Robot Viking

While at PAX I got a chance to be hands-on with the new X-COM: Enemy Unknown. It’s brilliant. Those of you who remember how hardcore difficult the original series was will find the same difficulty here, but now there’s a tutorial, so folks who’ve lost the manual (me) can actually play it without constantly alt-tabbing [...]

There’s a New Event Nearby, and it is in a little game called Guild Wars 2, the latest offering from ArenaNet. Fans of the original Guild Wars and its expansions likely wept tears of joy when it was announced and queued up for the head start weekend.

The Steam summer sale is ongoing, and I’ve already discovered one unplucked gem – Legend of Grimrock. It’s a great old-school RPG computer game, but better yet, it offers a brilliantly simple plot for a tabletop mega-dungeon crawl.

Duels of the Planeswalkers lets you play Magic: the Gathering on your computer or gaming console, against the computer or online friends. It’s a standalone game — no card collecting — and it gets updated every year. It’s sort of the Madden of strategy/puzzle games, and this year’s edition is fantastic.

Day 1. We lost Jesse. Worse, his loot lay out of reach. It all went down in the town of Pustoschka. I curse that town, from its pre-Infection Neo-Nazi leanings to the slim pickings of its supermarkets. More like Supermark-nyets. Rewinding back throughout the day, it seems now difficult to believe we could overlook the [...]

There are actually two Mechwarrior video games coming out in 2012. Mechwarrior Tactics looks like an online version of original Battletech, and just released some screenshots, hexes and all.

Apparently it’s a day for teasers, as word has spread around the internet of a restless website stirring from its age-long slumber. Will the Children of Bhaal stride across the Forgotten Realms once again?

The ability to pilot a giant battlemech against other human pilots online is enough to get a gamers drooling all over their SRM launch controls. Here’s a look at the new teaser trailer for Mechwarrior Online, featuring a big friend who carries the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Pinball FX2 is a platform for original pinball tables, played video game style on your Xbox 360. The latest table, Epic Quest, lets you earn experience and epic items while defeating a shifting array of monsters and collecting loot.

Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO) has been free to play for more than two years now. Rather than a death knell, the end of monthly subscriber fees in 2009 turned out to be a brilliant decision that boosted the number of users and increased profits. How well are things going for DDO? They just announced [...]

Skyrim is by far the most popular video game that doesn’t involve mowing down enemy troops with a machine gun, selling almost three million copies in November alone (and it didn’t even come out until November was almost over). As such, there are a trillion Skyrim reviews on the Internet. So I won’t bother talking [...]

Dungeons: the Dark Lord is the sequel to last year’s Dungeons, from publisher Kalypso. In many ways it’s the spiritual successor to the beloved Dungeon Keeper franchise — a game that turned the RPG trope of heroes invading dungeons upside down, putting the player in control of the dungeon and making the heroes the antagonists. [...]

The official D&D Facebook game, heroes of Neverwinter, is in beta, and Robot Viking has 50 beta keys to give out. If you’re looking for an old-school RPG video game, check it out!

I wrote an article for io9.com today about how the story elements of Star Trek Online fit into the greater Star Trek mythos. Instead of just pointing you over there as usual, I’ve got a bit more to say on the subject — specifically, how I would design a “starship captain” MMORPG that’s very different [...]