Earlier this week, I picked up Marauder Interactive's early access game, House of the Dying Sun. This tactical space sim definitely had a sense of style to it that wasn't quite pushing me over the edge until I saw it in action. It took watching Giant Bomb's Unfinished look at the game to really double down on it, but I was legitimately impressed with what I saw.

While it doesn't seem to entirely deliver on the super-tactical elements, it provides a scratch to an itch I didn't realize I had that was somewhere in the vein of the old Rogue Squadron games. The flight itself is pretty arcade-like and never really demands too much from the player beyond the occasional drift through space after cutting the engines. Commanding your fleet that you build up over time is fairly simple: if using the gamepad, the D-pad is viable to order all of your fighters or all of your larger capital ships to perform certain actions (cover, attack, defend, bomb, etc.). If you're looking for a more micromanaged sort of order set, you can enter the tactical view by hitting back on the gamepad, at which point the game will allow you to pause in order to consider your next move. All units, friend and foe, are displayed here and actions can be assigned on an individual ship level. It's a mechanic that seems like it would be more useful or necessary than it is. By the end of the game, your fleet is upgraded and outfitted in such a way that generally the most effective course of action is the Halo Wars "All Units" style of approach and systematically destroying your foes one at a time.

It's a bit light on content. As of this writing, I've already completed the game after clocking about two and a half hours with a few achievements and upgrades left to unlock. They make up for the lack of content by trying to bolster it with replayability. At any time, the game allows you to reset the universe in the options menu so that you can start the game over from scratch. The difficulties themselves aren't... the most well balanced. From the very start of missions it will be apparent if you're properly equipped to handle it. This leads to situations where you occasionally coast through on the easiest difficulty, reap the upgrade to your fleet from the missions and then jump back in on a higher difficulty. Completing the optional objectives on the missions will award you with Favor, which is traded in return for varying ship upgrades, such as different armor to reduce damage from flak, shield piercing ammunition, or the one I found most useful throughout, armor piercing ammunition, allowing your ships to burn through the dangerous capitals ships and weapons platforms throughout the game. All in all, there's plenty of reasons to go back through and continue playing the game, but it's fairly easy at some point to have seen all there is to see in about five or six hours.

For what it lacks in content it does make up for in spades with style. The audio design is truly next level. It really encapsulates what it feels like the vacuum of space would be. Flak and autocannons thud bassily through your speakers in a muted fashion that just hits that hard to place mark. Radio chatter is constant and nigh incomprehensible... save for when they begin counting down the arrival of a Traitor Flagship and letting you officially know you've been there too long and it is time to extract.

The lore is reminiscent of Warhammer 40,000 in a fashion. The Emperor is dead, an individual who has reigned for thousands of years. You play as his proclaimed Dragon, a being capable of inhabiting the bodies of other, lending credence to the mechanic of jumping between your fleet's single pilot Interceptors. Your mission is simple: Hunt down the Traitor Lords and bring ruin to their people. It's dark, it's dreary, and there is no honor in it. Civilians are not collateral damage in these missions: more often than not, they're targets if not liabilities. The game liberally throws around the terms "Purge" and "Heretics" when referencing the rebels who have overthrown the Emperor's regime. The story itself is fairly barebones, giving you just enough of a hint of what's going on in the universe to crave more but never quite get it. This sparsity is used effectively in the end game however, and a choice you make can quite literally recontextualize your actions and motivations throughout the game.

All in all I'm excited for them to finish up the game and put it out for real. The developer has stated more or less that the only thing remaining to add will be a wave-based survival mode and that it is feature and content complete. Unfortunate, given my desire to want to spend many more hours with that game in a fulfilling fashion, but I've really enjoyed my time with it thus far regardless. Given it's current sale, it's hard not to recommend it.

Edit: As a person who has no reasonable means to play VR, I can only speculate as to the quality. Given how incredible the rest of the game feels outside of it, this seems like it would be a must-play software addition to the VR lineup.

I realized an interesting thing as I was playing, something I never really intended to do -- I projected a sort of breakdown on Michael in the way I feel I'd react to the situation. Once he hits a rather low point in his story and is alone for awhile, with work for a heist that needs to be done sometime shortly after yoga is introduced, I got a random urge to just call Franklin and Trevor and try to hang out. They answer but blow him off pretty much saying 'Yo, don't we have work to do?'

