Erik Novales

I played the demo for Tom Clancy’s HAWX recently, and was pretty disappointed in it.
I found the plane to be quite difficult to control (for no good reason), and the “action camera” mode is extremely disorienting. You are forced to use the “action camera” for part of the tutorial, and it’s quite maddening — for [...]

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My first brush with Rez in person was at some “games = art” presentation at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts a few years back. (Of course, I had already seen “that article” about it, too, but I wasn’t going to dismiss the game as a gimmick since it had received such widespread acclaim.) [...]

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My wife completed The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess the other day, after starting it several months ago, and playing in sporadic but lengthy bursts (the kind that you tend to indulge in only on the weekends, and which usually leave you feeling guilty about “wasting time”). I was a spectator for a small, but [...]

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I did some air travel a few weeks ago, and had a chance to play and finish Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime. It’s a fairly easy action RPG with some interesting features, and a very good localization, which makes the charming humor in the game seem, well, charming, as opposed to bizarre. Gameplay is split [...]

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Braid is a very good game that overcomes some ham-fisted writing and overly ambitious themes. I won’t really dwell on talking about the game in this post other than to say that I recommend it, and that there are some mild spoilers in the remainder of this post.
I saw a post by the author commenting [...]

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Last night we went to see Supergrass in concert, which was a decent show. Standing near us was a guy wearing a promo T-shirt for a game — I had the same shirt, from an E3 several years ago. The game was "Seed," and was apparently shut down a few months after its release. As [...]

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Oasis frontman links videogames to knife violence:
"If kids are sitting up all night smoking super skunk [cannabis] and they come so desensitised to crime because they’re playing these videogames, it’s really, really scary."

* "sudden expertism" being a bit of Ticket lingo describing people who insist that they are an authority on any subject you care [...]

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We bought Ticket to Ride on XBLA the other day, and Sandy has pretty much owned me in our (decidedly non-combative) matches. I was 0-9 before I eked out a victory last night. I feel like I have a pretty decent grasp on appropriate strategy for the game (card and route selection), but it never [...]

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When I haven’t been playing GTA IV, I’ve been trying to whack another game off of my backlog — the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. I finished it today, having played the series somewhat out of order — 2, 3, 4 (aka Apollo Justice), then finally the first game.
While having played the series out-of-order probably [...]

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I am currently playing the crap out of Grand Theft Auto IV. To get this out of the way immediately — it is not a 10/10 game, it isn’t perfect. It isn’t even close. That said, the middle third of the game is pretty excellent, and the game every now and then does something quite [...]

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