Prey

Prey, by 2K Games, is a first-person shooter which offers somewhat more than stand and shoot game play. In Prey, you control Tommy, a Cherokee who wants nothing more than to take his girlfriend and leave the reservation. Then he (and his girl, and his grandfather, and the entire bar the three of them are in) is abducted by a horrific race of aliens. A malfunction in the assembly line he's loaded onto frees him, and he sets out to give his abductors an ass full of pipe wrench. Tommy may be the only hope humanity has against the alien menace, But he's really only interested in saving his girl, and getting the hell home.

Prey has a variety of interesting hooks. Tommy reacts verbally in fairly realistic ways to his environment, level design makes use of gravity manipulation, wormholes, changes in scale, and an interesting grab bag of both biological and mechanical scene elements. Also, the aliens have a number of monitors tuned into Art Bell's late-night radio show Coast to Coast AM, which is covering the events on the ground.

The biggest hook however, is Spirit-Walking. Tapping into ancestral Cherokee medicine, Tommy can leave his body to walk into areas that are otherwise inaccessible, and to hunt his enemies without risking his physical form. Not that his physical form is all that precious. Upon death, Tommy has the opportunity to hunt wraiths for a short time, in order to resurrect himself and continue the fight. While this ability does mean you won't spend any time re-hashing previously completed areas, it also means that the challenge is functionally non-existent, because Tommy is basically immortal.

Sadly, while the first half of the game is clever, many of the design elements that make it so lose their color fairly quickly, and the latter half of the game is little more than a run and gun experience. And it's LONG.

My recommendation is to rent it, play until you stop being confused, horrified, and disoriented, and return it, confident that your five dollars was well-spent.

MapleStory

At first glance, MapleStory is a charming online multiplayer platform hack and slash game. Cute characters traverse landscapes reminiscent of old Super Nintendo levels, swinging swords and shooting spells at cute monsters, accompanied by music that is, if not good, at the very least not unpleasant.

I remember how excited I was when I first loaded it up and saw gameplay that seemed as if player skill might just trump 22 hours a day of grinding. Sadly, this illusion was broken pretty quickly.

The sad truth of it is that MapleStory is not a good game. As a matter of fact, in a genre where the norm is monotony, MapleStory stands out as being not only monotonous, but grind-heavy to the point of serious unbalance. In fact, Unbalanced gameplay seems to be the majority of what MapleStory is built of.

MapleStory features four profession tracks (thief, warrior, wizard, and archer), each with their own skillsets. A brief look at a forum or wiki will advise strongly against certain skill choices for any class, as a large number of the skills are basically useless for a serious player. As for casual players, well, the MMO scene just isn't for you, anyways.

For an MMO, the ability for it to remain entertaining hinges on variety, and Maplestory is sorely lacking in this department. Quests from NPCs either involve travel, collecting a large number of a certain item (dorpped randomly by certain monsters), or killing a large number of a certain kind of monster. What's worse, NPC quests often unlock a good 10 levels lower than you'd have to be to complete them.

All that said, however, MapleStory is free to download and play. If you find that you enjoy it, there's a premium item shop you can spend real money at to enhance your gaming experience.

In any case, have some relevant links, kay?
The MapleStory Homepage where the game can be downloaded, the in-game currency can be bought, and a variety of other information can be found.

A MapleStory Wiki

Rez

When you've played as many games as I have over the years, it becomes harder and harder to distinguish one game from another. Within genres, there seems to be a sad consistency which tends to make most games, sometimes even games of outstanding quality, fade into the background.

This is not a problem Rez has. Part rhythm game, part shoot-em-up, Rez shines in a way that few games ever manage.

In Rez, you take the part of a net-diving hacker set on breaking into a network built to house Eden, the self-aware program tasked with controlling data-flow on an overwhelmed world-wide network. Beset by viruses, Eden has shut down, and you have decided to jack in and risk your mind in an attempt to break the firewalls surrounding her and restore her to functionality.

Rez is a delight for the senses. Some of the best trance music I've ever heard makes up the game's soundtrack, and the player's shots (themed to the background track) add to that soundtrack very nicely. The visuals are gorgeous, and even now stand out as some of the most beautiful graphics I've yet seen.

The game interface is simple; move the targeting cursor around the screen while holding down the fire button to lock onto up to a maximum of eight targets, release the fire button to fire at said targets. Targets include enemies, incoming missile attacks, support items dropped by destroyed enemies (Blue to evolve your avatar through the six available forms, red to power your overdrive attacks, and green to raise your score), and network firewalls.