Michael kind of rolls with it, but I found that personally, I was a little fatigued on story missions at that time and didn't really feel like doing them. I drove around a little, found a rad car, stole it, pimped it out. But I was still just bored of bumming around the city -- that's when I realized there was a yoga point out in the middle of the desert, off on the right hand side of the map, amidst a ton of black. So, I started driving along the freeway. I kept on it and realized that my GPS point led me to massive cliffs with no way of getting up. But there's a hitchhiker. I pick her up and bring her back to Sandy Shores, hearing her out and acquiring another potential heist member. But I still haven't seen the yoga point. So I turned around, went back to the outskirts of the city and ran off the freeway, hitting the mountains and desert. The car was fast but terrible for the trip, but it looked rather amazing. The sun was setting, the coast looked grand. It was all fairly beautiful. I got out to admire it, and a mountain quickly came out of nowhere. I jump back in the car and flew, but accidentally took it over too steep a cliff after too much damage, and the damn thing exploded.

Michael emerges from a hospital in Sandy Shores, and I am now convinced that it is my destiny to reach this yoga point -- I need to know what's different about it and why the HELL it's become so difficult for me to get to. I get the urge to see what kind of hair Michael can sport at the barbers, and find I'm really drawn to shaving him bald. While I'm on the customization spree, I decide to check out the tattoo parlor for the first time in the entire game, and get him entirely inked. Then I stop by the discount shop, picking up clothes that are fitting for a desert trip. I walk out and steal a motorcycle and take off once more. I'm barreling through the desert, leaping hills at breakneck speeds and taking jumps over dangerous cliffs, and finally, after what seems like a million distractions and potential deaths via trees and fences, reach the point.

I park the bike and get onto the mat. Michael pops out the music and begins the yoga routine. Nothing is different, but it feels weirdly authentic, out in the middle of nowhere against the backdrop of yet another sunset. He finishes up and I feel weirdly accomplished having finally reached my goal. Out of nowhere, a hiker appears, says something passively dickish and walks away again, entirely ruining the vibe. He ruins my accomplished feeling and it feels like he intruded upon a serene sort of moment -- naturally, he was not allowed to walk away for this.

In the end, I had Michael hop back on the motorcycle, looking like he'd had a breakdown, bombing down the freeway back to the city once more to do the work that I'd blown off, while I was ultimately unfulfilled and as listless as before.

It was a weird, nice, personal touch that I never intended to add to the narrative or craft the scenario in my head -- I hadn't realized that it was playing out until I had finished the next heist that it was happening. But instead, it ended up accidentally creating extra depth for this character that I was playing, while surprising me that the game had let me imitate how I'd approach major personal crisis as a social support structure fails; with absolute reckless abandon, no regard for life or health while pursuing an asinine and artificially important objective, that even attaining wouldn't really accomplish anything.

One of the things I’m seeing a lot of (that I’ve done as well today) is people saying ‘I never thought I’d be so upset over a man I never knew.’

We may not all have gotten the chance to meet or speak to Ryan Davis, but we all knew him. He was a personality and a king amongst men, more out there and open than most even aspire to me. He’s been putting his life and career on camera and podcasts for a dog’s day, and each and every one of us has been taken on the crazy ride that was his life. From GameSpot to Giant Bomb to Cbs, from single life to Beyoncé’d life to married life, the man’s been open, honest and goddamn genuine.

He’s made everyone who got invested in his ventures a better person one unending belly laugh and cackling fit, one uncomfortable stare and awkward arm stroke at a time.

Grieve now duders (and duderettes? is there a female form?), pour one out, and take solace in the fact that the man lived how he pleased, carrying some of us kicking and screaming through our worst years while he and the crew flipped the script on everything that we knew about entertainment and games journalism with the most infectious joy to grace this planet.

Thank you Ryan Davis.

This is actually one of the more interesting concepts for a game that I’ve heard of in a long time. Nevermind, currently being developed by a small indie team in L.A., is a horror-puzzle game that uses biometrics to determine just how difficult of a game you’ll be playing. In order to do this, you’ll need to be using a Garmin Heart Monitor and a USB Dongle (unfortunately, neither of which is able to currently ship with the game.) Together, it is a tad pricey, however the game is completely playable without them.

