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What is Rogue?
Recently, there has been a flood of games touting to be "Roguelikes" in both the Indie and AAA design spaces over the past few years. Even more perplexing, the titles claiming to be Roguelikes seemingly spanned all genres. With the new update of one of my favorite Roguelikes (more later), it seemed only fitting to really examine what a makes a game a Roguelike, and more importantly, what a "rogue" is.
For the full version, you could always Wikipedia it, but in brief, Rogue is a PC dungeon crawler with ASCII graphics. The premise is pretty simple: go from the top floor of a dungeon, get an item, and then escape. The game features turn based combat and movement; for every action you take, all the enemies get a turn, similar to a game of chess. Each level of the dungeon is semi-randomly generated, and populated with a myriad of enemies, items, and interactable objects to make each delve unique. Being simple in the graphics department, Rogue could also go much deeper in item interaction than most games, as not having to animate things saves considerable time. Other things that make Rogue different from most games is that items do not come identified, and the user usually needs to figure out what they have via trial and error. This generally leads to some hilarious situations, like drinking a potion of fire when you badly needed healing instead.
Continue reading Much Ado about Roguelikes
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Many modern, first person adventure games are labelled as "walking simulators," particularly the ones with a narrative focus. This term refers to a game in which players walk throughout the in-game environment without doing much else like engaging in combat or finding collectibles. It's a label that, while superficially accurate, is often applied to a game because players can't decipher much more beyond the surface characters or stories. However, more often than not that couldn't be further from the truth of what these games offer. Take, for example, Dear Esther; it features the final fleeting thoughts of its narrator as his life fades away. It's true that the gameplay only involves walking from one set piece to the next, but what makes the game substantial is the emotions and memories the narrator presents. The walking simulator is the most effective at allowing players to really get into the head of a game's character.
Firewatch, the first game from Campo Santo, is the latest inclusion in the walking simulator category. The fact is that this game offers much depth of character, narrative interactivity, and even some role-playing which can only be achieved by utilizing this unconventional and divisive genre.
MAJOR SPOILERS FOR FIREWATCH CONTINUE
READING AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!
Continue reading Firewatch: Not Just a Walking Simulator
[img width=700 height=393]https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-IF5krWHMARI/VjiQsmj5QUI/AAAAAAAAAHM/F4yGBit1uWE/s800-Ic42/lucanor_poster_02.jpg[/img] PC, Mac, Linux
The Count Lucanor, from Baroque Decay Games, is the result of blending The Legend of Zelda and survival horror. It's a combination that's intriguing enough to support the core gameplay, but its execution is only effective for a couple of hours.
Continue reading The Count Lucanor Review
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Next month, we hope that some of you will join us in playing in the first episodic, adventure game of the RF Generation Community Playthrough. In March, we will tackle Life is Strange, a game developed by Dontnod Entertainment and published by Square Enix. Life is Strange features five episodes that chronicle the turbulent teenage years of Max Caulfield who has the mysterious ability to rewind time after witnessing an unexpected tornado. Guide Max through this modern, coming of age story and help her learn how to use her time-shifting powers to prevent this natural disaster from demolishing her town.
Life is Strange has been praised for its fantastic character development and effort to tackle certain subjects considered taboo for video games. It has won several awards including Develop Industry Excellence Awards (New Games IP - PC/console & Use of Narrative), Golden Joystick Award (Performance of the Year [Ashly Burch]), Global Game Awards (Best Adventure & Best Original Game), The Game Awards (Games for Change), Playstation Official Magazine (Best Episodic Adventure & Best Moment), New Statesman's (Best Game of 2015), and received countless other nominations and runner-ups awards. Life is Strange is available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Steam/PC, and PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (both via download). We hope that this pick interests you and that you'll take the time to join us in March!
Join the Life is Strange discussion thread here: http://www.rfgeneration.c...m/index.php?topic=16286.0
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Posted on Jun 14th 2015 at 12:00:00 PM by ( noiseredux) Posted under PC |
[img width=603 height=517]http://www.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2014-10-23-image-21.jpg[/img]
Gamers who grew up with consoles have been lucky over the years as far as nostalgia goes. In the last decade or two, we've seen a rise in and have been stuffed-to-the-gills with compilations of old console games. We've seen celebrations of the Atari 2600 and it's been shouted out loud that "Intellivision Lives!" We've gotten collections of Genesis carts and plenty of various arcade era releases.