Rez features a difficulty feedback system, which tailors the boss encounters found at the end of each area to player performance in that area. Mega, Giga, or Tera versions of the end bosses are encountred based on the percentage of enemies shot down during the course of the level.

Upon completion of the game, extra modes are unlocked. Score attack mode allows players to attempt high-scores on remixes of the original levels which feature new and much more numerous enemies. Direct Assault is a classic Sh'mup remix of the original game, setting the player to the task of playing all the levels consecutively. Lost area is a bossless area with high difficulty. High performance in extra modes unlock a number of other options as well, allowing you to pick your avatar's starting form, choose color schemes for levels, and even modify your avatar's lasers.

Rez is available for the Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, and now, in a super-pretty HD version, as a download for XBox Live Arcade.

Planescape: Torment

One of the lamentable truths about the video game industry is that when something is really and truly great, it has a roughly 80% chance of being missed, at least until it's hard to find, and will cost you an arm and a leg on ebay.

From time to time, you're going to see me review a game that is out of print. Often, these are games that could run you upwards of $100 on the speculative market. Now, while there are numerous pathways one could take to acquire pirated versions of these games, and while there is no harm done to the gaming industry if one was to pirate them (especially when the company or branch that made them no longer exists), I'm not about to suggest you run out to your nearest torrent site, grab disc images, download Daemon Tools, and play a stolen game. No sir. I'd vastly prefer that you got the game legitimately. From game scalpers, who are making huge profit margins from us sorry sods who got to the game well into the third inning.

Yep.

But anyways, I digress.

Planescape: Torment is a game from the amazing (and now defunct) Black Isle Studios. Published in 1999, PS:T sold fewer than 400,000 copies, but enjoyed critical praise, and is widely regarded as one of the best games of it's genre ever made.

Imagine you wake up on a slab, and a talking skull reads a tattoo off your back instructing you to find this guy Pharod, read your journal, and be secret about what you are. Except: there're a few promlems with that. You don't remember your own name, let alone this guy Pharod, you don't seem to have a journal, and as previously stated, you don't really remember anything about yourself, so it'll be hard to avoid letting that last bit slip. First things first, though, the skull says that you and he have got to escape this Mortuary...

Thus begins PS:T. It's something of an anomaly in computer video games. I mean, sure, you can hack-and-slash your way through the game, but you'd miss out on most of it. Truth be told, there are only four encounters throughout the game that can't be solved wthout combat. The game mostly shines, however, via it's glorious writing. The plot is thick with philosophy and existential dillemas, touching on such concepts as shared reality, the nature of man, and the very nature of reality itself. Dialogue is incredibly well fleshed out, the characters have interesting and satisfying backstories, and the entire thing just comes across as one of the most subtle, intelligent, and beautiful approaches to adventure design I've personally ever seen.

PS:T is set largely in the city of Sigil, The City of Doors at the center of the Dungeons & Dragons Planescape Universe (Planescape is also defunct, being one of the many settings which was culled when Wizards of the Coast bought TSR, the company which owned D&D and Planescape). The "Doors" in question can be found in any structure closed on two sides and open in the middle; an archway, for instance, or between the legs of a statue. All such doors require a Key, which could be anything from a memory of the smell of pastries, to a whistled tune, to a shard of glass held in your right hand, and can lead anywhere. The city of Sigil is covered with such doors, and much of the fun of the game comes in discovering where they are, and how one goes about opening them.

I can't heap enough praise on this game, but it's not for the weekend gamer. Start this game, and you're looking at 100-plus hours of gameplay, over .8 million words of dialogue, and an in-depth experience that puts most of the rest of the industry to shame.

One downside, however, is that it's buggy as all hell, and Interplay, who owned Black Isle, stopped support of the game before releasing patches that addressed the vast majority of them. Luckily, as so often happens with abandoned and well-loved properties, the fanbase has released a few mods and fixes which address just about any of the problems they could find. A link to these has been included at the end of this article.

Speaking of...

If you want to buy a copy of the game, it can be found at Amazon, with prices ranging upwards from $58.00

Once you've got a copy, you'll most likely want to get the unoffical fixpack.

You can also look at a fan-created archive of the old Official Site.

Dino Run

As you may or may not be aware, the steadily advancing technology of the WWW has added a cross-platform arena to the world of gaming, in the rapidly expanding universe of Flash games. Accessible from the very browser you're using to read this, are thousands of games, mostly made by unpaid hobbyists, and offered by and large for free to whomever wishes to play them.

