Free to Play Games (F2P) and World of Warcraft (WoW)! article by Wade Manns Since the beginning of the Internet, there have existed free games: download them, play them, no big deal at all. Then came the Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games, which were quite the opposite: you paid a (usually hefty) fee up front,...
Author: WManns
Weird and wacky animal detectives cause hilarity in three interactive seasons!
Sam and Max: The Adventure Games By LucasArts, then TellTale Games Genre: Graphical adventure Steve Purcell is a comic artist best known for releasing Sam and Max: Freelance Police in the late 80s. This comic series (and what I’ll be talking about, the games) follows the adventures of a detective dog who works for a...
The end of a cinematic era in this epic sequel of sequels
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 By Warner Bros. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson Genre: Magical fantasy Some say it’s the end of an era. It only lasted about ten years, though, so for cinema in general it’s a fairly small time frame, and arguably the literary potential can last indefinitely....
Watch out: this whimsical-looking tale is more than it appears
Mary and Max (2009) Directed by Adam Elliot Starring the voice of Toni Collette, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Eric Bana and Barry Humphries Genre: Black comedy/drama Let’s get one thing straight, first: Whatever you may think of claymation – the technique used by (among others) Aardman, creators of the whimsical Wallace and Gromit series and movie...
Oldschool RPG flavor comes to Steam, and it’s good
Cthulhu Saves the World and Breath of Death VII: The Beginning! By Zeboyd Games Here I was, just recently waxing near-rhapsodic on the virtues of old-school games for this very publication, when along come two of the best representatives of the Retraux game form I’ve ever seen! From independent developers Zeboyd come offerings that are...
World War II action takes a turn for the supernatural in this storied franchise
Wolfenstein: A Retrospective Back in the 80s, a computer-game author named Silas Warner made what could be considered the world’s first stealth-action game: Castle Wolfenstein. Taking place at the height of World War II deep in Nazi Germany, the game doesn’t give you much of a backstory or even a name. Since the graphics don’t...
The King’s Speech
The King’s Speech Starring Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush Genre: Drama/biopic Rating: R for some language. Here’s an excellent picture that delivers to us a dramatized look into the accession to the British throne of Albert Frederick Arthur George, or simply Bertie (Firth), Duke of York, who would become King George VI, shortly before the outbreak...
A look back: Retro and Retraux
(pronounced the same, actually) I’ve played quite a few retro titles in my time, and for good reason: Retro, as well as more modern attempts to capture the retro feeling through graphics and/or sound (known as Retraux as a sort of portmanteau of Faux Retro), is one of my favorite styles of entertainment. The Seventies,...
Become little plastic pirates and explore epic environments!
LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean By Travellers Tales and Disney Interactive Genre: LEGO-building, action-adventure Rating: E10+ for Cartoon Violence, Comic Mischief Once again the venerable designers at Travellers Tales partner with a license holder to translate a property to the LEGO medium. This time, Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean gets the treatment. It’s every bit...
Build and explore to your heart’s content in the retro-styled world
Terraria By Re-Logic Genre: 2D sandbox action-adventure-puzzler-RPG? Not rated, but if it were it’d probably be E10+. Terraria is an extremely addictive sandbox game that supports co-op, and you will need your friends for this. You make your character from quite a few presets of color and basic look; you create a randomly-generated world, small,...