Games You Should Not Buy Your Partner for Valentine’s

Valentine’s has come upon us again, and for reasons I can’t quite pin down, I don’t hate it as much as I used to. Maybe it’s the presence of no adverts about Valentine’s being slammed in my face (which I am more than grateful for). What my concern is at this point in this year is the astonishing amount of artform-crap that has been spewing out of everywhere. No movies are remotely interesting to the point where I think that This Is War looks quite good. No books have come out that make me want to cower in Waterstone’s for fifteen million hours. And most disappointingly, almost every selling game has next to zero appeal. So instead of having a rant about Valentine’s Day, I’m going to have a rant about recent popular games.

Family Research Controlled By Sith Master

It seems that Bioware is including same sex relationships in their popular Star Wars MMORPG in order to satisfy fans, but Family Research is up in arms over the issue.  I normally wouldn’t bother talking about something like this, I mean the title itself is already redundant.  What, you mean that one anti-gay religious organization with a misleadingly neutral sounding name is against gay people being in something?  What a shocker!

Things get interesting however when you take a look at Tony Perkins’ incredibly poor word choice during the broadcast.

Seb on TekGoblin: Gamers, Stop Watching Fox News

I case you haven’t heard, SimCity Societies is the latest one of these ‘video game’ things that are corrupting minors and tearing apart the framework of society.  It will terrify your children and their clenched, sweat-drenched little hands into bowing down to socialist green police views by threatening them with punishment.

I’m sorry, I just can’t keep this joke running for any longer.  The above claims were actually made by Fox News, and are you really surprised?

Read the rest of this article over at TekGoblin.

Eurogamer Expo 2011: Thursday, Sept. 22nd

Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3, Dance Central 2, Final Fantasy XIII-2, Mario Kart 7, Kid Icarus: Uprising, Burnout: Crash, The Gunstringer.

Using Patches as a Crutch

I would like to begin by clarifying that this is not a review of Dead Island.  This article is meant to highlight a growing trend in the video game industry that I find unacceptable.

Review: Bastion

Most of us have played an isometric dungeon-crawler by now, be it Diablo, Torchlight, or Sacred.  You trudge through a series of large regions that recycle the same environments ad nauseam, defeat hordes of enemies with largely one-button combat, and pick up dozens of useless items along the way.  Each time you visit town you can expect to spend a good five or ten minutes repairing your equipment, selling the masses of garbage that you’ve collected, turning in quests, and distributing your new stat and skill points.  Bastion does away with a lot of this tedium.

Questioning Game Design

Here at SebSpot we decided to take a moment to shine a light on some design choices in games that just didn’t jive with us.  The following is a list of elements that left us frustrated, disappointed, annoyed, or even just confused.  We welcome any input or rebuttals that you have to offer, but just remember that we still loved a lot of these games.  In some cases it’s the sheer amount of time that we spent with these titles that brought the questions to the surface.

Addiction and Video Games

One of the most common problems people have with video games is the chance and the common reality of Gaming Addiction. When someone is addicted to video games, it isn’t in the sense that most people think of; Kid sits in room playing video games all day and never plays outside. While that can be a beginning moment, it’s not real gaming addiction. Gaming addiction is far more intense than that.  It is the inability to find interest in the real world and spend your life submerged into an alternate one. I know there are plenty of people who feel this way, as do I, but the difference is some people don’t know when to press ‘save and quit’ and deal with the drudge of everyone’s shared reality on Earth.

Review: Breath of Death VII/Cthulhu Saves the World

It seems fitting that two micro RPG’s get a micro review. Zeboyd Games recently dropped their two-pack  onto Steam. I snatched them up at release and got them on sale, but even at full price it won’t break the wallet.

Originally debuting on Xbox Live Indie Games, Breath of Death VII was released for the PC market with Cthulhu Saves the World. Don’t look for BoD I-VI.  They don’t exist, and that is part of the charm of these games. They aren’t trying to be something they shouldn’t. They are derivative and they know it. They know you have played this game before. They are meant more as an homage/spoof of old school RPG’s such as the Final Fantasy and Breath of Fire series.

Impressive Easy Bass Lines

The bassist. The glue that gives the drummer a little bit more interest by adding a melody and making sure the guitarist doesn’t decide to go off on one of his many overblown solos and all the while giving depth. And they’ve got to do this standing in the background not usually getting the limelight from the singer, unless of course they are the singer.