And Yet It Moves – And yet it gets reviewed

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Generally I’ve been pretty happy with the games I get from the Humble Indie Bundles, but And Yet It Moves makes so unhappy, I don’t even know where to start.

How about with the name? It is at least representative of something you can do in the game, moving around. Actually, you can spin the world around clockwise or counter-clockwise to move yourself around the world and solve puzzles. This is guaranteed to be neat for at least the first 10 minutes, but to base a whole game on it is a bit risky if the developers can’t come up with any unique ideas that take advantage of it in order to keep the game interesting.

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Let’s Play: A Valley Without Wind – Part 2

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Still trying to get over the loss of my good friend, Clinton Few, I set out this time in search of a purpose. Although considering I had next to no health left, I knew I’d have to search for that purpose very carefully. Fortunately, the way to the right was more or less clear for a good portion of the journey, having traversed the area already. After a couple minutes of travel, I came across a very rude stone. A very rude Ilari Stone.

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Let’s Play: A Valley Without Wind – Introduction

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I was actually going to play 1997′s Fallout for lagserv.net’s first “let’s play” series, but I started up a game on my laptop last month and didn’t take any screenshots so I’d need to replay a decent portion of the game (though I think I would need to anyway as my home Vault was dangerously close to running out of water). Anyway, now I’ve decided that I’m going to start playing a game I found out about only just recently. That would be, A Valley Without Wind from Arcen Games.

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Jamestown Review (PC)

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Jamestown will remind older players of days in the arcade. With its old-school looks and feel it seems to try and pull at some nostalgia string buried deep inside you.

It’s a very simple concept. Basically, you’re in some kind of weird ship shooting at stuff (you can unlock 3 other ships using money you earn after completing missions). You have a “normal” fire, a “special” fire, and an ability called a “vaunt”. I’ll try to explain these: normal is boring and weak, special isn’t very special – you’ll be using it most of the time – and vaunt basically protects you for a short period of time and strengthens your attack. You can use normal and special attacks whenever you want but you need to collect enough gears (I think that’s what they are, anyways) in order to use your vaunt ability. An aptly timed vaunt can be invaluable.

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Dear Esther Review (PC)

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Dear Esther is an awful game. Having said that, it is also an interesting piece of what I can only describe as art.

I finished it in just 75 minutes, and that included exploring nearly every corner I could find and taking screenshots of the scenery. Not exactly a long commitment, but $10 for a 75 minute experience is… a little expensive. Although I can’t say I didn’t think it was worth it. It’s hard to explain, but I’ll give it a shot:

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Gratuitous Space Battles Review (PC/Linux/Mac)

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During university finals each semester (a time I usually refer to as “the week of hell”) I often find myself spending a lot of time either in my room or on campus at one of those study desk things with pictures of penises flanked by various swearwords and declarations of love all over the sides. This time around it was hard to ignore that a lot of the people on my steam friends list were playing games, especially with the Diablo 3 beta weekend, and I eventually got jealous. As my main “school” computer is now a Mac Mini, I set out to find a game that I could play in 10-20 minute increments on a Mac in between studying as sort of a reward for studying. I browsed down my steam library list at only the Mac games, most of which I acquired through humble indie bundles and had yet to play. No, don’t feel like playing a puzzle game, that’s too stressful… no, don’t feel like playing an adventure game, there might not be any pauses for my disciplined side to tell me to get back to studying… oh, what’s this? I wonder what this game’s about. I did some googling and it seemed low-maintenance and like I’d be able to play it in several small increments, so I installed it and went on my way. As you’ve probably guessed by now, this game was called Gratuitous Space Battles. You can check out (and buy) the game here: http://positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/

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Guild Wars II Beta Gallery

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Yesterday I had a brief opportunity to play Guild Wars II. I went through the first, tutorial section, did a couple quests afterwards, then explored some of the other parts of the game a bit. Here are a bunch of screenshots following what I did.

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Pre-lagview – Guild Wars 2 Beta

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7.0/10

As a lover of the first Guild Wars, I rushed into pre-purchasing for access to this beta as fast as I could with a smile on my face. With all the hype of the second game, some lessons learned from the first one as well as many other MMOs, I really wanted to see something good.

Let’s jump in the time capsule back to Guild Wars 1. Guild Wars 1 presented us with very basic combat, and by basic I mean it was bad. Pressing C then space (target nearest and attack) through a battle was all you had to do fight your way through a mob. The only thing that set you apart was your skills, weapons and armor. Lets expand on this a little.

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Roadside Picnic and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games

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I recently read the newly re-translated version of Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The only reason I knew about the existence of the book was from playing the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (from now on, just STALKER) series of video games by GSC Game World, which are actually in many ways based off of ideas from the novel. Both the game and the novel revolve around the idea of a zone containing anomalous activity, filled with strange artefacts, although they do have some fairly big differences.

I’ve wanted to write a review of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl for a while now, but it wouldn’t really be fair to the game, considering I played it years ago and my second play-through would leave a far different impression than my first. I’ve actually recently tried to play it again despite this, but there are things that turn me off enough that I go play some game that I haven’t finished yet. I tend not to like to repeat doing things. After reading the book, I realised I had a chance to write about the game without actually reviewing it. So, here we go!

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