Nevermind takes places in the Neurostalgia Institute and the minds of trauma victims, which the player will explore in a way akin to the movie The Cell, which Team Lead Erin Reynolds has cited as a source of inspiration. The gameplay itself is meant to stress the player by both creating a disturbing world and situations that will require quick responses. Should their heart rate become too high for too long a time, they will be pulled from the patient’s mind and put back in to the hub world of the institute so they may collect themselves. Moments of reprieve will be offered throughout the levels, but as the player progresses through the game, they will become few and far between, forcing them to learn ways to manage their own stress level and cope with their own fears on the fly.

Currently, the team has crafted one fully realized level. Contributing to their current campaign (they really aren’t asking for much at $3,000 over the next two and half months) nets you access to this and helps fund their overall vision of ten unique environments.

If you don’t contribute, at least check it out. The link to their Indiegogo page is here, and the game’s official website can be found here. Spread the word and take a glimpse, give them some feedback and ask some questions! It’s just too unique a concept for me to allow to languish.

Last November, during a tumultuous time in my personal life, I found that I had a lot of spare time on my hands. I chose to use that time to begin working through some of the biggest time sinks in my history with RPG games: Skyrim and Dark Souls.

This is at a time before I had a PS3, and at a time where I was envied those who did to no end. I had heard loads and loads about Demon's Souls, from frustration to cult-like adoration for it. I developed a strange sort of admiration of the game from the outside, having only been able to look at screenshots and see a few gameplay videos. I wanted to understand. I wanted to know -- what the hell was this game about? Unfortunately, at the time, it was out of the question for me to get a PS3, and I only recently caved on purchasing one. By chance, I stumbled across it at a local GameStop. One sealed, new copy of Demon's Souls, sitting right next to Yakuza: Dead Souls and... well, Dark Souls. Lots of souls games recently, it's kind of weird, to be honest.

So I picked this game up. I had put in a great deal of time with Dark Souls, but between my job and other obligations taking back that free time, trying to split it between Skyrim and Dark Souls, and then eventually purchasing Saints Row: The Third, I just hit a point where I didn't want to go back to it. It wasn't necessarily that it was too hard for me. On the contrary, I welcomed the challenge. It was refreshing to get the living shit beaten out of my in a game, to have spent literally hours playing a game, only to be laughed at by the enemy, stripped of everything that I had earned, and left only with a memory of where the Hollow would spawn and a vague sense of direction. Having inundated myself with the shooters of the season, it was nice to play an obtuse RPG that was going to move at it's own pace and did not care if I kept up -- the experience was mine to craft, for better or worse.

When I got home with Demon's Souls, I let it sit for a few days. I pondered whether or not this was a wise decision. I knew how much time it was going to take out of my life, I knew that it was going to be difficult, but after some deliberation, I cut the plastic and dove in. Strangely enough, I'm finding Demon's Souls to be a much better crafted game than the successor. Though I'm having a bit of difficulty finding my way around the Nexus, the central hub of the game, I really feel a better sense of direction than I ever did playing Dark Souls. They are directing me a bit more instead of throwing me in to a world, offering a thousand directions and saying 'Go.' Arguably the most challenging part of Dark Souls is the beginning, just trying to determine which direction is the right one for you to be travelling at any given time.

Instead, I'm finding Demon's Souls to be challenging purely from a design and gameplay perspective. Early enemies are not telegraphing their moves in quite as distinctly, the timing window for a parry and riposte seems much smaller, the penalties for losing your human form feel much more severe, and I'm currently banging my head a little bit against the wall of the Bridge Dragon. I'm not that far in to Demon's Souls, and it's perhaps unfair to qualify it as a much better game, but everything about it so far just feels so much more focused. The story and the world thus far have made sense to a certain degree, or have not required me to go to a Wiki to understand what the hell is happening, and that sense of direction means everything. On the other hand, I'm wondering if my experience with Dark Souls simply conditioned me a bit for Demon's Souls, giving me an intimate knowledge of the combat, stat bonuses and such, as well as an innate sense of caution and direction in a world that I've never been to before.

Only time will tell, but I can say with certainty that I'm very excited to continue playing Demon's Souls.