The purveyors of consoles are well-aware of this. All three of the current-era of gaming consoles can access and play flash games, and the Wii even has entire fansites devoted to the browser-displayable games.

As time goes on, Ill be reviewing Flash games, as well as the more traditional PC, Mac and Console titles.

As for this review, I present to you Dino Run, by PixelJam. Dino Run places you in the role of what appears to be a velociraptor, fleeing the Pyroclastic Wall of Doom, as generated by the meteor what is about to kill off you and all your kin. Unless, of course, you can outrun it. Find somewhere safe, away from the fiery Doom Wave, and save yourself!

Pinning down a single reason why this game is so good is difficult, but most of it's qualities feed into a single benefit: Near-infinite replayability. Just a few of these contributing factors:

* Upgradable Stats: As you run from the Doom, you sometimes pick up eggs, which can be traded for Dino DNA, which, when enough is amassed, allow you to trade for ungraded stats, which in turn allow you to complete higher difficulty levels.

* Challenge Runs: In addition to the main game, there are 21 unlockable Speed Runs. Each of these present new challenges, such as hoards of dinos, lots of falling meteors, lava tunnels, even super-low gravity.

* Downloadable Bonuses: Unlock all the Speed Runs? Now save your bones for wallpapers, mp3s, and icon files for both the PC and Macintosh operating systems.

* Multiplayer Races: Yeah. Says it all, don't it?

* Hats: Donate anything above and beyond what PayPal sucks away in fees, and you're given hats. Lots of hats. Way too many hats. They may not do anything, but I swear that my fez makes Shrinasaur faster. Or at least more indie-hip.

Add all this to a speed game which fights you every step of the way with lava, panicked dinosaurs, and the occasional pterodactyl dropping rocks on you, and you've got a game which I'll be playing for a very, very long time.


Hey, look! Links!

First off, and most importantly: Dino Run at PixelJam games.

Want another perspective? JayisGames did a wonderful review of Dino Run, as well as lots and lots of other wonderful games.

Escape Velocity: Nova

From Ambrosia Software, purveyors of some of the finest shareware known to human kind, comes Escape Velocity: Nova. This title puts you in the role of a starship captain at the helm of your very first shuttlecraft. Where do you go from here? Space piracy? Commercial freight running? Military service? Asteroid miner? The choices are yours to make, and each choice you can make is fleshed out in remarkable texture and detail.

Escape Velocity: Nova comes packed standard with a very open universe, which allows for the maximum freedom within the engine, but has less in the way of story than many players might want. But hey, that's OK. One of the best things about the Escape Velocity series is it's modding community. Mds are available which entirely overhaul the game, placing you both in familiar universes, such as the Star Wars, Star Trek, and Foundation settings, as well as in entirely original settings. On some of these overhauls, the writing is above and beyond what I've seen for player-written mods for any other game. There are even two (of which I am aware) that have professional writing talent behind them.

The game interface is pretty simple. view is top-down (in space... yeah, I know.) and everything is keyboard-controlled. The controls may take a while to get used to, seeing as how there are about thirty different keystrokes which control everything from requesting landing clearance, to selecting secondary weapons, to hailing ships to beg for mercy or fuel.

Ambrosia Software is cool enough to give you almost the entire game for free, and to allow you to continue playing forever, even without paying your shareware fee*. But payment means they'll make more awesome games. And I want that, and you want that. so for chrissakes,pay yer shareware fee!

Want to know more, download EV:N, or take a look at it's thousands of mods?
Check out the Homepage

Fate: Undiscovered Realms

This one, it seems is best left short and sweet. Fate: Undiscovered Realms is almost exactly the same game as Fate. Added to the pot are:

! A Story-arc! Now you've got a goal other than fame and glory! Yay! (The story still feels tacked-on, but it's a mild improvement.)

! Several new NPC quest mechanics! Collect a number of mini-monsters, escort a wounded NPC to a given level, or activate and then defend a shrine for a given period of time.

! Expanded content! Lots of new item types, lots of new monsters, lots of new pets, and lots of new dungeon themes.

They've also gone and given different pet types different movement speeds. While this can be a bit annoying when your crystal golem thing seems to always lag behind you and never manages to actually get involved in combat, it does add a bit more strategy to pet selection (pet selection is still done via the fish-feeding mechanic.)

