There are few things about a video game which can turn me off. Basically, there are four.

1. I dislike games that feel gimmicky.
2. I don’t like games whose sole purpose is to show off some new graphical effect.
3. I don’t like most sports games.
4. I don’t like games whose game play is too frustrating.

I am leaning towards that last one for this game, although I am really trying hard to cut the game some slack since I am playing on a laptop keyboard. The game routinely has puzzles or combat situations where dexterity with your fingers is paramount to success. While I do enjoy games with a reasonable amount of finger gymnastics, this game makes it something of a core mechanic. The maneuvers required in a few parts of the game, however, are nothing short of brutal — especially when you want that fabled Sword of Nex. I think I am going to stop playing this game for a while, until I can get a proper keyboard, or at least one with some tactile differences. My laptop keyboard is so polished, I can’t tell when my fingers slide from one key to the next.

Categories: Games
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This game was first released on Xbox Live 360 in 2010, but I have been playing it on Windows 7 via Steam for the last few days. The title was the third-highest selling game on the XBLA, generating around $7.5 million in revenue during the first year of its release. The title won several awards from industry groups after its release, and was named as one of the top games for 2010 by several publications.I absolutely love the design of this game. It plays contrasting light and dark scenes perfectly, and the filter effect shaders which are used to apply a film grain look to the game are top notch. The continuous level and puzzle system is simply fantastic as each chapter flows easily into the next. The few enemies in the game are moody and fit in perfectly with the game environment. The controls couldn’t be simpler: arrow keys for movement and jumping + the control key to interact with the environment.

Categories: Games, PC
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“Cannot initialize audio hardware”

If you get an error message like the one above in Police Quest 3, or in some other Sierra games, then it may be due to your processor being a little too fast for its own good. On my retro box, the Pentium class processor was executing things a little too quickly, so much so that the game could not initialize the sound hardware properly. The solution was to slow it down by disabling the hardware turbo mode or running software like “PENTSLOW.EXE” which disables advanced processor features and makes the processor run more like an i486.

Categories: DOS, Games, Retro
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This could be just another Internet hoax created by someone with a few skills in Photoshop, but the domain “baldursgate.com” has popped up with a count down timer. If you scan through the source code for the web page there are some clues hidden within. Searching around brought up nothing concrete, including from the company who now owns the rights. Oooh baby, very exciting!

Update: It seems Atari, Wizards of the Coast, and Overhaul games are enhancing this timeless classic. You can bet there will be updates to the Infinity Engine, which I have yet to determine if this is a good thing (I love that engine). But a boost in resolution and definition would be very welcome, especially when our 27″ monitor arrives…

Categories: Games, PC
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Check out this site: http://www.turboviews.com/

He does a great job of reviewing titles. The videos are both information and entertaining to watch. This should definitely be parked under your review site of choice for TG-16 / Duo, and Super CD games.

Categories: Games, TG-16
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This is the first installment of (presumably) a multi-part puzzle game series. The first version was fairly short but had a nice, not so in your face musical score. I guess it’s fairly typical for this type of game, as you’re often spending a lot of time in one particular scene. My advice to you is don’t pay too much attention when the game tells you there is nothing of interest here when looking at Granpa’s book shelf. I used information in those books to unlock the tool cabinet under the sink. Personally, I find the “find the hidden number” games to be annoying most of the time, so I hope there aren’t too many of them in the sequel.

Categories: Games, PC
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All you need to know about this game is that there is an awful software bug which rears its ugly head when you travel to Spain before Syria and get the chalice. This little detour works perfectly fine on the PC version, but the GBA version will never reveal the icon for traveling to Syria even after finding the missing clue. I now must restart the game from the beginning, if I care to do so.

Categories: Games, Nintendo GBA
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It has been a while since Dragon Age first appeared on the market. My wife have been playing off and on since the release, and we are close to completing the game, definitely within the last 25%. To make a long and frustrating story short, I managed to destroy our operating system installation accidentally one dark and stormy night (NTFS file system gone, EXT3 in it’s place with additional files installed on top for good measure), on the very drive which held our Dragon Age and Fallout 3 games. Two very long games, so no small amount of investment. Obviously, there was much drama and hand waving.

Long story short (didn’t we already do this part?), I recovered most of the save game files, reinstalled the operating system (Windows 7, 64-bit), and installed all of those nasty dependencies. Now, I was ready to install the game. I gingerly placed my Dragon Age game disc in the DvD drive, ran the auto-installer, and… whammo! A big ol’ data read error in my face. Now isn’t that just great. Insolent hardware! I went through this process several times later (copying contents from the disc to the hard drive, disabling the Data Execution Prevention for the installer, etc.), and to make a long story short, had no success with the same error appearing in seemingly random locations during the install. However there is a silver lining, and I eventually did manage to get a fully functional installation. Would you like to know how?

SCRATCH HERE TO REVEAL SECRET

I simply copied the disc’s contents from another machine’s DvD drive (an iMac in this case) to my Windows 7 box. Ran the installer and it worked. No fuss, no muss. Except for all of the fuss and muss I mentioned above. Please feel free to send me money if you find this helpful.

Categories: Games, PC
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I am really, really late in finding this out (I’m looking at you Jared), but you can still buy World of Goo and pay whatever you want for the title during their birthday sale. It’s an experiment of sorts, and the data they collected is not terribly surprising (I’ve seen data collected before which indicated purchasers went “on the cheap” because that’s “all they could afford at the time”), but if you think there is money to be made using this model, then it’s certainly worth it to go whole hog and put your data where your mouth is, or your money where your data is, or whatever.

Categories: Games, Linux, Mac OSX, Windows
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Amazing video of “The Beast” vs. Justin Wong at California State Polytechnic University. It was during the EVO Championship Series fighting tournament in 2004. It’s been a while since that contest, but anyone who has ever picked up a controller and played one of the Street Fighter games, or who was lucky enough to have a local arcade centre, should be able to recognize the skill involved in playing this game and others like it. I found a decent feed on YouTube.

Categories: Games
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