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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Super Meat Boy Review

I love Super Meat Boy. I want to hug it and give it awards and then hit it with something large and heavy until its lifeless body stops twitching and then throw it into a river with cement shoes on. Then I shall dive in after it screaming “I’m sorry!” at the top of my lungs while weeping slightly.

This is the somewhat confusing relationship I have with this brutally difficult platformer. I both love it and hate it. I’m absolutely addicted to an experience that should rightfully have me in tears, not of joy, but of pain and sorrow. Instead, I’m finding that I can’t put it down and don’t quite know why.

Traditionally, a review of a difficult game is supposed to start with a warning. Something along the lines of, “this game isn’t for the faint of heart” or “this game isn’t for the easily frustrated”. But therein lies the beauty of Super Meat Boy. Lines like these are not necessary. I am, in fact, “the easily frustrated” and I am smitten by Meat Boy’s masochistic charms.

Through a brilliant combination of precise control, superb level design, and forgiving game mechanics that do not punish death but instead reward skill, Super Meat Boy takes what could have been one of the most maddening games ever to be released upon the gaming public and turns it into a sublime example of pure gaming at its best.

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First Impressions - DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue (demo)

DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue

PSN Demo

Release Date: September 21, 2010 (PSN); September 22, 2010 (XBLA)

Date of Play: September 21, 2010

• It is hard to shake the feeling that I am playing the exact same game as the first DeathSpank. The title menu is the same, the menu music is the same, and the animated intro isn’t the same but it’s close enough. The whole thing feels like a rehash. That’s not necessarily terrible, but I hope there’s something more here. 
• I wonder if your save carries over from the first or if they have some way of explaining why the mighty hero has randomly lost all of his cool shit and gone back to square one with his abilities. I won’t be able to tell without buying the full game, which I have not yet done, but I’m curious.
• Just as I make a comment about the game perhaps lacking new ideas, I actually begin to play and the first weapon I pick up is a gun. Hmm. Intriguing. Not sure if that’s good or bad yet.
• Come to think of it, the gun is just a retooling of the crossbow from the last game isn’t it? Never mind.
• Already there’s a little prick of an enemy who likes to shoot me and then run away forcing me to blast it with my gun/pea shooter. I hate enemies like that. So annoying.
• Unsurprising revelation: just like the first game, the dialog is the best part of this demo. I just hope it’s up to the quality of the writing of the first game. So far so good, though. I’ve already had a number of laughs. 
• Oh great. The game is already resorting to bathroom humor. This is a good sign. Yeah. 

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