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Entries in costume quest (2)

Friday
Apr082011

Stacking Review - Miniature World, Full-Size Fun

We could use more games like Stacking. It’s charming, original, fun, and the perfect size for its ideas. Imagine Portal but with Russian nesting dolls. 

Double Fine’s latest downloadable morsel learns important lessons from the Portal school of game design. For a small fraction of full retail price, it delivers a compact experience that’s a good value without overstaying its welcome. It lasts long enough to charm you into loving it, but no longer. 

The question of value is one of the biggest issues the gaming industry is currently facing. Games can last anywhere between five minutes and hundreds of hours while costing as little as a dollar or as much as sixty. In other words, we spend a lot of time thinking about how much our games are worth these days and there’s no easy answers.

What is clear is that you don’t see many games like Portal. These gaming middle children, so to speak, can provide a dose of originality not possible with expensive games that have to play it safe while offering bigger budget thrills than what’s possible in the bargain bucket. 

The industry needs more great titles in this category, but it’s hard to find a place for them. Downloadable gems such as Limbo are leading the way in this area and Stacking will surely soon find its way into the hearts of many gamers as well for the same reasons as others of its ilk. Its concise tale packs the charm and satisfaction of a game many times its price.

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Thursday
Oct212010

First Impressions : Costume Quest

Costume Quest (XBLA, PSN)

Publisher: THQ

Developer: Double Fine

Release Date: October 19, 2010

Date of Play: October 19, 2010

Double fine has a bit of a troubled history when it comes to the sales of its stellar titles. Its wonderful blend of humor, original gameplay concepts, and terrific writing produces games that are critically acclaimed, but don’t sell all that well. This is a shame because Tim Schafer and company produce games that every gamer should be able to play and love and cherish.

With Costume Quest, Double Fine begins a new adventure into the realm of downloadable games. Potentially, this could be a match made in heaven. It allows Double Fine to express its wonderful weirdness in a more compact, cheaper form. Games such as these are less expensive both for the company to produce and for the consumer to purchase. This lower cost of entry has worked well for other downloadable titles that veer from the safety of the mainstream, so it could be the perfect fit for Double Fine’s unique brand of entertainment. Should this venture work out, not only might Schafer’s company have a brighter future ahead of it, but we might get to see more frequent releases from the company as well.

Can Costume Quest manage to condense the wonderment brought on by Psychonauts and Brütal Legend into a package that feels both worthy of the company’s history and of your $15? Let’s find out.

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