Brad Gallaway's blog

With buzz building around "inevitable" new console announcements, I started thinking about it and came to a realization: For the first time in over thirty years of playing games, I'm honestly not excited about or even looking forward to the next generation of hardware.

If you're into strategy games or old-school role-playing games, the Nintendo 3DS is where the action is right now.

Indie developer and fighter of good fights Mommy's Best Games recently released Serious Sam: Double D—XXL on Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA). The big cheese of Mommy's Best Games, Nathan Fouts, explains everything anyone needs to know about XXL, and a few other topics came up, to boot. Apart from the noogie he gave me (it still smarts!) the interview went rather well.

Welcome back to a semi-regular feature here at GameCritics.com: TouchTalk. In every installment we'll be reviewing a handful of mobile games and apps that you might want to check out… and maybe some that you'll want to avoid. This time we cover Ravenmark: Scourge of Estellion, Hungry Giraffe, Blood Roofs, Sushi Mushi, Noble Nutlings and Paper Galaxy.

At the recent DICE conference which just took place in Las Vegas, David Cage gave a speech which outlined nine points supporting his message that "the industry needs to grow up." Predictably, his comments angered many people and I've been seeing comments across the gaming spectrum disagreeing with him or trying to prove him wrong in various ways.

Today I had the chance to visit Signal Studios located in Kirkland, Washington, and I spent about three hours talking with the good people hard at work on the upcoming free-to-play Ascend: New Gods coming to XBLA and other platforms to be announced.

It's not a backlog title, but I managed to get a copy of Fire Emblem: Awakening for Nintendo 3DS, and I've been putting some time into it… it's not title I was eagerly anticipating, but I needed a portable title and word of mouth from people that I trust was almost universally positive.

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate hits the 3DS and WiiU in March, and I'm hoping that a lot of you out there who haven't tried the game yet will decide to jump aboard. If you do, be aware that Monster Hunter has always been utterly terrible at welcoming newcomers. Even though it eventually became one of my favorite games of all time, I fully admit that my first few experiences with the series were nothing short of awful.

I'm trying to make a serious effort towards trimming down my backlog this year, so I decided to give Bayonetta one more shot. I've started and quit the game twice before, but it comes up in conversation so often and in such positive terms that I'd feel like I wasn't doing my critical due diligence unless I gave it a least one more try.

The Denpa Men: They Came By Wave is a title I had been looking at in the e-shop since the day I picked up my 3DS, but I just wasn't convinced to buy. It was cute enough and it seemed weird enough, but the demo didn't sway me and I left it on my wish list for later.