Pit of Despair: The Crew

The Crew
Open World Racing Game
1 Player (More online)
System: Xbox One
Developer: Ubisoft
Year of Release: 2014

It's disheartening when you're playing a game and in order to keep yourself plugging along you find that you completely disregard the story and characters opting, instead, to substitute your own goals. So it was that The Crew, for me, was more about finding my way home from Chicago. How I got there, I'm not certain, but the Pacific Northwest was calling to me. The journey didn't take that long, but something was off. I couldn't find home.

XNA: PLATFORMANCE Castle Pain

Here’s a real gem of a game! Platformance: Castle Pain revels in how old school and punishing it is. See it’s deceivingly simple, and honestly the easier difficulties don’t prove to be much of a challenge at all. But once you crank up the difficulty, it becomes a gauntlet of countless deaths and infinite frustration. And it’s glorious.

XNA: Nuclear Wasteland 2030

I really want to open with "this game is garbage", because as much as I really hate this game, it's not technically garbage. Pointless, not great.. but not garbage. The main problem is that this game has no real reason to exist. It's an FPS for a dollar, and boy do you get what you pay for.

XNA: Breath of Death VII

How about we kick this off with the game that cemented my faith in the Indie channel in the first place? Breath of Death VII: The Beginning, a retro style RPG that parody’s pop culture and the RPG’s of days long gone. It might not sound terribly exciting, and truthfully I’m one of the few people who still really enjoy JRPG’s, but it really is amazing.

XNA: Intro to Xbox Indie Games

(I originally posted these on another blog back in December of 2010 and early 2011. Really though it didn't make much sense to have another blog, and was very short lived anyway. So I plan on posting the four entries about Xbox Indie Games here starting with this introduction. I also may, or may not, finish the last review of another indie game I was planning way back then, but maybe not. This might lead to more Xbox indie games getting covered, or is a cheap ploy to post more. You decide!)

Triggered: The Metroid Series

Every so often I find a podcast that I really enjoy and binge listen to it. Bonfire-side chat is a Souls-centric podcast that I discovered when they had just started diving into Dark Souls II. I wound up forgetting about them waiting for them to finish covering the game, and recently stumbled upon them again. They do appendix episodes between most regular episodes to cover listener questions and whatever else. In Appendix 55: 3D Dot Heroes one of their listener's raised a point about how they felt Metroid isn't actually a good video game series, but that it has one great game. I'm here to say, fuck that person.

Road to Justice: An Unjust Path

Simply put, I just don't give a shit anymore.

Dem Bones: Cat Tower

Cat Tower
Reverse Jenga
2-6 Players
Playtime: 15 Minutes
Designer: Aza Chen
Publisher: IDW Games
Year of Release: 2013

For a while now I've been fairly interested in board games. Sure as a kid I played plenty of the standard cavalcade of games, Monopoly, Sorry, Yahtzee, Apples to Apples, Clue, etc. And I think everyone's played Cards Against Humanity by now. But I've always been aware of this larger world of hobby board gaming. Sporadically I'd read or watch reviews and wish I had money to try some of these games out. Slowly, but surely, I've finally started amassing a collection. So let's start off with a kid's game that is essentially backwards Jenga! Meow!