Russian Fairy Tales
Sometimes a puzzle game will come out where the entire purpose is to solve puzzles. While I could be perfectly happy solving puzzles all day long, I crave some atmosphere and story and characterization intermingled with good puzzles. Fortunately for me, there are games like Jazz & Faust. Jazz & Faust is a puzzle/adventure game […]
Watchmaker's Clockwork Mystery
The Watchmaker is the latest offering from Got Game Entertainment, and while it has a great deal of potential, it only lives up to part of it. You play two characters: Victoria Conroy (lawyer) and Darrel Boone (paranormal expert), who meet at 3:00 in a London law office, where you are briefed on the mission. […]
Cuboingo is Fun Cubed
I can remember a time when the game that was taking everybody’s quarters, and sucking away more work hours than pointless meetings was a now-classic game called Tetris. As time moved on, the market shifted, and we were treated to eras of shooters, RPGs, and strategy games. While these were all enjoyable in their own […]
Assimilation: AI is Irrelevant
I hope I’m not hopelessly dating myself, but I remember when the pizza joint down the street from the college campus got in a game called Ataxx (this was back in 1990). It was different from a lot of the other games that were coming out at that time, in that is was a turn-based […]
Patrician II is a Rich Game
Patrician II takes you back to Europe in the 1300’s, where sea trading was really starting to take off, and a veritable fortune could be made if a trader was clever enough. The most resourceful sorts of fellows could even reach positions of power in a town or even a seat on the fabled Hanseatic […]
Once You Pop, You Just Can’t Stop
It’s weird being the ‘puzzle guy’ around the office. Everyone automatically assumes that I’ll want to get the latest puzzle game to review, and – plop – there it is on my desk. But do they know me? Do they know my secret desires? No, let the ‘puzzle guy’ have his puzzles. Maybe I wanted […]
Somewhat Divided on Schizm
I don’t know how they do it, but Dreamcatcher always seems to find a new puzzle/adventure game just to keep me from being bored. Publishers of some of the best games in this genre ever (Traitors Gate, Cydonia, Safecracker – hey, while I have your attention, guys, where the heck is game two of The […]
CycleFX marries exercise and gaming
When I first ran into Neil Nusbaum, the president of CycleFX, at E3 in 2000 he was showing off an interface he’d developed that would feed into a PC running software that would track mileage, speed, etc. Like I imagine others had, I said, "You should really make it so you can play games on […]
Patrician II is in a League of its Own
Through all the to-do around the new console platforms and who’s got the hottest sports games and so forth, it’s good to see certain types of games that I thrive on enjoying some popularity on the PC. In particular, the economic/military strategy games are really starting to come out. Maybe it’s because of Civilization III […]
Here's the Finnish Line
Scandinavian innovators change the face of wireless gaming. What do you think of when you think of Finland? Well, if you're anything like me, you think of Laplanders, those really big reindeer, probably a lot of snow, and the only country in Europe to pay back the United States its Lend-Lease from WWII. Pioneering advances […]