Review: Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 (PC)

When a game title includes the word “Simulator” there's a justified expectation that there will be an exhaustive tutorial or at least an extensive manual to consult. Imagine dropping into a Jane's flight simulator or even something older like Falcon 3.0. Put in control of a jet at the end of a runway or on the deck of an aircraft carrier, and 99% of us would like explode or eject before getting the wheels off the ground. That's what Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 is for the narrow field of car mechanic simulators.

Review: Convoy (PC)

Convoy's biggest problem is that every time I think about it I get a glimpse of The Simpsons episode “Maximum Homerdrive.” Through a cartoonish series of events, Homer winds up hauling cargo in an 18-wheeler. At one point a version of the diddy, “Convoy!” (or at least a version of it) is repeated.

“We're gonna drive this convoy...!”

And that little excerpt of song spins through my brain every time Convoy – the game – starts. It's really annoying.

Review: Codename: S.T.E.A.M. (3DS)

If you like Valkyria Chronicles, you are going to like this game. Maybe Fire Emblem or Advance Wars are more your thing? Codename: S.T.E.A.M. might be a good fit. Even if you have never played or heard of those games, keep reading because it still might be the kind of game you like.

S.T.E.A.M. stands for Strike Team to Eliminate the Alien Menace. That pretty much sums up what you need to do.

Instead of a top down view of a map in many traditional turn-based strategy games, Codename S.T.E.A.M. lets you view the game world from on the ground which is unique and refreshing.

The single player campaign in this game is great and balanced (much like the rest of the game). There are all kinds of missions and new aliens are doled out to you at a reasonable rate.

Review: Mario Party 10 (Wii U)

If you haven't played a Mario Party game I would be surprised. Starting out with three releases on the Nintendo 64, four on the GameCube and two on the Wii, Mario Party has seen a consistent release schedule since 1998. I'm not even counting the portable releases over the years on the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS. There was even Mario Party-e for the e-Reader, but that's more obscure than finding game cheat codes in modern games.

Review: Splatoon (Wii U)

Splatoon is the new property from Nintendo with a cute premise: anthropomorphic squid kids participating in an ink fight. The colored ink you shoot, spray, and splatter actually paints the terrain of the combat area. Your character is able to "swim" in your ink color to not only fast-traverse across the map but refill your ink ammunition. This basic game control makes for a very different experience compared to other games where proper ground control will dominate lone-wolf or sniping tactics.

Review: The Witcher III: Wild Hunt (PC)

Everything you've read or heard about The Witcher III: Wild Hunt is true.

Those weird bugs, game-crashing or otherwise, you heard about from your second cousin; the glowing reviews by the vast majority of players and the enthusiast press (groups often on opposing fronts); the nudity from that weird guys you shared a bus ride with through a questionable part of town; the gritty violence of careful rolling and parrying; storytelling that actually weaves the world and it's inhabitants into an interesting whole; alchemy and magic; and the sweeping vistas of a game that packs a "Wow!" Factor of at least 70 when it comes to detail and texture.

Review: Slow Down, Bull (PC)

I have to say, I was pretty bummed out that Slow Down, Bull l had absolutely nothing to do with a Night Court reboot. If you'll recall -- if you're old enough -- Night Court was a sitcom that ran on NBC for 9 seasons starting in the mid 1980s and Nostradamus "Bull" Shannon was the towering bailiff that featured prominently in nearly every episode I can remember.

However, once clear of that particular "Hurdle of Disappointment," I was pleasantly surprised that a game so "cutesy" and obviously designed for mobile devices or touch screens could be so engrossing for quick play sessions.

Review: Guilty Gear XX Λ Core Plus R (PC)

Any fighting game that asks you to "Solve for R" is generally a video game that is a pantless hobo doing a jig on a piece of cardboard while strumming a handmade banjo and reciting recipes from "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" (just volume 2). That is to say, entirely nuts but not without its own charm and sophistication. Guilty Gear XX Λ Core Plus R is one of those pantless hobos. (The "Λ" is stands for "Accent" in case you're looking for this one on Steam.)

Review: The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III (PC)

The Incredible Adventures of Van Hellsing III is the final game in a trilogy of action adventure games utilizing the isometric view of combat that the Diablo series has perfected. The respect and reverence that Hellsing III holds up Diablo is quite evident with the frequent "homages" and downright borrowings in some places. Besides some rather hot and furious combat in places, the game writers definitely did their best to keep themselves entertained by including a ton of horror/gaming/nerd jokes and Easter Eggs for those amongst us who have to click every imaginable surface or game texture. Myself, I averaged about one third of the available "surprises" in each area.

Review: Shovel Knight (Xbox One)

I bought Shovel Knight originally on PC in the Summer Steam Sale last year in the midst of a purchasing orgy of akin to Shark Week. It quickly supplanted not only the games bought at the same time, but became my sole focus. There are very few games that can keep my attention for any appreciable amount of time, as the majority will get played for a stretch until they get unceremoniously dumped into the "to be finished later" pile. Having a very "pun"-ny sense of humor and an appreciation for odd visual choices in both character and level designs makes it a stand-out when compared against the typical battle for higher fidelity in all things.

Review: Evolve (PS4)

Welcome to the planet Shear. It's a roughly Earth-sized world containing a wide variety of flora and fauna, all of it inimical to human life. It's like Australia stretched out over an entire globe. Everything is either going to kill you deliberately or circumstantially.

So what could possibly be worth coming to such a choice hellhole of the Universe? Simple. Big game hunting. And we do mean BIG game.

