Last week the final entry in the Skywalker Saga – Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker – arrived on BluRay in stores (it has been out for digital purchase for a few weeks), and I thought it might be worthwhile to look back at the Sequel Trilogy and compare it to the original Star Wars Expanded Universe (EU) that was ‘purged from canon’ when Disney took over the franchise.
While I have been critical of a couple of releases (Star Wars Jedi Outcast and Wolfenstein Youngblood in particular), in general, last year was an excellent time for PC gamers who were looking to get in some modern portable console gaming.
If I had to choose a list of ‘desert island games’, in my top five you would find Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. As I said in my ‘Netbook Gamer’ retro review, “Jedi Knight II is my favorite of the entire Kyle Katarn saga, my favorite Star Wars game, and my favorite first-person shooter.”
Point and click adventure games had a heyday back in the 1990s with Monkey Island, Sam & Max, Grim Fandango, Broken Sword and more. Then about a decade ago we saw a resurgence as TellTale games brought us a renewed look at Sam & Max, and many other excellent adventures followed.
I have always been an ‘update first and ask questions later’ kind of guy, but every now and then an update arrives that hits at something critical me – and that is the case with MacOS Catalina. Because it is incompatible with 32-bit applications, everyone has known that older applications would be in danger – but for me an entire industry seems to have been waiting for the last possible moment: music production.
It has been nearly eighteen years since release and almost a decade since my ‘Netbook Gamer’ retro-reviews here, but my love for the Jedi Knight games from Raven Software has not waned and I replay them at least annually. Now I will have to make more time for these playthroughs because Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy are coming to the Nintendo Switch!
The 1980s & ’90s were an incredible time for video games with huge leaps in graphics and gameplay and controllers starting with the NES and leading into the launches of the PS2 and XBOX. In between we got some of the greatest console and game releases – NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, and Sony Playstation.
Are you considering buying the newly released multiplatform game Wolfenstein Youngblood? Please stop! Don’t do it! Let my purchase and playthrough serve as the warning beacon that saves you from unnecessarily wasting time and money on one of the worst shooters I have ever played, one that highlights some of the core issues with formerly great Bethesda Software and with current shooters in general.
This week is QuakeCon, and aside from the usual huge sales at every PC game shop we got two big surprises! First, on the iOS store the classic DOOM has been updated for the first time in 6 years, released on Google Play for Android, and DOOM II has been released on both stores.
I have been a fan of Mahjong games since 1986 when I played Shanghai on the Apple Mac Plus, and so have been thrilled over the past several years to see many high-quality mahjong games released for smartphones, tablets and handheld game systems. Now the Nintendo Switch has been added to the list with the release of Pure Mahjong.
For the last month, we’ve been hearing rumors about the Nintendo Switch Lite, and now Nintendo has made it official! Releasing September 20th and costing $199 – a full hundred dollars less than the current price of the original Switch – the Switch Lite is the handheld-only gaming system fans have been clamoring for since the release of the Switch!
For all you pinball wizards, Stern Pinball has a third game for you to enjoy in their Black Knight series called Black Knight: Sword of Rage. The game is offered in three different models of Pro, Premium and a Limited Edition which has only a 600 production run globally.
Back in September when we posted the announcement of Sony’s PlayStation Classic, there was a load of enthusiasm – which is easy to understand when you look back through the press release and list of included games.
Neverwinter Nights (NWN) is a 2002 PC role-playing game (RPG) developed by Bioware as the follow-up to their classic Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn, which is regarded as one of the greatest games ever made.
Throughout my life, two interests have been constant standbys: superheroes and video games. So when Sony announced a massive open-world, PlayStation-exclusive Spider-man game, I had to have it. But there was only one problem: I didn’t have a PlayStation 4, and buying a new one wasn’t in the budget.
While I have always played games on a PC, as a gamer there is no denying the impact and appeal of the original Sony PlayStation. Launched in Japan in late 1994 and worldwide in 1995, the Playstation signaled a new age in console gaming: 3D graphics, data stored on CD, and a huge wave of third-party support from software developers who had already started working with those technologies for the PC.
Video games are no stranger to criticism. Over the years, they’ve been blamed for encouraging laziness, fostering the development of brain rot (or other cognitive limitations), and even increasing violence (despite no real evidence to back up the claim). But like any technology, video games aren’t inherently good or evil; all that matters is how you use them. There are actually several benefits to playing video games regularly, and with the right gadgets and devices in tow, you can enhance those benefits significantly. The Benefits of Video Games How exactly can video games be good for you? Spatial reasoning and…
At the end of March, Beamdog Studios – the group responsible for bringing the Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale and other 90s classic games to the modern age – released an ‘enhanced edition’ of the venerable 2002 RPG ‘Neverwinter Nights’.
Monument Valley is a great portable game – it was Apple’s ‘ Game of the Year’ for 2014 and won countless ‘best game’ awards for iOS and Android that year. And while the sequel is also available, the original game remains beloved, and it tends to be the one I jump to more often than not.
We can’t say that we didn’t see this coming, but just in time for May the Fourth, a multiplayer mode has finally arrived for the Star Wars: Jedi Challenges AR system. More specifically, the multiplayer mode is being called Lightsaber Versus Mode, and it will be available via a free app update on the App Store and Google Play.
I don’t normally cover video games for Gear Diary; they just aren’t on my radar. But this week we received a pitch for a video game that made me so angry, I’m pretty sure my women’s studies degree became sentient, broke out of the frame in my office, and is currently trying to escape the building to protest. I’m glad it can’t, though, because then the creator of the Super Seducer video game might hit on it.