Once upon a time, when I was a young boy just starting middle school, I got a PS2. I remember getting a few games for it -- Shaun Palmer's Pro Snowboarder, Smuggler's Run, Jak & Daxter, and Final Fantasy X. I played these to death with a friend, even before I had a memory card. We'd start up Jak & Daxter, have my mom order a pizza and get us a gigantic jug of Lemon-Lime Gatorade, sit down, and not stop playing until the sun rose again, knowing that at some point... we'd have to turn that system off and lose all of our progress. We looked forward to the nights of pretending to be asleep to avoid scolding while keeping an eye out for those Girls Gone Wild commercials on Comedy Central and the uncensored episodes of South Park.

Occasionally, when my mom, my friend Alex and I would go out, we'd hit the grocery store. Here, we gathered snacks and sustenance to get us through a weekend of too much Halo and too little sleep, and every now and then, we'd get a chance to check out the now non-existent rental section.

I was still big on renting N64 games, like Ocarina of Time, especially when other people would work through puzzles I couldn't figure out and become Adult Link, so I could have a real sword and shield. But, once, in an adventurous move I decided to pick up a game that I knew nothing about, one that's cover, frankly, unnerved me.

Silent Hill 2. I was eleven at the time, and still excited to play just about anything but the games that were marketed towards my age range. I truly had no expectations about this game, had no knowledge of prior entries in the series -- it was the blankest of slates. I remember it starting somewhat slow and handling somewhat clunkily. But the gameplay is not what stuck with me. It was the story, the people, the characters, and the gruesome premise of everything that transpired.

I admit now that I was too young to be playing the game, but that was something I thought I was used to, starting with Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, followed by a haunting experience with Max Payne (which is silly, having gone back and played through it again). But Silent Hill 2 really left a mark in a way that I still find hard to put in to words. A story of guilt and remorse, longing and lust. A cast of characters that are all psychologically broken. A set of endings, none that I encountered being uplifting. It was... shocking. Yet, for some reason, my young self continued to play. I didn't understand James and the complicated relationship with his wife at first, but I was willing to try. I empathized with Eddie's plight as an overweight child who had been picked on, but was too cowardly to stand up for himself, and watched as he became overwhelmed by madness and vengeful wrath, leading to his undoing. I felt pity for Angela, who at the time seemed to just be sad and crazy. Even as the player, I wanted to help her even as she pulled away. I didn't understand. It's only in the years that followed, looking at analysis of her character, that I understand why she acted as she did.

Everything about that game clicked with me in a very special, deep, unsettling way that I haven't found in a game before or since it's release. The story and characters drove me forward, their arcs being memorable and engaging to me, evident by the fact that I can still recall them almost nine years later. It's stuck in my head as perhaps my favorite game of all time, and incurred many a late-return fee. But now I'm at a crossroads.

I feel it is my duty now to play this HD re-release. But in a way, I'm scared to dive back in to this. The Halo Anniversary HD release made one thing incredibly clear to me -- the games you once played and loved often are not as you remember them. Even with up-resed graphics, will Silent Hill be ugly? Will I still find the characters and dialogue to be as hard hitting?

Will I find pleasure in this release or will I realize that the memory of one of my most beloved games is just a rose-tinted lie?

With trepidation, I march on, and can only hope for the best.

(As a post-note, I'm not even sure if this remake will do my memory proper justice, going by the forum posts, but it's time to soldier on.)

Perhaps I'm jaded. Maybe I've seen too many movies, played too many games, read too many books. Perhaps I'm the minority on this particular issue even. But damn it, I'm kind of tired of these post-apocalyptic stories that like to ram vagueness down the consumer's throat about how the world has come to be what it is.

The first two games that spring to mind quickly are I Am Alive and Left 4 Dead. I'm willing to write the latter a pass on my frustrations because, let's face it, it wasn't a story driven game and it never intended to be. Left 4 Dead was a co-op shooter that focused on resource management and teamwork. The story was limited to brief, twenty second conversations in elevators or what have you and your character screaming about pills and ammo.

I Am Alive, however, is grinding on certain nerves, ones that I didn't even realize were so sensitive. "The Event" -- a phrase that is causing me a great deal of frustration just by reading it or hearing it. I just can't stand the faceless apocalypse, which might perhaps be excusable if the characters I've talked to thus far didn't refer to it literally as that: "The Event". "Hey, go look around for one of those government crates, y'know, the ones they dropped after... the event..."

