Games

Dragon Age: Origins Mac Game Review

Not too long ago I did a review of Dragon Age: Origins, looking at the PC and console versions. Back when I was first playing the PC version the Mac version was announced and released, and I started playing – knowing that I would come back to provide a review on the port at a later time. The Hype: From BioWare, the makers of Mass Effect, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Baldur’s Gate comes Dragon Age: Origins. An epic tale of violence, lust, and betrayal, Dragon Age: Origins is a single player role-playing game (RPG) set in…

Game Diary, Reviews

FastCrawl (2006, RPG): The Netbook Gamer

Got any plans for lunch hour? Let me show you one of the best dungeon crawlers you can start and finish before going back to work! It seemed that 2006 was the ‘year of the casual game’ … everyone was attributing the success of the DS and the allure of the Wii to the desire for quick, simple and fun gaming experiences. That isn’t a new thing, really – just ask anyone who has missed lunch playing Bejeweled or Zuma or Minesweeper. Now you can add FastCrawl to that list. FastCrawl is a simple concept – quick ‘dungeon crawling’. A…

Game Diary, Reviews

Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess Review

The Hype: Take control of the aristocratic demon known only as The Duke in an upwards-scrolling platformer and chase down fleeing monsters. The Reality: Let’s face it – if the title of the game “Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess” doesn’t immediately intrigue you … you need to inject more whimsy into your life. And once you jump into the game you will find that same sense of style and whimsy pervades the entire game. You see a castle, a sleeping monster known only as The Duke who dreams only of his captive princess … and then he awakes to find…

Reviews

Review: iParadise for iPhone/Touch/iPad

Need a vacation, but just cannot get away? Maybe you are single and just wish for a romantic trip to paradise with a significant other. Either way, your iPhone can now take you away with your love to an exotic island. iParadise offers a truly unique and deep iPhone experience. Almost any activity that can be enjoyed at an island resort is available in the iParadise getaway. I have to admit, when I first opened the game, I was not too sure what exactly to expect. The idea of taking a fake vacation seemed strange. Puzzle, word and arcade style…

News

Cub Scout ‘Video Game’ Loop/Pin: Pandering or Better Preparing Kids?

The joke of the day seems to be that the Cub Scouts are redefining ‘outdoor activities’ to include sitting in front of the TV playing video games. The reality is that the Boy Scouts of America are now offering a belt loop and pin to Cub Scouts (i.e. kids generally 6-11) related to Video Games. Also new this year are belt loops and pins for such activities as Disability Awareness, Family Travel, Good Manners, Nutrition, as well as Hockey and Skateboarding. If you look at any of those you will see a very similar structure to what the Video Games…

Editorials, Game Diary

I Don’t Know If It’s Art, but I Like It!

Image courtesy of WebMuseum I love Jackson Pollock … but there are many who despise his work and would argue that his technique, described as “”all-over” painting, pouring paint rather than using brushes and a palette, and abandoning all conventions of a central motif”, isn’t art at all. I also love Derek Bailey … but again many would argue that his approach to music, which eschews structure of any kind, isn’t art, perhaps not even music. And I love video games – I love role-playing, solving puzzles, shooting stuff, building civilizations, exploring mysteries, shooting peas at zombies, having in-depth discussions…

Game Diary, Reviews

Serious Sam Gold (1st & 2nd Encounter) (2001/2002, FPS): The Netbook Gamer

I was amazed in early 2002 when I came across a jewel-case FPS game at my local EBGames for $19.99 called ‘Serious Sam: The Second Encounter’. The images on the back looked quite nice and the description of a fast-paced action romp sounded like a complete blast – and somewhat of an anachronism. The funny thing is that when I first saw the Serious Sam games, I passed on buying them that day because they were on the ‘junk rack’. There was a four-sided rack of jewel-case games in that store, and they were pretty much universally either low budget…

Game Diary, Reviews

Don’t Trust That Label!: The Netbook Gamer

Image courtesy of GameSpot There are two paths I take when working on games to review for the Netbook Gamer: on the one hand I love to dig up classic PC games from the late 90’s that will still run on WIndows XP. On the other hand – particularly recently – I have been pushing the boundaries of what a standard netbook is capable of doing. Sometimes – like in the recent Tron review – things go very well. Sometimes – like in the Thief Deadly Shadows review – they work at a level that is barely acceptable. Sometimes I…

Game Diary, Reviews

Dragon Age Origins: PC/XBOX360/PS3 Game Review

The other night I was watching VH1’s ‘100 Greatest One Hit Wonders of the 80’s’, and was thinking about Bioware and the whole ’spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate 2? thing surrounding Dragon Age: Origins. Baldur’s Gate 2 is the 2000 classic PC RPG that is not just one of the best RPGs ever but one of the greatest games in video game history. Not only that, it is one of those rare sequels that is better than the original – and the original itself is always on the ‘best video games ever’ lists! Put into that context, it is hard…

Editorials, Game Diary

Where the HECK Did All of Those PSP Games Come From?