But what if you are nostalgic for early PC gaming? Certainly there's plenty out there to explore. Services like GOG and DotEmu do a great job of bringing old games to a newer generation of gamers. And heck, if you know your way around DOSBox or Windows compatability settings, there's usually very little stopping you from finding old CD-ROMs or even 3.5" floppy discs of your favorites titles of yesteryear. Yet having said all that, it's nice to see a publisher throwing a bunch of their classics together and offering them up in a nice bundle. And that's just what the 3D Realms Anthology is.
Continue reading Review: 3D Realms Anthology
[img width=700 height=393]http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/534015537654975671/1ACE0FAC81ECD88711EA4728C6BE9D06F4F66EE9/[/img]
Dead Or Alive has long been my favorite 3-D fighting game series. While subsequent sequels constantly improved, for years the second game remained my favorite. That was until Dead Or Alive 5 was released and completely blew me away. It looked gorgeous, played fluidly, had an impressively huge roster and implemented a wonderfully ridiculous Story Mode that delivered so much fun and fan service for long time players. Yes, what made Dead Or Alive 5 so perfect to me was that it basically rendered its predecessors obsolete. Sure, I still loved Dead Or Alive II; I just couldn't think of any real reason to play it over this one.
Continue reading Review: Dead Or Alive 5: Last Round
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Posted on Mar 23rd 2015 at 04:00:00 AM by ( noiseredux) Posted under PC |
[img width=600 height=375]http://nomadgames.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Dwarf_At_Hidden_Valley.jpg[/img]
In the past year I've put a lot of time and money into upgrading my PC so that it can play the newest "hotness." I've upgraded my motherboard and CPU to make overclocking available. I've upgraded my GPU so that the latest, graphically intensive games are no sweat. I've upgraded my RAM and my SSD so that everything moves along quicker. And yet, the game I've spent the most time with in 2015 so far is a digital remake of a board game. In fact, while recently going through my Steam wishlist, I realized that the game I was most excited about was actually an expansion to Talisman: Digital Edition. Sure, bigger titles have been released like Evolve and Elder Scrolls Online, but I really just wanted to add another little piece of the board to Talisman.
Continue reading Talisman And The Art Of Digital Board Games
[img width=700 height=393]http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/532885921340280539/39D1D4CD07FC269A8C3A849CA8F8D58847908F49/[/img]
Fahrenheit (or Indigo Prophecy as we had always known it here in the States) was the second game released by developer Quantic Dream, all the way back in 2005. Alright, so that really wasn't all that long ago. Perhaps it seems odd to 'remaster' a ten year old game, but for this game, I think there's some justification. While the visuals were already great, Indigo Prophecy has had a history of censorship outside of Europe as well as a clumsily handled PC port if you wanted to play with a controller (which was the control type that the game really seemed designed for). So on its ten year anniversary, let's take a look at this cult classic. But be forewarned, it's pretty tough to talk about a game like Indigo Prophecy without some spoilers and potentially NSFW discussion thrown in (though both are avoided for the purposes of this article).
Continue reading Review: Fahrenheit Indigo Prophecy Remastered
[img width=610 height=343]http://i1340.photobucket.com/albums/o736/Fleach/7edf0df2-0459-4b55-b949-1e454462e25f_zps17f62c45.png[/img] Source: Sandstorm's itch.io page
The sun heads west and the world spins as you make your journey through the desert to Mount Distant.
Sandstorm is a small game for the PC developed by Daniel Linssen with a simple premise. You play a wandering traveler on his pilgrimage to Mount Distant. Nothing is known of your destination, just that you must arrive safely and brave the treacherous sandstorm that obscures your vision.
Continue reading Indie Review: Sandstorm
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Posted on Jan 25th 2015 at 05:00:00 AM by ( noiseredux) Posted under PC |
[img width=552 height=367]http://www.troll.me/images/first-world-problems-ii/steam-wishlist-sale.jpg[/img]
While 2014 was a great year for new games, it was also a great year for old games. As a PC gamer it's been great seeing all the retro love making its way onto my platform of choice recently. In fact, we've seen so many games of yesteryear re-emerge on Steam, GOG and the likes, that it's almost been tough to keep track of them all. But as much as I've made the conversion over to pretty exclusively gaming on PC, there's still plenty of console games out there that never made it to PC. I could easily list hundreds of games I'd love to see brought over to PC. Heck, my secret fantasy is that Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft would all take a cue from Sega and just become software developers so that all games were on the same platform. But that sort of wishful thinking is borderline fan-fiction, so instead I'd like talk about console games that I'd like to see ported to PC because these games would specifically benefit from the platform itself.
