Marcus here, and I want to talk about something that has been bothering me about the way people discuss portable gaming. Tim continually claims that mobile strategy games are basically the same thing as those on Game Boy Advance showing that he has no idea about the technical brilliance that is Advance Wars. Advance Wars was more than a strategy game that simply ran on a handheld; it was a prime example of optimising complex…
Samuel here – trying to get the kids off to school whilst wrestling with a colour drifted CRT television. I’ll be honest I was sceptical when Mark of the Ninja came out in 2012. A 2D stealth game from Klei Entertainment? Same people behind the wacky animated adventures? Seemed like a huge mismatch of genres to me. Stealth games were 3D games – cameras moved freely and the environment affected how you played. How were…
Heroes of Might and Magic III Review: The Best Turn Based Strategy Game Ever Created John’s writing about this one because the rest of the team spent an entire Zoom meeting arguing about whether turn based strategy peaked with Civilization or Total War and completely forgot that the best strategy games actually come from the world of computer gaming. Whilst they are all fighting about console strategy games that barely meet the minimum requirements for…
I’m Marcus and there is one thing that I think has been driving me crazy for decades. Each time someone says that XCOM: Enemy Unknown “brought back” turn based tactics (which it certainly did) I think they should be pointed towards a title that was effectively addressing the very same issues in 1999. Jagged Alliance 2 not only predicted the direction of tactical combat – it improved upon the systems that would eventually become common…
The Most Effective Strategy Games Ever Created: A Finalised Ranking Which Almost Drove Us Crazy We knew that listing the most effective strategy games ever produced would ultimately result in another couple of weeks of broken friendships and a growing number of group chat blockages. Marcus immediately began arguing that real time games are less mentally taxing than turn based games whilst David said that any strategy game which did not include multiplayer could never…
“Alright, let’s get this settled,” Carl declared after what was meant to be an informal Thursday night phone call. “Greatest stealth games of all time. Ranked properly. No fudging with honourable mentions.” Three weeks of the most vicious arguments since the Street Fighter 2 tier list debacle ensued. Timothy continued to argue that Thief did it first and therefore deserves to be recognised more than anyone else. Joe nearly walked off the group chat when…
Tim wrote this review so we get the view of someone who found out about this classic way after everybody else decided that it did indeed count as the 4th Indiana Jones movie. So here’s why the 1992 point and click adventure game is the definitive Indiana Jones experience outside of the original trilogy. When LucasArts combined their SCUMM adventure game engine with the Indiana Jones licence they produced something truly remarkable. Fate of Atlantis…
From the mind of Carl here (primarily because Timothy insists on ranting about how modern narrative games like Life is Strange invented emotional storytelling whilst Joe quietly mumbles that adventure games died with LucasArts) but both of them are wrong and The Longest Journey is precisely why. This 1999 masterpiece by Ragnar Tørnquist both proved adventure games weren’t dead and that they could be something much deeper than expected. Adventure games were “dead” by 1999.…
Hey guys, Joe here. Why has it been twenty plus years since the greatest “F*** You” in video game history? As Carl stressed about the frame rates and Sam cried about the balance patches, I’m still angry about the biggest trolling game design in history. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty didn’t simply break the 4th wall. It loaded it with C4 and asked you to question if walls really existed in the first…
Right, let me tell you something about Warcraft II that people have totally got backwards. Everyone bangs on about how StarCraft revolutionised real-time strategy and made Blizzard famous. Rubbish. It was Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness that actually did the dirty work, and I will die on this hill because I spent hundreds of hours with both of them on the original hardware. Not nostalgia by the way. I still have the CDs, I’ve run…