On a moonlit night,
every thousand days,
the restless dead,
rise up to play.
They did not expect,
on this night though,
a fierce opponent,
of sauce, cheese and dough.
Thus begins the journey of pizza.
That’s probably the weirdest opening I’ve ever written, which fits because Pizza vs. Skeletons is one of the weirdest games I’ve ever played. Well, played and liked. I can think of several weirder, yet horrible, games.
After the jump, a culinary favorite declares war on the dead. Continue reading →
“Corridor” used to be a dirty word in shooters. Time was I thought a linear corridor-based shooter was a lost cause. Thanks Calls of Duty! But then along came the Bioshocks, and games that did such nifty things with the shooting that I didn’t mind the corridors: The Club, Resident Evil 5, Lost Planet 2, Kane & Lynch 2, Fear 3. And now The Darkness II, a sequel to a game I didn’t even like, drives home the point that corridor doesn’t have to be a dirty word.
After the jump, a shooter Bill Gaines would love! Continue reading →
One of the many reasons I love Wargame: European Escalation, the latest RTS from the developers of the sadly underappreciated Ruse and Act of War, is the graphics. What a mostly gorgeous rendition of Cold War hardware in the thick of battle (pictured)!
I say “mostly” because of that weird grid of dots inside the explosion. Do you see it? I can’t help but see it, on each of the four systems I’ve used to play the game, every time there’s a big explosion like that. It looks like a broken dot matrix display or a half-assed Lite-Brite. Apparently, it’s a bug and it’ll be fixed in the next patch. ETA: who knows. Great. I understand weird bugs, occasional corrupted textures, and driver issues. But something this egregious baffles me. If I made a game this good, I wouldn’t want players having to look at that error any more than I’d leve a typo in an article. See how annoying it is?
So until the next patch, playing Wargame: European Escalation is like admiring a lovely painting with a bunch of staples randomly stuck in the canvas.
More weird explostions after the jump Continue reading →
