Author: Christian Donlan
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I wish every game had Subpar Pool’s card system
[ad_1] I love XCOM’s Second Wave options almost as much as I love XCOM itself, which is quite a lot. Second Wave is a suite of design choices that were added to XCOM: Enemy Unknown in order to make the game harder, less predictable, a bit more weird. All of this, though, at the…
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Game of the Week: Why does Saltsea Chronicles feel so much like actual travel?
[ad_1] Our Game of the Week is Saltsea Chronicles, a beautiful seafaring adventure filled with choices and different islands to visit. There are people to meet, radios to listen to, dreams to sail and cultures to explore. I thought it was wonderful, and I hope anyone playing it over the weekend has a really…
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Subpar Pool review – golf meets pool and it all clicks beautifully
[ad_1] A thrilling arcade pool game with a lot of leeway for making your own blend of rules. One of my favourite studio names of the last few years comes from the team that made PinOut. PinOut was basically Tron: The Pinball Game. Against a humming, buzzing, looping backdrop of glorious retro-futurist dance music,…
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Saltsea Chronicles review – a dreamy adventure that contains multitudes
[ad_1] A crew searches a watery world for a missing friend in this evocative game of exploration and conversation. Don’t call me Ishmael. Today, you can call me the whole rabbling cast of the Pequod. This is the beautiful, improbable conceit at the heart of Saltsea Chronicles, because it’s a game in which…
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George Fan, creator of Plants vs Zombies, on design and his new game about the greatest fact in the world
[ad_1] George Fan is the creator of Plants vs Zombies, alongside fascinating, playful, elegant games like Octogeddon. He’s also seen as having created the best ever GDC talk, “How I got my mom to play through Plants vs Zombies.” It’s a beautiful bit of applied thinking about game audiences and tutorials. Hardhat Wombat Publisher:…
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Super Mario Bros. Wonder really is filled with secrets and surprises
[ad_1] Super Mario Bros. Wonder preview Developer: Nintendo Publisher: Nintendo Platform: Played on Nintendo Switch Availability: Out 20th October on Nintendo Switch There’s a moment early on in Super Mario Wonder that genuinely surprised me. I laughed out loud. I was shocked, almost scandalised. I had run up to a pipe, right, these staples…
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Game of the Week: Assassin’s Creed Mirage is another great game about climbing
[ad_1] Climbing is one of the great joys of video games. It’s one of the things I am always looking out for. It felt like it was a rarity in games until something like Crackdown came along. I was a long way through Crackdown before I realised that it wasn’t really about…
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Assassin’s Creed Mirage review – a fascinating new city and the embrace of a classic formula
[ad_1] Golden Age Baghdad, along with a return to a more focused, stealth-based design, makes for a rich and characterful adventure. Reader, I am in love with the House of Wisdom. Who wouldn’t be? A vast palace of books with thick walls, beautiful ceramic window inlays and plenty of what the Californian real estate…
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WarioWare: Move It! takes the series back to Smooth Moves
[ad_1] Somehow, it’s been 20 years since the first WarioWare game, which means it’s been 20 years since we all started catching toast, jumping over shark cars, and catching funny little bugs beneath glasses. The first WarioWare is such a strange, singular game it feels like it hasn’t aged at all. But for the 10th…
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Qrth-Phyl and rethinking how we remember video games
[ad_1] Game preservation is one of those topics that we keep returning to with greater and greater frequency. In a week like this, and a year like this, it’s not hard to see why. Marvel’s Avengers, a mega-budget game that still feels relatively fresh, is being delisted, while Hyenas, which looked weird and rather brilliant,…