PixlBit

Get hooked on this cult fave where it all began.

It seems like the Etrian Odyssey series has steadily won over more and more fans since its first entry in 2007. Along the way, Atlus has added in niceties to take the edge off of a series that demands a lot of its players, and revisiting the original entry with these tweaks turns out to be a great move. Even though it seems a bit odd to remake a game that’s only six years old, Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millenium Girl is the perfect way to please existing fans and those just joining the dungeon-diving party.

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Respect the environment.

Making a game with no puzzles, no combat, and no action to speak of in order to tell a specific and carefully crafted story seems like such a simple idea, and one that could easily turn out to be pretty boring. Luckily, the creators of Gone Home have been paying close attention to the powerful little vignettes stuck in the cracks of other games that have come before. It’s the little notes left in Skyrim’s caves and the journal entries in Myst that paved the way for Gone Home to turn those little nuggets into a pretty amazing story.

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The good not-so-old days.

As developers of the Battlefield games, DICE should know how to recognize a good multiplayer map when they see one. After Jason Brice posted his first attempt at a Battlefield map on his personal website, DICE swooped in overnight and told him they wanted to make it an official piece of DLC. From that point onward, Brice has been making maps for multiplayer shooters, and now he’s working on his very own full game, Rekoil, to put all of his training to another big test. I got to play several rounds of a capture the flag type match-up when I was at QuakeCon and had Brice at my side to share what he hoped to accomplish with Rekoil. 

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Think before you shoot.

If you’re starting to feel like there’s too much Call of Duty in every shooter out there, you’re not the only one. With pressure from fans of the almost extinct strategic shooter sub-genre, designer Christian Allen spearheaded a Kickstarter project to keep this methodical niche on life support a little longer. Allen is self-admittedly part of the “problem” of shifting slower-paced shooters to mainstream sensibilities during his years of working on the Ghost Recon franchise. His current game, Takedown: Red Sabre, throws all of those years of mainstreaming the genre right out of the AC-130 Gunship’s window and promises to give us the realistic, slow-paced, strategic squad shooter we’ve been missing. 

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Two hours spent in a game that could last forever...

O, the wailing of the fans when Elder Scrolls Online was announced! Would populating the beloved land of Tamriel kill the excitement of being a renowned and solitary adventurer? After spending two solid hours exploring the small Bleakrock Isle in a demo of Bethesda’s upcoming MMO, I can assure you that it feels like an Elder Scrolls game even though there are countless sorcerers, thieves, and warriors running around with you.

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