December 2009
8 posts
5 tags
COLD FEAR: BEST GAME OF 2005
Each year around this time I start hearing people (including myself) discussing what was the “best game of the year”. But those of us who are “in the know” understand that there will only ever be one best game of 2005. That game is Cold Fear. Below the jump, Mega64’s commercials for Cold Fear from the midway point of this illustrious decade in video games.
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4 tags
Ëvën Mörë Brütäl
Here are the three button diagrams from Brütal Legend, superimposed. If you’ve played Brütal Legend, this image is somewhere burned into your cerebellum:
I think there’s an agreement here at Warp Skip! that while the world, audio, and art of Brütal Legend are perfect, the controls and mechanics seem… unpolished. I offer the image above as evidence. They’re not the most...
4 tags
Ghoul Patrol →
Apparently there was a sequel to Zombies Ate My Neighbors! A terrible sequel. Which has been rated by the Australian rating board as a Virtual Console title, meaning we may someday be able to play this on the Wii. This interesting article tells you a bit about it (and does a pretty good job of convincing you to never play it).
There’s more info on GameCola, too, although I find the ending...
4 tags
Gaming the System →
rands:
There’s a socially frightening act inside of optimization that normal humans don’t get and it’s the calming inanity of intense repetition. In a game like World of Warcraft, many of the tasks involve an exceptional amount of repetition. Repetition like, “Hey, go kill 1,000 of these guys and come back and I’ll give you something cool.” Yeah, 1,000. If each kill take a minute, you’re talking...
6 tags
The Perils of "Joining the Conversation"
Over the last year I’ve purchased a number of Xbox 360 games, but very few of them within the month they come out. Why bother? The price curve on 360 games is much more evenly declining than most console’s releases, so it’s easy to choose to buy in anywhere from 60-20 USD (new) within the first year of most games’ release. My friends don’t generally play online...
7 tags
Brütal Sändwich
I just finished playing Brütal Legend. I’m trying to decide whether or not I liked it.
Okay, that’s not true. I definitely liked it. But I didn’t love it. That’s not strictly true either.
I did love some of the game: I loved the writing, the voice acting, and the art. Double Fine hit these elements out of the park with Psychonauts, and it’s even better in BL. If...
4 tags
Shut Up And Play This Game: "Small Worlds"
I’d like to introduce a new feature at Warp Skip called “Shut Up and Play This Game,” or “Shut Up” for short. I know how it is in this day and age— someone tells you in 2002 to check out this band called The Mountain Goats, you kind of shrug it off, whatever, you forget about the band, then in 2006 you pick up Get Lonely and you say OH GOD WHY DIDN’T I LISTEN TO...
5 tags
Postmortem: Twisted Pixel's Splosion Man →
Splosion Man is one of my favorite games of the year and Gamasutra has a great postmortem on the project, in which two of the co-founders of the development studio look at the development process with a critical eye, speaking honestly about what went right and what went wrong.
If you haven’t played Splosion Man yet and you have an Xbox 360, you really need to download and play it....