Adventure/Explore

The Style is in the Details

HIGH Finally glimpsing the lost city of Shambhala.

LOW Quickly dying ten times during a chase sequence before getting a hint as to what I should be doing.

WTF "Don't you love how the water makes your jeans all squidgy?"

"This should be interesting. Or fraught with peril."

HIGH Murray's rendition of the closing credits.

LOW These games are always over too soon.

WTF Much of the game takes place inside a giant manatee.

He's not angry, just misunderstood

HIGH Hanging motionless for a split second a hundred feet in the air above a boss before crashing down on it bionic fist first.

LOW Fumbling ineptly with certain biomech enemies for a large amount of time before discovering their weakness.

WTF When replaying certain sections, the in-game chatter is sometimes replaced with more profane versions of the same sentence.

Computer scientists at the Pontíficia Universidade Católica in Rio de Janeiro are working on non-visual games for mobile phones that they hope will be fun for players who are blind, have low vision or are sighted. In a paper in the Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society, Luis Valente, Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza and Bruno Feijó describe their protype adventure game Audio Flashlight. They also discuss some things they learned during field testing about making games accessible to players with visual impairments.

Finished The Longest Journey last night, and it was fantastic, if not a bit awkward at times. The "battles" are strange in that since I can't fail, I can stand completely still and do nothing while the monster just looks at me and waves its arms. I'm aware that Dreamfall has a combat mechanic but my friends tell me that it isn't very well done. I'm curious if something akin to Shadow of the Colossus (which I haven't played) or the new Prince of Persia would work here.

Something's fishy in Spinner Cay

HIGH The main characters are as strong as before—perhaps moreso.

LOW The secondary characters? Not so much.

WTF Swashbuckly ending! Wait—WHAT?!

Team Fortress 2's "classless" update dropped recently, adding the new King of the Hill game mode, several new maps and some pretty significant class changes (despite being classless), the most prominent of which are the return of the Scout's double jump while using the Sandman (at the expense of 30 health) and allowing the Engineer to repair one end of a teleporter (including removing Spy sappers) by repairing the other.

Don't go in the attic

HIGH Giant alien heads! In three dimensions!

LOW Fighting a missile-shooting freezer, only to have my game lock up more-than-several times.

WTF The natural enemy of extra-terrestrials? Potatoes.