THQ’s been having a rough year. The Hollywood-based game publisher’s seen some expensive flameouts recently, with their internally-developed hardcore AAA games like “Homefront” and Red Faction Underground getting critically blasted and under-performing in terms of sales. But, THQ also does a brisk business in licensed video games and playable experiences based on properties like Nickelodeon’s…
“Gears of War 3” reminds me of nothing so much as a classic music video. It takes the emotional energy of classic “Gears of War” trailers–Mad World, Ashes to Ashes and War Pigs–and turns it into a big playable experience. The rage rock of the AC/DC song, the mournful recontextualization of the Tears for Fears…
Insert Credit endeavors to suss out where you should be allotting your video game allowance, sifting out a single title from many and crowning it as The One Game You Need to Get This Week. Don’t consider these reviews, gentle reader. Rather, think of Insert Credit as a mix of hands-on time, informed opinion and…
One look at the new trailer for “Max Payne 3″ and your first thought will be, “Time changes a man.” The hero of the hard-boiled shooter series sports a paunch, shaggy hair and bristly beard, where he once had six-pack abs, a dashing pompadour and razor-sharp jawline. But the trademark kill-or-be-killed action looks to have…
One of the most buzzed-about games at this year’s PAX Prime was the innovative real-time strategy adventure “Skulls of the Shogun.” The debut title from Haunted Temple Studios updates the grid-based formula of RTS games like “Final Fantasy Tactics” and “Advance Wars” by letting players move freely and advance and retreat within a round. “SotS”…
Video game teasers tend to stick to a certain formula: dazzle the viewer with awesome graphics, show off some of the games’ abilities and maybe dribble a little story out to tantalize would-be players. But every so often, one piece of video-centric marketing will float above the rest or sink to join the sludge. In…
Insert Credit endeavors to suss out where you should be allotting your video game allowance, sifting out a single title from many and crowning it as The One Game You Need to Get This Week. Don’t consider these reviews, gentle reader. Rather, think of Insert Credit as a mix of hands-on time, informed opinion and…
In true stuntman fashion, Hello Games’ “Joe Danger” landed with a surprise explosion on the PlayStation 3 last year. The stunt-centric title had players controlling the titular death-defying daredevil through a series of motorcycle races, helping him regain his former glory. It recalled the old-school fun of “Excitebike” on the NES, with a robust, modern-day…
In “Portal,” players were the ones that moved through rifts in space. In Kim Swift’s new game, all of reality is the thing experiencing a dimensional shift. Developed by irtight Games, Quantum Conundrum casts players as the nephew of a famous if peculiar scientist named Prof. Fitz Quadwrangle, who’s gone missing after an space-time experiment.…
“Portal 2″ came out this year and Valve’s instant classic showed how powerful and imaginative their mind-bending physics-based experiences can be. You’d figure that there wouldn’t be any room for another game to impress folks with a teleportation mechanic. But, “Warp”–being developed by Montreal-based Trapdoor–stood out amongst the crop of new games being shown at…
One of science fiction’s greatest promises is the melding of man and machine. For decades, authors and creators have imagined what humans would be like with all of our free will bonded to inexhaustible carbon alloys or polymers that would replace bone and muscle. Of course, the question arises as to just how human a…
Insert Credit endeavors to suss out where you should be allotting your video game allowance, sifting out a single title from many and crowning it as The One Game You Need to Get This Week. Don’t consider these reviews, gentle reader. Rather, think of Insert Credit as a mix of hands-on time, informed opinion and…
“Portal” gets a lot of love on the internets, and with good reason. The ingenuity of its brain-bending, physics-based puzzles, the snarky antagonism of passive-aggressive AI villain GLaDOS and the singularly well-executed gimmick of on-demand teleportation all combined to make it one of the best games ever made. By the time, you reach its affecting,…
Warner Bros Games is making more and more of Batman’s milieu come to life in “Batman: Arkham City.” Along with recent reveals of the Penguin and Mr. Freeze as antagonists for the Dark Knight, we’ve also heard about Catwoman falling under players’ control in the game’s story mode and Robin being a playable character in…
Video games have gone to rarefied places for inspiration before. There was that 8-bit “Great Gatsby” game a few months back and Electronic Arts put out a game inspired by “Dante’s Inferno” some years ago. Celestial folklore from Japanese mythology has inspired such great games as “Otogi” and “Okami.” Nevertheless, it’s still rare that you…
Not much word’s crept out ever since Guillermo Del Toro announced some months back that he’ll be developing a game with American publisher THQ. The “inSane” project’s known to be a horror trilogy with a strong Lovecraftian influence, but the first game in the series was described as being years away. It’s hard to get…
Insert Credit endeavors to suss out where you should be allotting your video game allowance, sifting out a single title from many and crowning it as The One Game You Need to Get This Week. Don’t consider these reviews, gentle reader. Rather, think of Insert Credit as a mix of hands-on time, informed opinion and…
The success of Activision’s blockbuster “Call of Duty” has let the publisher do a few groundbreaking things: launch a social network dedicated to the millions of “COD” enthusiasts out there, create a three-day fanfest with a million-dollar and form an charitable endowment to help soldiers coming off of active duty transition back to civilian life.…
The best thing about “Batman: Arkham City” might be the way that characters only teased at in 2009′s “Arkham Asylum” are finally getting into the spotlight. The Riddler, Penguin, Catwoman and Two-Face–all mentioned only in passing before– all move to the foreground in this year’s sequel. The latest teaser focuses on maybe the most tragic…
In part 1 on IFC’s focus on “The Witness,” I talked about the experience of playing Jonathan Blow’s next game and how it differed from his 2008 hit “Braid.” The build of the game I experienced was still a work-in-progress but Blow stated that it provided an accurate representation of what he was aiming for…
Jonathan Blow’s last game was “Braid,” the 2008 masterpiece about time and memory as told through the template of a side-scrolling platformer. Players could manipulate the flow of time, pausing it or slowing it down, to solve various puzzles in the waterercolor dreamworld where “Braid” takes place. Tim, the game’s suit-and-tie wearing hero, journeys through…
Unless you’ve been under a very cozy rock, there’s no escaping that the popularity Apple’s iDevices has had a great impact on the video game industry. Among the changes wrought by the iPhone-centric seismic aftershocks has been the way that sequelization occurs on App Store games. So many of the games on Apple’s digital download…
Insert Credit endeavors to suss out where you should be allotting your video game allowance, sifting out a single title from many and crowning it as The One Game You Need to Get This Week. Don’t consider these reviews, gentle reader. Rather, think of Insert Credit as a mix of hands-on time, informed opinion and…
As a category, music games are in a weird place right now. The glory days of the first “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band 2″-and the plastic instruments they ushered into homes worldwide-are long gone. Activision shuttered the division that made “Guitar Hero” and MTV unceremoniously sold off Harmonix, the developer who created “Rock Band.” The…
