Bastion By Supergiant Games, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment Genre: Action RPG Caelondia. Once a country by degrees gritty and industrious, but also beautiful and idyllic. That all changed when the Calamity struck. Something caused the world to simply shatter, its people turned to statues of ash, with no hope of repair, and so the ending to this tale comes before...

Oddworld: The story of a unique, though maligned franchise. Way back in the late 1990s, a company founded by special-effects experts called Oddworld Inhabitants began a years-long journey to tell us tales of the adventures of non-human, yet sentient species on a bizarre, diverse planet known as Oddworld. The first in this offbeat series, Abe’s Oddysee, was released in 1997....

LIMBO By Playdead Genre: Platforming/exploration “Uncertain of his sister’s fate, a boy enters LIMBO” – honestly, this sparse description given on Steam’s Store Page for this wonderfully understated, creepy game is all you need know of the story when you start playing. To say much more of it would be horribly spoiling what is an amazing and wonderful experience, albeit...

Two Tribes Games Another independent game studio has released a three-pack of its offerings on Steam, the game delivery service of which I’ve sung praises in the past. The name of this group brings to mind a song by the 80s new wave band, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and while they claimed that when two tribes go to war, a...

Captain America: The First Avenger From Paramount Pictures and Marvel Studios Starring Chris Evans, Hugo Weaving and Tommy Lee Jones Genre: Superhero-style action Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action Captain America is one of my favorite superheroes; simply patriotic, determined and very able to get the job done. But as we see in this excellent lead-in...

Singularity By Raven Software Genre: First-person shooter with Time Control Rating: Mature for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language In this game seemingly inspired by BioShock, you play a Marine, Nathan Renko, sent to the Russian island of Katorga-12 on a reconnaissance mission. Back in 1950, strange experiments were run here concerning a newly discovered element, E99, and its...

And now it’s time to talk about perhaps the best form of gaming ever: gaming for charity! In 2010, a group of independent game developers banded together with another one, Wolfire Games, to deliver their games in connection with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that defends online rights, as well as Child’s Play Charity, started in 2003...

Chantelise: A Tale of Two Sisters By EasyGameStation Genre: Japanese Action-RPG From the makers of Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, comes this more traditional action-RPG in the vein of, say, Secret of Mana or even, perhaps, a more primitive form of Final Fantasy XII (the behind the back view definitely lends itself to this). It’s definitely Japanese in origin, as...

Ghostbusters: The Video Game By Terminal Reality and Atari Genre: Third person action/adventure Rating: T for Comic Mischief, Fantasy Violence, Mild Language If you’re like me, you have fond memories of that excellent pair of science-fiction-fantasy movies from the late 80s/early 90s, Ghostbusters and its sequel. They saw a ragtag trio of “paranormal investigators” (everyone THOUGHT they were fake, even...

Fallout: New Vegas – Old World Blues article by Wade Manns Yet again Obsidian brings to us another piece of the puzzle that is the Courier’s life in the Mojave Wasteland. This time out the storyline and happenings are far quirkier than you might expect for an installment of Fallout; it seems to draw as its inspiration old 50s-style science...