Honestly, This feels more like an add-on than a true sequel. It's built on the same engine, has the same flaws, and doesn't add enough to gameplay to justify the second purchase. Bottom line? If you love Fate, then Fate: Undiscovered Realms is likely to be just as much or more fun. If you never played it, then this is a better first buy, despite the tacked-on story claiming it starts with your triumphant return to the surface. If you weren't overly fond of the first one, this won't entice you.

Fate

Take what is basically a Diablo 2 clone, strip out the outfits, classes, and runes, toss in a few innovations, and wrap the whole thing in a sort-of cute aesthetic. The end result is Fate, a game by WildTangent games.

Fate places you in control of a young and unknown adventurer, newly arrived at a village which has sprung up around the gate to a near-infinite dungeon*. You're given a randomized main quest (Slay something or other 45-55 levels below the surface), an axe, and a cat or dog, and set loose upon the denizens of the deep.

Despite initially feeling like a simplified Diablo 2, Fate has a lot going for it:

Pets
As well as helping you in combat, your pet can run back to town to sell items for you, meaning you don't neessarily have to teleport back to town every few minutes to sell things. In addition, you can feed fish to your pet (gained either through fishing, or bought from NPCs that can on occasion be found in the dungeon) to change it to one of 20 differant forms, which range from large predatory cats to wyverns and unicorns.

Fame
In addition to the standard experience levels, your adventurer earns fame for completing sub-quests and slaying named monsters. Upon reaching certain totals your title is upgraded, and you are given a few skill points to spend. Aside from the skill points, some upper-eschalon items require certain levels of fame to be reached before your adventurer can equip them. A bard in town can, for a price, raise you to the next level of fame.

Bloodlines
Once your adventurer's quest is completed, you can choose to retire her, and pass the mantle of heroism on to the next generation. Your hero's offspring starts his adventuring life with two advantages: a little extra fame, and a family heirloom, which is selected from your hero's inventory when you choose to retire them. That heirloom grows in power when it is passed down, and a hierloom that has been passed down for several generations could easily become absurdly powerful.


Of course, all that said, there are a few downsides. First off, the camera control is a bit abysmal. you can rotate the camera 45 degrees counter-clockwise or clockwise, but as soon as you let go of the key, it snaps back to where it started. This often leaves you fighting with a wall between yourself and the camera With nothing but little circular markers to tell you where you, your pet, and the monsters you're fighting are.

Secondly, sub-quests, which are your main source of fame, have only three real themes. You'll be killing a monster, picking up an item off the dungeon floor, or killing a monster and then picking up an item off the dungeon floor. And you'll be doing that over and over. There's no real story. Just a kid walking into a dungeon to kill a big monster fifty or so levels down.

As much as I like the heirlooming and pet mechanics, and as much as I like the idea of ner-infinite* gameplay, I don't think Hasty III is going to be taking his ancestral ring to kill the Legendary Green Dragon named Kazzak'thul on level 48 of the dungeon any time soon. Still, I can see picking it up for a few hours here and there.

*there is a limit to everything in Fate. Specifically, this limit is 2,147,483,647. You can't have more HP than that, nor can you delve deeper than that in the dungeon. Other values rising above this threshhold will display oddly, but will otherwise perform normally.

Knights of the Old Republic

It's honestly not often that I play an RPG and find I'm willing to call it an RPG. Generally, I prefer APG (Adventure Progression Game,) as role playing never actually enters the picture. In the rare case that it does, the choices tend to be pretty artificial. Do you want to save the kid from the bandits? Or do you just want to shoot the kid, then kill the bandits, then murder a few innocents on the way to your home, which doesn't have a door so much as a bloody pile of corpses, which tends to keep away the Jehovah's Witnesses better than a door in any case?

Knights of the Old Republic manages to break that trend in a variety of ways. You can sow the seeds of conflict among your companions, threaten people for reasons which tend to actually make sense, and in the true Star Wars tradition, move towards the Dark Side, not because you're evil per se, but just because you like an easy or fast path to power. Needless to say, I like this about it.

KOTOR takes place thousands of years before the events of the films. There's some sort of Sith menace, and you get to be all Jedi, and smack the ever-loving crap out them, all while trying to figure out just what made them capable of amassing such a huge fleet in the course of a few short years. Nothing I say about the plot is going to convince you one way or another about the game, I expect. It's Star Wars. In addition to it's involved and time-consuming main plot line, there are a myriad of smaller plots to pursue, many of which have both Light and Dark Side solutions, both of which tend to be equally satisfying, as far as depth of thought is concerned. You're either going to like the story, because it's a part of the Star Wars universe, or you're not, for precisely the same reason

If you're looking for massive amounts of innovation, look somewhere else. The engine is the same one used in Neverwinter Nights, although the camera is a lot more satisfying, and nothing will strike you as especially new or clever. But it's a solid game. It's well-thought out, well put together, well-written, and remarkably easy on the eyes and ears (being fully voice-acted by honest-to-goodness voice actors, and having the standard amount of Star Wars awesome in the sound-track,) considering the release date of at least 100 years ago (five, actually,but who's counting?)

