Creators of digitally distributed games have enjoyed a financially and creatively successful couple of months. One-man developer Markus “Notch” Persson has siphoned millions of euros from his growing army of MINECRAFT acolytes (I’m one of them), and the moody 2-D platformer LIMBO managed a healthy profit this summer on the Xbox Live Marketplace, which...

If you’re a rational consumer who thinks about purchases before making them, you might find that you have to choose (gross) between GOLDENEYE 007, a re-imagining of the 1997 classic for the N64, and CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS, the seventh mainline entry in the venerable shooter series. If you’re like me, you begrudgingly bought both. They are games, after all, and...

When people tell tales about the controllers they’ve flung in fits of gaming-induced madness, I generally shrug. This hobby of ours is something we do to keep madness at bay, right? How frustrating could a game be, and whose interests are served by chucking a $50 peripheral at a wall? But I’m starting to sympathize. In the ten days since I bought SUPER MEAT...

This calendar year was top-heavy with the sort of big-budget, AAA titles we usually don’t see until September. GOD OF WAR III made sense as a March 2010 game — its predecessors hit retail about the same time of year — but spring releases for FINAL FANTASY XIII, SUPER STREET FIGHTER IV and other heavy-hitters prompted a lot of clucking among the gaming...

So did you hear about the new Metroid game? It’s a sequel to the 1994 SNES classic SUPER METROID. “You mean METROID FUSION for Game Boy Advance?” No. This is a different one. You see, this is a narrative-focused Metroid title where Samus actually expresses herself. “Hmm… sounds like Metroid Fusion.” Well, no, it’s different....

I follow NIS America like a hawk. Why? As a publisher, the games they bring to us tend to be one (or both) of the following: a) quirky b) awesome In the case of VIRAL SURVIVAL, a $5 WiiWare title developed by Peakvox, we get a lot of a, but only a bit of b. Much to my surprise, this game actually does come from Japan (original title, “Escape Virus”). It...