts she unearths tend to get lost in some cataclysmic event that she barely escapes with her life.… Read the rest
The Halo series is revered by many, specifically by fans of the original XBox and its successors. It is a series tied to these consoles, not available elsewhere, as it was developed by Microsoft (the company behind the XBox). Halo is a scifi-shooter featuring a gruff-voiced space marine whose face we never get to see as it is always hidden behind a helmet.… Read the rest
William “B.J.” Blazkowicz has a gigle-worthy nickname, but is dead serious about killing Nazis. There are a lot of those around, as in the alternate history that he lives in, the Nazis won the war and have achieved global domination. After spending years in a vegetative state due to a brain injury, B.J.… Read the rest
I enjoy a good story. Even in my video games, though a game is not the best medium for a carefully crafted tale. It’s helpful if you actually care about the characters, your alter-ego especially, and are curious about what will happen next.… Read the rest
Crysis 2 is a convoluted Jerry Bruckheimer action movie poured into a video game, starring a dead-man-walking protagonist, who was almost literally poured into a power suit as he lay dying. It allows him to withstand a great amount of damage or to turn invisible, but not simultaneously, and only for a short amount of time.… Read the rest
I do not like military shooters and tend to avoid them like the plague. A lot of them are morally awkward, featuring mostly white Westerners shooting at whichever group of ‘others’ seemed the most threatening at the time the game went into production.… Read the rest
When Max Payne is around, any glass that’s half-empty is soon to be entirely empty, literally and figuratively. The guy can’t catch a break and has decided to drown his grief in alcohol. Having lost his family in the previous installments of the Payne franchise, he gets entangled in all sorts of nastiness again this time around, when a gig as a bodyguard in Sao Paolo goes south.… Read the rest
I tend to have a hard time being a bad guy in video games. Whenever there is a choice between doing something moral and something immoral I tend to go with the first, because it helps my feeling of immersion: my character is acting close to the way I imagine I would in similar, far-fetched circumstances.… Read the rest
Deus Ex: Human Revolution takes place in a moody tech-noir near-future in which nearly everyone seems to have settled on a yellowish color scheme. And more importantly: people are getting ‘augments’, technical enhancements grafted onto or into their body, which give them special abilities.… Read the rest