I've only really got one thing bad to say about it, which is standard, unfortunately, to about 95% of computer APGs and RPGs: there is rarely any consequence to theft. Wandering into people's houses to rob them blind has zero effect on your alignment, so sneak and steal to your heart's content! In fact, like most games of it's ilk, if you're not willing to rob and plunder you're going to miss out on a pretty valuable revenue stream, as well as a metric ton of useful (and occasionally unique) items.

All in all, it's a solid title, with a lot of things to suggest it. Plus, I mean, come on. Light Sabers. Seriously.

Want an "un-biased" look at Knights of the Old Republic?
Look No Further.

Screenshot not enough for you? Check out the
Official Trailer

The Experiment

As someone who generally buys his games used, and who often is behind the curve by as much as years, I realized when started writing this blog that I would have to start buying games that people were actually faced with on store shelves. To this end, this week I went to a few electronics stores, and bought a game I saw on the shelves of all of them: The Experiment.

The Experiment, by The Adventure Company, is a game which places you in control of the electronic surveillance systems of a derelict laboratory ship, and gives you the task of helping a woman discover just what the hell happened there.

The entire interface is played out as an all-purpose security and intranet desktop application, which allows you to track the goings-on via multiple cameras, view the personal files of various employees, and turn on and off lights, monitors, and various other electronic doodads. and generally be the ghost in the machine.

Sadly, there's very little I can say good about this game. The voice acting is god-awful, the interface is clumsy at the best of times, and Lea, the woman you're following around, acts with exactly enough independence to make me want to rip my hair out by the roots. And I don't mean that in the "Oh dear, this puzzle is very hard" way, I mean it in the "Fuck's sake, why can't you figure out what I'm trying to tell you to do?" way.

Nearly every line of the script is as wooden as a tobacco shop indian, and from the first spoken line, you know your ears, and your sense of dramatic tension, are in for an abysmal experience. Worse yet, though her face has clearly been animated, when Lea inevitably spends a good long time looking directly at one of your cameras and talking, her mouth and face don't so much move, as fix themselves firmly into the expression of someone who's just spent seventy-two-and-a-half hours in a row watching nothing but sitcoms, and is now sitting in a pile of their own excrement.

Honestly, I didn't get very far into this before I quit. A time came when I was supposed to be finding something with the cameras, and the game wasn't exactly clear on where exactly that thing was, which wouldn't have been a problem, except that Lea kept giving me a reminder prompt that I was supposed to be looking for it, which was played at full volume regardless of which cameras I had activated, and repeated about every ten seconds or so.

Remembering this has me looking at the disc sitting on my desk, and considering microwaving it, so it can't be a bother to anyone else.

Sam and Max: Season 1

Based on the comics of Steve Purcell, Sam and Max: Season One is a series of six short point-and-click adventure games starring, eponymously enough, Sam, a big-gun-packing Bogart-esque dog, and Max, a hyper-kinetic kind of rabbity thing. Together, they form the Freelance Police, the worst nightmare of villians, crooks, ne'er-do-wells, and innocent bystanders everywhere.

Telltale Games has given the genre a much-needed facelift, bringing it solidly into 3D, fully voice-acted, full-color glory. They've also managed to remove most of the obstacles to the average person's enjoyment of the genre, such as tiny or difficult to find items, inventory item combination, and completely unintuitive solutions to seemingly simple puzzles.

Episodic gameplay is perfect for Sam and Max, it turns out. Each episode can be finished in about an hour, ideal for the casual gamer. In addition, the difficulty ramps slowly throughout, allowing the novice to slowly adjust to the style of gameplay, and the sense of humor of the designers. Each episode (except for the season finale) ends on an ominous note, which leads nicely into the next episode.

The character design is fantastic, and the NPCs are far more than the standard cookie-cutter obstacles, and watching the way they develop throughout the series is a joy. Throw in a couple of unexpected musical numbers, and you've got me pretty much enthralled.

