Travel back in your mind, if you can, to the mid-80s. Travel back to your local mall, and enter the arcade. Crowded, noisy, maybe smoky?  Filled with flashing lights and sounds of primitive audio processors? I am filled with a rush of nostalgia whenever I think of the classic arcade; 20 or more cabinets of wood, plastic and glass, free-standing...

Splinter Cell series Tom Clancy, the renowned author of political action thriller novels, has carved out quite a little niche for himself in the world of computer gaming, most of his work being distributed by Ubisoft. From Rainbow Six and its many spinoffs (Ghost Recon, Vegas, Raven Shield), tactical first-person shooters; to HAWX and its sequel, arcade-style flight simulators, to...

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, plus a monthly charge to...

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 nebulously defined police agency (they...

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. But those were some of...

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 – Mary and Max is...

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 certainly aware of the clichés...

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 help out much (it’s still...

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 of World War II. Unfortunately,...