A couple of weeks ago when Apple introduced iPhone OS 4 something struck me, but I had forgotten it until someone on a forum was asking me about the amount of games on the PSP … then it came back to me. Do you remember when Apple announced the new iPod lineup in September of 2009? At the time I wrote about the iPod Touch questioning the quantity to quality ratio, and led with this image: Image Source: Engadget Back then I thought that the PSP number was perhaps a bit low, given that I had reviewed more than 200…

Game Diary, Reviews

Mass Effect 2 (RPG, 2010): PC/XBOX360 Game Review

Way back in late 2007 (early 2008 on PC), Bioware released a game that was unique and interesting in several ways: it was their second game featuring all-new intellectual property (Jade Empire was first), a game designed from the start (or so we were told) as a trilogy, and the gameplay mechanic was a third-person squad-based shooter similar in some ways to Gears of War. The game was a tremendous commercial and critical success, thereby ensuring that the remainder of the trilogy would be produced, but there were some significant criticisms (even in the early 10/10 ‘bestest gaem EVAR’ reviews):…

Game Diary, Reviews

Tron 2.0 (2003, FPS): The Netbook Gamer

As a long-time techno-geek I loved the Tron movie back in the early 80’s and pumped loads of quarters into both the Tron and particularly Discs of Tron arcade game a few years later. I have watched the movie on a couple of occasions over the decades, but never owned or rented a copy until late last year. Sharing it with my kids, I found that they enjoyed it – though some of the ‘inside the computer’ references were terribly antiquated and the kids had no frame of reference to get the jokes. More recently we’ve seen the Tron Legacy…

News

So … Even The Government Accounting Office Can’t Estimate the Impact of Piracy?!?

Image courtesy of BoyGeniusReport If you even peripherally follow any news about media piracy – music, movies, video games, TV shows, ebooks, and so on – you would have likely been confused. The media industry would have you believe that the amount of piracy is so massive and devastating that if they could recoup, the taxes would be enough to pay off the deficit, solve world hunger, wipe out disease, and give every child a cute little hypoallergenic kitten. If you believe the pirates, they are actually increasing sales for media and are misunderstood innovators breaking ground with a new…

Editorials, Game Diary

PSP Charger Conundrum: Sony Reminds Us It is the Leader in User-Unfriendly Design!

As a gamer, gadget-hound and someone who has been a reviewer of games on a variety of platforms for nearly a decade, I frequently get questions about games and gaming systems. These range from ‘what system should I buy my kids’ to ‘how do I get by this boss’. But yesterday I got one that really stopped me in my tracks. Here are the basics: So my next problem is, I went to go play my psp for the first time in a few months and I could not find the charger. I can find the usb wire so I…

Game Diary, Reviews

Ragdoll Blaster 2 Lite for iPhone/Touch/iPad App Review

The iPhone has become a great puzzle gaming platform. A style of game I have come to enjoy are physics puzzles. There are many different versions of the genre, but each of them use the amazing physics possibilities on the iPhone to create a unique game. So to carry on the idea of uniqueness, how about firing rag dolls out of a canon to solve the puzzle? Well, that is exactly how Ragdoll Blaster 2 is played. The idea of the game was strange to me at first also. Once you play the game though, the addictiveness of shooting rag…

Game Diary, Reviews

Vampire The Masquerade – Bloodlines: GearGames Retrospective

Hello, L.A., you’re up way past your bedtime, aren’t you? That is the line that greets you when you arrive at your apartment ‘haven’ in Santa Monica after a poorly done cutscene and wonderful tutorial, coming from a radio show that is just one of the many delicious undercurrents that make Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines one of the absolute best role-playing games of the past decade. It is hard to think that a mere five years ago releasing a product based on vampires would be considered a commercial liability, and that there hadn’t been a game released based on the…

Game Diary, Reviews

Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader (2003, RPG): The Netbook Gamer

The only thing better than playing a great game is getting a great deal on a great game. Heck, even a great deal on an average game is a pretty great thing! As I’ve said in the past, I came back to the RPG genre on the PC after a long absence in mid-2003, starting with Neverwinter Nights on the Mac and proceeding to Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic on the day it was release, then starting to ‘backfill’ with games like Gothic 2 and Baldur’s Gate 2. By engaging many folks on forums in discussions I got…

Game Diary, Reviews

Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf … MMO Game?

Like many others, I joke with friends who regularly line up for the new edition of Madden NFL or NBA or NHL or whatever annual sports game they choose, that they are really just paying an annual subscription fee for roster updates and tweaks. Apparently EA Games was listening, and has released the dominant golf video game – Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf – as an online web browser-based game based on an annual subscription model. I have been playing Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf for many years across PC and (more recently) PSP, and was fortunate enough to participate…

Game Diary, Reviews

Dead or Alive Paradise: PSP Game Review

When you hear a title like Dead or Alive, you naturally think about scantily clad women in bikinis prancing around an island giggling and … WHAT?!?! OK, so perhaps you would think of the famed fighting game franchise … but that isn’t what you get here. But let’s get to the real question: is the game any good? No it isn’t, in fact it is downright abysmal … but you can read on for more details.

Game Diary, Reviews

Flip It! Lite for iPhone/Touch/iPad App Review

This week and next week are the craziest weeks of the spring for us as coaches. I have four games and will work at two track meets and this year I add my son’s four t-ball games. While I was on my weekly search for an app for the Blue Plate Special, I decided I wanted something fun and different. The craziness of work made me not want to do something productive or the usual games. I stumbled upon Flip It! Lite and my interest was piqued. Remember the days of youth when you spent a boring class period in…

Game Diary, Reviews

Hearts of Iron III: Mac Game Review

Strategy games have become entrenched as a core genre for PC gamers in recent years, which has caused the genre to adapt to the expanding audience. For some this has allowed entry to the massive world of RTS games for the first time, but veterans of the genre sometimes feel that their hardcore grognard needs are being ignored – particularly those who choose to play games on a Mac. Don’t worry, guys, Paradox has your back – Hearts of Iron III is a game with a steep learning curve that will reward the investment of tons of hours learning the…

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