Review: GTA V (PC)

It's safe to say that Grand Theft Auto V is one of those games that just keeps on giving. And two years after its initial release on consoles, GTA V has reached its most potent form on PC. Besides an extensive single-player story that stretches across an expansive world, the game packs in a full suite of video editing tools to create exportable films, a complete multiplayer mode that's heavy on action, and another awesome soundtrack that features just about every genre of music one can recall.

Review: 3D Realms Anthology (PC)

Most of what comes packed with the 3D Realms Anthology is a painful reminder of the period in PC gaming when there were many, many stabs at trying to match what consoles were doing.

In a year that saw the release of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System along with Super Mario World, PC gamers were saddled with the likes of Arctic Adventure (a sequel to 1990's Pharaoh's Tomb, also in this collection) that starred "Nevada Smith." It was sad attempt at capturing the, oh, I don't know what... FUN! of 16-bit console games. And no matter how bad the games were, we PC gamers, at least around my neighbourhood, stuck it out hoping the playing field would level off. It took more than decade. All through the 1990s Apogee/3D Realms -- the evolutionary line between the two has always been blurry for me -- there were incremental differences and improvements to making a platformer work on a PC with the likes of Secret Agent (1992), Hocus Pocus (1994), Alien Carnage (1993), Dark Ages (1991), Bio Menace (1993), Monuments of Mars (1990), Monster Bash (1993), the horrible Truxton clone Major Striker (1993), Crystal Caves (1991), and even the the first couple of Duke Nukem games. Most of the games from this era are curio items your eyes would scan over at a garage sale and there's this momentary flicker of memory that makes you appreciate today's video games a whole lot more, even the terrible ones.

Review: Zombie Kill of the Week (PC)

Tazman: Zombie Kill of the Week Reborn (ZKWR) on Steam is a re-release of a game that came out back in 2010 (or 2013 depending on the source). ZKWR tackles the trope of zombie horde destruction in a 2D map with your character being able to shoot 360 degrees in what can only be described as one of the worst rotator cup tears of all time. The game art is very simplistic – I'd go so far as to describe it as a flash-game on steroids, but the visuals aren't the draw – the game speed is.

Aaron: Let's be very clear about this. Zombie Kill of the Week started as an Android game in 2013 (or 2010). That's not to say that Android games can't be fun or should somehow be frowned upon, but the gameplay doesn't lend itself to a PC game.

Feature: Comments on GTA V (Part II) - Climate Change

Why don't more GTA V citizens ride bikes?

At first I couldn't put my finger on why littering in GTA V sparked in me a mixture of irritation, a high level of anger, and sadness. At first I thought it might be due to the casualness of the littering. Michael finishes coffee with an FIB agent, and Michael leaves his coffee cup on the patio table, the agent throws his on the ground. I switched to Franklin at one point as he finished off a can of Sprunk. He then tossed it to the sidewalk.

In real life, littering does irritate me, especially when the item being tossed is recyclable. Is your life so damn busy you can't hold on to that empty can for bit to drop it into a recycling bin? Or hand it over to a can collector? After some deep thinking, I think the reason it grates on me so much because Los Santos/Blaine County is a closed system. For all we know, it could be a biodome on Mars or trapped in a snow globe on the desk of Tobias Funke. Either way, the boundaries of the world in GTA V are clearly defined and there's a definite "Here be Dragons!" hard edges to the map. (Other countries and nationalities are name-checked but we never see those places.) So the fact that all the characters in GTA V seem to treat littering like it's no big deal is incongruous with what daily life should entail, which is a lot of the three R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

Review: Tower of Guns (PS4)

Tower of Guns aims to try and mix a few popular ideas that show up in other indie titles, with the biggest one being procedurally generated levels, but a floaty control scheme and generally unintuitive gameplay makes this tower not worth the climb.

Review: Battlefield Hardline (PC)

Video games are an escape from reality. Where else can one explore strange new worlds and so on? Not only is it an escape from reality, it's an escape from consequence. Mow down a dozen (or more) mercenaries and it's no biggie -- you'll never be brought up on charges. It's fantasy, which makes it all the more confusing that Battlefield Hardline's main conceit feels so ridiculous. And most video games are ridiculous.

Review: Aaru's Awakening (PC)

Aaru's Awakening is an electronic version of patting your head and rubbing your belly. Some players will be able to “get it” right away because of some quirk of neuro-synapses or extra fibers in the corpus colosum, that important bridge between the left and right hemispheres of your brain.

For this writer, the game felt more like I was patting my head, rubbing my belly, hoping on one foot while trying to learn a dirty Russian limerick and deking between high-heat laser beams. That's my way of saying, the game isn't easy. In fact, most of my advancement felt more like an accident than anything connected to competence or “gam3r skillz.”

Review: Söldner-X 2: Final Prototype (PS Vita)

Nothing like a good ole fashioned horizontal shoot-'em-up to take the rough edges off of a lousy day! Unless, of course, you suffer from an advanced case of obsessive compulsive disorder… then perhaps this may not be the preferred method to decompress.

Review: Total War: Attila (PC)

It's an ancient concept, but names have power. When you mention a certain name, depending on reputation, certain feelings are evoked.  Even today, the name of Attila the Hun conjures up images of rampaging marauders and ravaged lands, of burning cities and blood-soaked battlefields where proud and foolish armies dared to challenge the nomadic king known to the dying Roman Empire as “The Scourge of God.”  Now, The Creative Assembly brings the last days of Rome and the rise of the barbarians to life with Total War: Attila.