It just bothers me in ways I'm finding it difficult to even describe. This seems like one of the biggest cop outs, design and script wise, that anyone could take, regardless of their artistic medium. It's true that I Am Alive is a $15 downloadable game that is rounding out Microsoft's "Alright, they're not quite good enough for summer release, but they still should get some advertising" House Party, but I'm finding it hard to forgive it just on account of that. It's clear that going in to this game, they are working to establish a tone and an atmosphere unique to this game. They want to make you feel alone and hated by the world, they want you to be just as in the dark about what happened and how it came to this as everybody else would be, but as a consumer, it just. bothers me.

And it's really just that obtuse nature of speech, the kind the accompanied those awful NBC commercials, where they talk in fairly non-descriptive fashion and go out of their ways to call this cataclysm "The Event." Just tell me something, anything. Tell me a bomb went off, tell me something happened somewhere that caused this, tell me that it was divine intervention. Just give me something, as a person. What the fuck is happening?

This isn't souring my opinion too much on the actual game thus far -- there's plenty in there frankly that's already working to take care of that. But it's certainly not helping. The story of the game right now seems to be fitting in incredibly well with the actual gameplay mechanics; a wonderful concept that, while cool on paper, plays out very mechanically and less than intuitively.

As far as gameplay goes, I've been fairly keen. The designers of this game clearly know how to make you stress your actions and choices, forcing you to make knee jerk decisions at times. Having gone through the first few chapters, one of the most irritating things to occur were scripted sequences in which tutorial messages would come up late and be detrimental to gameplay. The first time I encountered a group of enemies, I quickly drew my gun. This caused two to shoot at me while one charged me with a machete. After dying and wondering, what the hell just happened?, I loaded the last checkpoint and hit the same point and waited. The men approached me and uttered some dialogue, then a message popped up saying "Don't draw your weapon in this situation." Admittedly, early on in the game, this serves as a good lesson, but my issue with this stems from the fact that it sort of kneecapped me early on, demanding that I perform better for the rest of the game as my retrys were burned on tutorials sequences that my reflexes just happened to beat.

Despite anything negative I may say about it, I really am looking forward to completing I Am Alive. I've managed to get my expectations of what it was originally supposed to be under wraps, so I'm hoping that this can live up to the potential that it promises. Failing that, I hope that this game is used as a precursor to future game development. Taking the basic concepts of human interaction and survival and developing them farther in other games could go a long way, and I'd relish in the idea of a survival-horror game that cribbed from I Am Alive.

This game has seriously grabbed me in a way that I did not expect at all. I like dubstep. I like dystopian cyberpunk futures. I like shooting dudes in the face. Thus, I was kind of bound to enjoy Syndicate. But something about this game, it's... inexplicably satisfying. For some reason, just every detail about this game is clicking with me. The movement, the intuitive (and more importantly, functional) cover mechanic, the satisfying feel of the weapons in game. Everything about this game just feels incredibly right. The single player experience was a little lacking and did feel like it got rushed towards an undeserved conclusion at the end that really solves nothing, but it's pretty forgivable and not anywhere in the realm of offensive, especially when put in to direct comparison to the multiplayer mode.

Syndicate's Co-op mode is the first time in about six months that I've played a multiplayer game and didn't mind jumping in with random quick match players. Maybe it's the way that the game rewards you tremendously for operating in a support role as well as an aggressive role, but playing with three other people just feels like an incredibly satisfying experience. With the combat being snappy and brutal, ripping through waves of enemies with a few other people feels incredibly satisfying, especially if you get a crew that is diverse in their application set and familiar with the maps. It reminds me of how I used to play Rainbow Six games with friends, except that instead of being grueling and strict, Syndicate seems to encourage wanton experimentation, discovering what the most ideal way is to handle any given situation while also giving you the tools and support you need to be able to adapt and roll with any punches or curves that the game throws at you.

And for some reason, I just find the HUD and the overlay, particularly in the singleplayer, to be really cool. I like how just walking in to a room, the DART chip just immediately scans and identifies everything in the room, from "Wrench" to "Wire" to "Hobo". It all felt incredibly busy and initially was a bit of a turnoff. After sinking a little more time into Syndicate, it all felt rather natural while being oddly profound and unique while thinking about why and how it works, within the context of the game. For some reason I just looked around my house and was thinking, 'man, it'd be nice to have a little overlay like that in day to day life'. I wish I had a better way to define that right now but it's disgustingly early in the morning and I'm putting in some work in a Syndicate wiki overhaul and I want to go to bed.