Sam and Max: Season One is available in it's entirety from Telltale Games, for the PC, and as of October 7th of this year, will also be available for the Wii.

And now, Signifigant Links!

The Sam & Max Official Telltale Games Homepage
You can buy the episodes here, as well as a fair amount of other Sam & Max swag. Be sure to check out Abe Lincoln Must Die (epidode 4), which is being offered for free.

FreelanceSamAndMax
A YouTube user who's thoughtfully gone and uploaded the first three episodes of the ill-fated Sam and Max Fox Kids cartoon. Only 24 episodes aired before it was given the axe, and it's not quite up to the standard of the comics or games, but fun nonetheless. Incidently, you can buy the entire series on DVD for the low, low price of twenty-five American dollars at Amazon.

Well, see you around, little buddies.

ADOM: Ancient Domains Of Mystery

My inaugural review is for a game which has, sadly, a limited appeal. Don't take this to mean that it's not good - it's one of the most in-depth games I've ever played, not to mention one of the most challenging.

If the word "roguelike" sounds familiar, you've probably already heard of, and even played ADOM. If not, and if you're under the age of 30, then there's a whole slew of games out there you've never experienced, and unless you keep a fairly open mind, a whole slew of games you never will experience.

ADOM is, in my humble opinion, the best of the bunch. A fantasy adventure game wth randomly-generated dungeons, thousands of items, hundreds of race/class combinations, bunches of quests, secrets, easter eggs, and one cute white puppy. There's really only three problems, as far as the average gamer is involved:

1. The "graphics" are ASCII text. Your character is an @. A goblin is a g. And so on.

2. There are a LOT of commands to remember. Most keystrokes are valid commands. There are commands to wipe your face, and clean your ears, among other things.

3. Death is forever. Your character must survive the entire game to win. Expect this to take weeks or even months of casual playing, if you ever manage it at all.

Personally, I don't find any of these things to negatively impact my gaming experience. The ASCII text graphics means the game is wicked small. They also allow me to imagine the action in my own way, and as The Maxx once said, "The shows in my head are almost always better."

The large number of commands means that at any given time, there are many choices you can make to attempt to ensure your character's survival. Some otherwise very difficult monsters can be dealt with by giving them certain items. Even the seemingly extraneous commands have uses in certain situations. For instance, you can deafen yourself by shoving beeswax in your ears, but your earholes aren't an inventory slot, so removing the beeswax requires cleaning your ears.

As for the death thing, I find that the tendancy of gamers is to take risks in fantasy games that are reckless, based on the idea that they've just saved, and therefore if the risk doesn't pay off, they can always reload, and suffer no loss. Permadeath makes you slow down, take measured risks, and seriously consider things like whether or not that super-heavy armor is worth it, considering how much it's going to bog you down and how will you carry that AND all your spellbooks, and still have room to keep yourself fed, and what about this hammer? It's not been identified yet and... Yeah, you get the point.

ADOM features a detailed skill system, special class powers unlocked at milestone levels, a feat system not at all unlike D&D's, and several endings, based on a number of in-game factors, plus, it's a 100% free-to-download-and-play game. If you give it enough time, you'll get pulled in, I damned near guarantee it.

Hey, look! Links to stuff!

The ADOM Homepage
Here you can find the pertinent download for your operating system, The blog of the author, Thomas Biskup, and some fan-art. Also contains stuff about JADE, the sequel to ADOM which will NEVAR BE RELEASED.

The ADOM Guidebook
The most comprehensive collection of information on ADOM the world has ever seen. While it's an incredibly useful collection of information, it IS spoiler-tastic. Many people find that much of the fun in roguelikes is the slow discovery of differant aspects of gameplay.

OK, until next time, keep playing games. I will.

Hasty Plays Games

Hey kids, I'm Hasty Lumbago, an avid Video gamer since the mid-eighties. I've become pretty opinionated in all that time, and I've played more games than I care to count.

Honestly, my friends get pretty sick of hearing about my latest gaming exploits, and many of them have suggested that with all my ranting and rhapsodizing about games I've been playing, I ought to join the rest of the blogoshpere and start reviewing games on the internets.

So here we go. I've got a few reviews lined up for today, and over the next few weeks, I hope to expand my library to include quite a few games, both new games, and older ones that you might have missed out on.

Incidentally, I'm trying to do this for a living, so if you'd like to do something that will help a starving geek, go ahead and click through some of my banner advertisements. Or you can be one of those awesome people who donates via pay pal. Seriously. I love those people.