Devolver will sell games on G2A but can't guarantee the keys we provide them will work unless G2A purchases the $500,000 Devolver Shield.
— Devolver Digital (@devolverdigital) April 21, 2017
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Full Mojo Rampage Review
Over the Top Games’ new roguelike-lite, Full Mojo Rampage, is quite the voodoo soup, one that has been slowly bubbling away in Steam’s dangerous “Early Access” section since late 2013. The game, having finally reached its boiling point in May 2014, is now out, and we are about to find out just how tasty this […]
Gone Home and The Reality Effect
Gone Home. Gone Home. This was The Fullbright Company’s famed “Story Exploration Video Game,” a game that I had been aching to witness, to dissect, and to analyse. This, I already knew, were a Critic’s Kinda Game - one that would absolutely speak both to my ludological and narratological interests… only, the increasingly massive amount […]
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Latest posts
- Quote of the Day: Devolver Digital
- G2A, Gearbox, and the Problem of Good and Evil
- Stranded Review
- Don’t Let Sleeping Dogs Lie
- Bioshock Remastered, Promise, and Emotional Torture
G2A, Gearbox, and the Problem of Good and Evil
The recent Gearbox-G2A-TotalBiscuit debacle (reported on excellently at Vice’s Waypoint by Patrick Klepek over a series of news articles here, here and here) that was the result of a deal struck to officially distribute Bulletstorm via G2A, was in the offing for the longest time.
It had to happen, because the legitimate online price-race (one that has now cooled, to be frank, after several online retailers have been, or are in the process of, shutting down shop) drives a portion of consumers to find the best available price every time, and every time they are caught unawares by the illegitimate practices of various services such as Cdkeys, Kinguin and the titular G2A, it is principally because of the way we are being sold games, and because of a lack of consumer education.
Therefore, such a burst of activity around this topic has been a good refresher and reminder to gamers that not all is above the board with these cd-key shops. Of course, by now it should be so very clear to all of us that anything that has the word “keys” plastered to it is morally bankrupt in the general view of the retail establishment. But it isn’t, and won’t be, not until the system changes - and that change will probably be to the worse.
The thing is, the framing of Gearbox’s brush with the Bad Guys was largely from the point of view of the scorned developer, as with the help of TotalBiscuit, Gearbox navigated the situation deftly and swiftly, which had the unfortunate side effect of distorting the crux of the issue, and perhaps side-stepping other relevant questions of digital distribution that absolutely led into the intended (or unintended) result of blending questions of legitimacy with illegitimacy, and proper practice with improper practice.
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Stranded Review
Note: This review was written entirely sans PR materials and research by bet bonus AU and betcode AU; ordinarily, we pride ourselves on diligence and copious amounts of background research, but due to the game’s clear intentions and sensibilities, chose to approach this review differently.
The single worst thing about adventure games - the one aspect that is also almost wholly unique to them - is being stuck. (Worse still, in fact, is knowing when you’re badly stuck.) For players, after all, adventure games are all about progression; for developers, they are all about managing it.
The genre on the whole is a curious balancing act of controlling tempo, pacing, difficulty, balance, and the flow of information.
Peter Moorhead’s Stranded, then, is supposed to be
“[…] a minimalist adventure game that foregoes dialogue and puzzles to focus on atmosphere, mystery, and exploration; it is both a love letter to classic point & click adventures, and an experiment with the fundamentals of the genre.“
To read the store page like the Devil does the Bible, then, according to the quote the fundamentals of adventure games are 1) dialogue, and 2) puzzles. From what I could gather, Stranded has neither of these things. Hence, it would be perfectly fair to state that Stranded is either a piss-poor adventure, or it isn’t one at all. Love letter? More like breaking up with emoji. (more…)
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Don’t Let Sleeping Dogs Lie
United Front Games, best known for their atmospheric Hong Kong city brawler Sleeping Dogs (2012), is rumoured to be closing down.
The weight of this rumour is not slight, and deserves all the extra attention we can bring to it - true or not, at this point in time we don’t yet know for sure - because, once again, the string of events that led us here reads like yet another example of Konami-like profound executive failure.
But, to start from a beginning. According to United Front producer Dan Sochan, Sleeping Dogs - which never quite lived down its reputation as a True Crime game - actually started out as the original game Black Lotus, which was then subsequently bought and slated by Activision to be the next part of their True Crime game series as True Crime: Hong Kong. After the publisher lost faith in the game’s market prospects, with Activision’s Eric Hirshberg noting in 2011 that “The finished product was not going to be at the top of that genre,” it was ultimately poached (sans the True Crime moniker) from Activision by Square Enix, who would then release the game as Sleeping Dogs in 2012. (more…)
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Bioshock Remastered, Promise, and Emotional Torture
We’re all huge fans of the BioShock franchise here on The Slowdown, but we’ve also had our fair share of the game series. We awaited each game, lathering ourselves with collector’s editions (remember the original Big Daddy statue that would crack in half?), with nightly chats about lore and story, and even with articles written on the game here in the archives. They are some really good games. Some guy named John Lanchester once said somewhere that Bioshock “was the first game he played that had the ambitions of a novel” and I find that very damn agreeable.
It’s just that no-one in particular was looking forward to The Bioshock Collection in the traditional sense. We’re not console gamers, so they just weren’t in the view, or on the horizon. The games are bygones for Ken Levine, too, who had claimed the games took such a toll on him that he thought sequels would make him “[…] lose my mind, and my marriage.”
We too were arguably done with these anomalously nihilistic, brutal, and taxing video games, perhaps even with additional future games in the series, the idea of which has soured somewhat with Levine’s surprise dissolution of Irrational Games as it were in 2014. With the joint release of the remastered versions of BioShock 1 and 2 on the PC, however, I have been made a fool.
I’ve been roped to care for something that was supposed to be both free and carefree.
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