Read on for an utterly biased wish list for 2015...
Continue reading PC Gaming Wish List, 2015
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The Wolf Among Us
Telltale Games, 2014
I've been a fan of Telltale's adventure games for a while now. In a sense, their adventure games not only reinvigorated the genre - they redefined it. You could almost start talking about adventure games in a Pre- and Post-Telltale way. And though they had plenty of good and interesting games leading up to it, it's hard to not point at The Walking Dead as the moment where they fully nailed the formula. In The Walking Dead, the user interface was as equally as well-designed for a controller as it was a mouse. The story was strongly written with characters you could care about and who you felt like you got to know well. And most importantly, your decisions seemed to matter, and actually shaped the rest of the story going forward. This device seemed even more important when Season Two of The Walking Dead was released and you realized that many of your decisions and experiences carried over from the first game if you had a save installed.
The Walking Dead: Season Two and The Wolf Among Us finished up their episodic runs and saw retail releases as finished products around the same time this past year. And truth be told, I was far more interested in the former title. I couldn't help but want to see what happened next to Clem, and I figured that a game about a zombie apocalypse would interest me far more than one about fairytales. How wrong I was. [Disclaimer: It is nearly impossible to discuss a Telltale game without any sort of spoilers being involved. Though this review will stay clear of divulging anything that feels like it would truly 'spoil' the game, just mentioning characters, settings and the tiniest of plot points will indeed be spoilers to some. You've been warned!]
Continue reading Review: The Wolf Among Us
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Posted on Dec 4th 2014 at 05:00:00 AM by ( singlebanana) Posted under playcast, wrapup, podcast, November, 2014, Super Metroid, modern, retro, SNES, System Shock 2, PC, playthrough |
Join RFGeneration Playcast (different name, same great, crunchy, and flavorful listen) hosts, Rich (singlebanana), Jamie (techwizard), Floyd (Fleach), and Shawn (GrayGhost81) as we discuss November's out-of-this world retro and modern playthroughs. In this episode, singlebanana, techwizard, and guest, RetroRage, discuss one of the most beloved sci-fi platformers of all time, Super Metroid on the SNES. On the modern side, join Grayghost81, Fleach, and guest, bombtomba, as their conversation safely navigates the Von Braun in their discussion of the survival horror, PC classic, System Shock 2.
Episode 8 discussion thread: http://www.rfgeneration.c...x.php?topic=14824.new#new
Get the show on Podomatic: http://rfgenplaythroughs.podomatic.com/
On iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/...playcast/id874327459?mt=2
On YouTube:
On Stitcher: http://app.stitcher.com/browse/feed/55943/episodes
And follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rfgenplaythroughs
And Twitter: https://twitter.com/RFGPlayCast
Continue reading Episode 8 - RF Generation Playcast
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There's something eerily wrong in Red Creek Valley and it's your job to piece things together in this atmospheric "weird fiction" detective game.
Continue reading Review: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
[img width=700 height=393]http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/73499800165275086/C8B25DDAF3FEA1B512FE031F6313AEFABFD55FF1/[/img]
Escape Goat 2
2014, Magical Time Bean
There's a really popular indie game about goats that came out this year. It's a glitchy, open-world mess of a game. And Escape Goat 2 isn't it. Instead, Escape Goat 2 is an amazing puzzle-platformer with tight controls, excellent level design, an old school sensibility, and gorgeous HD visuals. Also, it has a mouse that wears a hat. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's slow down and take a look at this excellent game.
Continue reading Review: Escape Goat 2
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Posted on Aug 19th 2014 at 04:00:00 AM by ( noiseredux) Posted under PC |
[img width=700 height=393]http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/778309180024878510/4A9C73F5AA73F2580B02133A254171B7E4B11637/[/img]
Question: what the heck is going on with sports games? I mean, if you're a console gamer, then they're considered over-abundant to the point of being cast off as nearly disposable. Each iteration of each individual series is being released annually so that the supply is so ridiculously high that eBay sellers of console lots need warn prospective buyers "L@@K! NO SPORTS GAMES!!!!" And yet PC gamers - the so-called "master race" seem to be struggling to find recent installments at all in some cases.
Continue reading The State of PC Sports Games, 2014
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