ToeJam & Earl

You can’t go home again.

One could say that is the story of ToeJam & Earl, a game about two aliens from the planet Funkotron stranded on the planet Earth. But it’s also the story of retro game players seeking the games they loved as children. Read more

Dwarf Fortress

“This is a joke. It has to be a joke.”

That was my reaction when I first downloaded and started playing Dwarf Fortress. At first blush it looks like a throwback to an old University mainframe game. I assumed that, like Robot Finds Kitten, Dwarf Fortress was some sort of sophisticated metacommentary on PC gaming. Read more

The Perils of PC Gaming: Uninstall THIS

I’m a simple man. I have simple needs. One of those needs is that when I uninstall a program from my PC, it actually be uninstalled. Apparently, this is too much to ask from a cold and uncaring Universe, or at least from the Universe’s cold and uncaring software developers. Read more

Death of a (Magazine) Salesman

A few days ago I had the opportunity to read Josh Norem’s excellent write-up describing the end of tech magazines in print. Around the same time, I had a number of conversations about our move to print, and each time the same topic popped up: why print a magazine you’ve been distributing electronically for two years? Why not just ship a disc, or why ship anything at all? Read more

A Reviewer’s Job?

I’ve been reviewing games for several years now. One thing I’ve learned from seeing how people react to my reviews is this: different people expect different things from a review.

Some people want to know if a game is good enough to spend money on. Others just like reading about games and want to have conversations about them. A third group of people read reviews of games they have already bought and seek validation. It’s this third group I find a little mystifying. Read more

Golf King

Here we go again fellow cheapskates, time for another tasty morsel of free online games to satisfy your empty wallets. We’re going back once again to the wonderful world of ijji to check out one of their top games, Golf King. Read more

Railroad Tycoon

Let’s talk about Sid Meier’s truly great game. Not Civilization, because everyone knows about Civilization. No, for older gamers, the name that springs to mind is Railroad Tycoon. Read more

The Fool’s Errand

Synergy is a situation where the sum of the whole is greater than its parts.  Cliff Johnson’s classic puzzle game The Fool’s Errand is an example of this principle in action. Read more

Deadly Rooms of Death

Take one part Sokoban, stir in two parts Chip’s Challenge, and add just the tiniest dash of the old Unix game Robots (for flavor), and you have a concoction approximating Caravel Games’ flagship title, Deadly Rooms of Death, or DROD for short. DROD is a puzzle game where you assume the role of Beethro, a Smitemaster, who cleans out dungeons using nothing more than his sword and his wits. Read more

Styrateg

Rake In Grass is an independent game developer from the Czech Republic. They’ve recently turned heads with their hysterically gory side-scrolling shooter Jets n’ Guns. But the real gem in their collection is Styrateg, a turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme. Read more

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