Video Game Review: Resident Evil: Revelations

This was my first real foray into Resident Evil, and I liked it so much that I finished the entire game in one sitting that went way late into the morning.

Though I have no other Resident Evil benchmark to compare it to, I thought the campaign story was really neat and well done, lots of twists that kept me guessing. Most of the characters had interesting personalities, though as a new player to the Resident Evil series with no prior background knowledge of the characters besides knowing they exist, I feel not much was done with Chris and Jill outside of them obviously being “the celebrity couple that won’t admit it” in the game. I suppose you’re meant to know them from previous games, but as a standalone, they ended up being the flattest characters even though you get to play the both of them and thus like them by virtue of them being an extension of “you”.

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Board Game Review: Tzolkin: The Mayan Calendar

A thing I like to do on occasion is review board games (and, technically, card games too). I’ve done many over at my main blog, and I think it will be fun to do it on occasion here as well. So if you’re interested in learning about some of the many high-quality (and, let’s be honest, not-so-high-quality) games out there, keep your eyes on this space and we’ll see how many we can cover! We’ll start with a game I learned to play last week: Tzolkin: the Mayan Calendar (which is technically spelled Tzolk’in, but I’m going to make things easier on myself and leave out the apostrophe).

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Video Game Review: Universe Sandbox ²

Have you ever wanted to throw an asteroid at the moon? Or replace the sun with a neutron star? Or even terraform Mars? The sequel to Universe Sandbox, a much more fleshed out version of the original game, is currently in Early Access on Steam, but already has many more features than the original. Arguably the most notable of these is that collisions now actually look like… well, collisions. Rather than the larger object just absorbing the smaller object, now the kinetic energy of an object is transferred into heat and light energy, with debris being spat out of the crater, just to impact an hour or so later. It truly is a magnificent display, watching an asteroid strike a planet in real time. Even better – the asteroids leave permanent craters on the surface they impacted.

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Review: Black Ops 3 Beta

This weekend, after an extraordinarily long install process, I got around to playing the Black Ops 3 beta.

At first it felt promising- was this the change of pace the series so desperately needed? The combat felt snappy and generally responsive, and the maps were well thought out, avoiding the choke-point based design that plagues games like Battlefield.

However, as I played more and more, I started to feel as if this was a game I’d played before. And I had.

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Video Game Review: The Simpsons Tapped Out

I downloaded The Simpsons: Tapped Out on my iPhone over a year ago and I’m still playing this game almost every day. I usually don’t play iPhone based city builder games more than a week or two. After a while it gets very repetitive and there is a long down time until you actually get to build anything. Although there can be a 24-hour wait for something complete in Tapped Out, this down time didn’t shy me away from the game. What kept me loving this game is the same thing that kept me loving the television series: the great comedy and story telling.

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