Darkest Dungeon: dungeon crawler meets sports management

Posted on Jun 21, 2015

I picked up Darkest Dungeon in the Steam Summer Sale last week and I've been really enjoying my time with it.  It's a gothic fantasy RPG resource/team management game that was KickStarted in Mar 2014 and is currently on Steam Early Access while under development.  Don't let "Early Access" disuade you, the game is fully playable right now.

You don't play any singular character in Darkest Dungeon but instead manage a roster of adventurers who you lead into the areas surrounding your town to defeat monsters, push the story forward, and get loot to build up your town and recruit more adventurers.

My Toolkit: A List of Games Part 1: iOS

Posted on Jan 03, 2012

Happy New Year!  Sorry that I haven't been posting much at all in the past couple of months.  The holiday was quite busy and so was work.  I've had a number of articles "locked in the chamber" but just haven't been around to polish them up and pull the trigger.

Things are actually slower right now (kind of a good thing!) but I'm trying to make finishing up these articles a priority for the new year.  So here's my first one, a list of games on various platforms that have gotten my attention over the past couple years...

Triple Town

Posted on Oct 13, 2011

Triple Town is an addictive, city-as-a-garden match three Facebook game designed by Danc of Lost Garden and Spry Fox.

The game was originally released on the Kindle as a kind of experiment to see if you could make a game on there. (you can, although there are some pretty extreme graphical limitations)  The Facebook iteration is pretty nifty.  The presentation is excellent and fun, but it's really the game mechanics that do it for me.

It's like pinball but with cars and explosions

Posted on Sep 25, 2011

Burnout 3 is still, in my opinion, one of the best arcade-y racing games out there.  It's a game series that realized that smashing your car - which happens more often than not in any racing - should be just as fun as the visceral rush of driving really fast and burning past your opponents.  The sound design was top notch and really added to the sense of speed and excitement.

Later games in the series didn't add much, except maybe frustrations: I found Revenge to be a bit frustrating in that rear-ending non-competitor cars caused a crashed instead of just shoving the card out of the way, and Burnout Paradise's open world, while cool, made replaying failed missions troublesome as you had to drive back to the mission's start point every time.

Four Indie games that I'm looking forward to

Posted on Sep 20, 2011

Really need to apoligize for the lack of posts.  The new job turned out to be a lot of work (what new job isn't), the weather was nice, and TIFF only just wrapped up last week.  But now it's September, time to put our heads down and get back to being productive, right?

Well, not with this post, not just yet. :) I'll do some development-related posts in the future (I have about 3-4 in draft mode, just need to clean 'em up) but today I just wanted to point you towards some indie games that I've been following the development on.  They're not out yet unfortunately, but most have a lot of juicy screen shots and videos for you to enjoy in the mean time. (And yes, I was inspired by Mashable's article)

Monaco

Monaco screenshot

As the Monaco website says, this game promises to be an interesting mix of "Pac-Man meets Hitman", although given the "heist" background story in the game, I prefer Pac-Man meets Ocean's 11.  You run around each level, avoiding the security cameras, hacking computers, distracting guards and picking locks, with your team of up to 4 buddies, attempting to steal something of value.

Monaco has a lot of 8-bit charm obviously, but it has science smarts too: all of the level previews use steganography to encode the actual data for the level right into the image!  Read the blog post on Facebook, it can do a much better job of explaining it than I can, plus it has more pretty pictures.