More Syndicate tomorrow.

Heavy Rain has left me conflicted. We're creeping up on the second anniversary of the game's release here in the U.S., and it remains perhaps one of the most unique experiences that I've had with a video game to date. As someone who never played Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit, to the rest of the world), the gameplay has astounded me all the way from it's initial reveal to present day. It teeters on this delicate balance of being both the most engaging and interactive thing I've ever played, while also leaving me strangely disconnected from the entire experience.

All the actions of your character are carried out in what can only be described as quick time events; from mundane activities, such as brushing your character's teeth and drying their hair with a towel via Sixaxis controls, to fighting off knife wielding psychopaths and rushing to mend the wound of a suicidal woman. The whole thing introduces an astounding level of interactivity, because regardless of whether they are passed, failed or skipped, every action has a consequence. Though not all actions will have a major effect on the flow of the story (for example, making my character drink some orange juice), it's easy to see how failing to perform quickly enough could result in the death of major characters, leading to a potentially wholly different story.

Unfortunately, for as engaging and impactful as these sequences can feel, one major shortcoming has been the inability to directly control the character. Though I can only imagine it impossible, given the way that the game uses the rest of the controller, not being able to move your character with just the left thumbstick can lead to occasional frustrations as you attempt to steer them, much like a car, towards your intended destination. While this hasn't proven to be game breaking, it does introduce a strange disconnect between the player and the character admist traversal, something that feels all the more odd given how the rest of the game feels.

What is a great deal more bothersome is the quality of voice acting in Heavy Rain. Developed by Quantic Dream, a developer based out of France, the accents of their voice actors have a tendency to come through, ranging from subtle to incredibly overt. With the whole game hinging on it's ability to build tension and immerse the player in the events that are unfolding, it can be brought down or outright broken at times between stiff, unnatural deliveries, or hearing some measure of a Western European accent slip in to a Bostonian FBI agent's voice.

All in all though... Heavy Rain still feels damn good. I'm engrossed in the story that's being told and curious to see how all of these characters will eventually come together, and looking forward to being able to review this game proper.

Damn you Terraria. Damn you all to hell. I had a life once. I had a family who loved me, a girlfriend. A home. A job. A future. And then you walked in. That's incredibly hyperbolic and I haven't actually turned into a pseudo-heroin junkie (yet), but the amount of fun I'm having with this game, or at least the amount of time that I want to sit down and sink in to it, is crazy.

For Christmas, I received a new laptop as a gift, and it works tremendously better than the one I previously was using, to the point where I felt good about maybe actually possibly playing a game on it. So I downloaded Steam again, recovered my log-in information from the days where I created an account in an attempt to play TF2 with my high school classmates, and got down to business with their holiday sales.

Now Terraria was game that seemed to be incredible. The Quick Look painted an incredibly positive image of it, and the staff members who played it seemed to have really good things to say about it, and best of all, it was $2.50, less than the cost of a meal and well worth the price of admission. It was Minecraft, but with an art style that doesn't actively repulse me, and with some measure of in-game guidance. I didn't need to spend an hour downloading mods and digging through questionable Wikis and YouTube tutorials -- I could just play the game. There were some things that I really had to work at to get a hang of, such as effectively fighting enemies and developing good housing, but eventually, it came to me. And then, it was a game. Exploration had a measure of joy where I can strike out in any direction and find things to do. Combat wasn't an excruciating task, there was a better sense of randomness in my stumbling across caves that extend every which way in a seemingly endless manner. It's such a different experience than I've had in games that are similar, in that I don't have to treat it like work. I can just have some sweet, unadulterated fun.

I sank about 6 hours in directly after the game installed, after which I heavily debated calling out sick the next day. I didn't even really do much, other than create an apartment building for NPCs, but the simply act of mining, fighting off enemies and plain old exploration was just so much fun, that I didn't notice.

I don't know what it is about this game, but I enjoy it, more than I feel like I should, and I'm excited to sink unholy amounts of time in to it, if only to build a world-consuming castle.