Portal is a master piece. Allow me to rephrase that: Portal 2 is the master piece. The influential puzzle platformer only became independent from Half-Life since its sequel, and it set some ground rules for FPS puzzle genre in its age. And the rules still stand firm, as many games since have tried to overthrow…
East Berlin, on the fateful night of the fall of the Berlin Wall, is when Industria is not set. Yes, you read the copy correctly. The game supposedly begins with East Germany, but the game takes place in the city of Hakavik, a place not in East Germany. Its prologue hints the beginning of the…
My first experience with the Dungeons & Dragons IP was actually the movie, Dungeons & Dragons from the year 2000. The film was a failure in both box office figures and critiques. One thing I do know since is that the half-century old TRPG doesn’t have a “main quest” that can be adapted to a…
Poppy Playtime as an indie horror game has a special place in many PC gamers’ heart. There is no doubt it has a special place in my heart as well, only that place doesn’t happen to coincide with “great” in “great-ok-fail” scale. Chapter 1 went viral as a new player in horror game with its…
The high bar set for Roomba’s software can only be resolved by upgrading its hardware. Features such as “linked clean” would have been entirely unnecessary if iRobot pioneered the combo market and concentrated its efforts only on the combo models. In the previous posts, I have discussed about iRobot’s software solutions in part 1 and…
When iRobot launched its gen. 3 navigation system with forward-looking cameras, the robot duos needed a software update to stay competitive. In the previous post, I’ve talked about problems that could have been solved by softwares without significant changes to the hardware. Now we are talking about problems and solutions that sit somewhere in between.…
iRobot, possibly the frontier of consumer robot vacuums, is now just about late in all the robot games imaginable. The company’s lack of direction in developing either hardware or software solution to the average household problems has left the latest iRobot vacuum, Roomba Combo 10 Max, with poorly received reviews. Seeing as iRobot made it…
I personally did not like the first Amnesia game when it came out. The Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a game published in 2010 was most popular on the new platform called “YouTube” and played by the up and coming online stars called “YouTubers”. I recall having a stock YouTube app, a social media app I…
My first Silent Hill was Silent Hill 4: The Room; though I couldn’t push myself through the end. It might come as a surprise, but by the time I was interested in the franchise, I didn’t have the old consoles to play the OG titles. All old franchises suffer from the similar problem; average modern…
I don’t know what makes puzzle-solving as a genre so ripe with indie games. The Portal franchise started as an indie project until Valve scooped them up, more recent Baba Is You is a literal indie game filled with programmer jokes. Perhaps it’s the financial limitations that translate into developments, or the metas and homages…
Diablo IV has a tall order to meet as a fourth installment in the franchise. Blizzard has added, removed, or changed some bits and that since 1996, but as a sequel to a 28 years old franchise, the game cannot offer new ideas without radical departure. Vessel of Hatred has even taller order, as an…
Have you read any iOS, iPadOS, or watchOS rumors for this year? Behind all the ‘throw the pasta on the wall’ schtick, there was one I couldn’t laugh about. It’s the calculator app. Calculator apps on any Apple devices were either too old it was a place holder item for announcement of App Store, or…
This one belongs in the “there is an app for that” department. If you are an avid NAS user, chances are most of your drives are already connected via network. And that means, on every boot up, you will need to manually login to the NAS on Finder to mount the drives. One might call…
For a game set in the ice age, Frostpunk 2 surely is released at a weird time. I would imagine September isn’t particularly hot or cold in either hemisphere. Last installment for the franchise was released during the pandemic, and even for a DLC, the last scenario didn’t sit well with the world it has…
If current generation consoles didn’t have that kicker exclusive, now we have one; and it’s called Astro Bot, and it’s on PS5. The game takes advantage of all the features introduced with the new controller and the console, most notably haptic feedback and seamless loading. It’s quite literally so good it should be illegal to…