By Desiree Bonilla I remember playing pinball at the arcade here in New York. I remember being really excited to play the pinball machine because of how the lights would glow up and the sound of the flipper hitting the ball felt so real. This was a good experience because I remember being really overjoyed…
By Harold Goldberg To me, Ubisoft’s Far Cry series can be compelling because each edition has a demented genius somewhat inspired by the evil, omniscient Green Beret Col. Walter E. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” The Kurtz character is a riff on the ivory trader of the same last name from Joseph Conrad’s…
By: Ronald Gordon Q.U.B.E 2, a stirring, adventure-filled puzzle game, is the sequel to the original which was released back in late 2011. The game, which I played on Xbox One, is about an archaeologist named Amelia Cross who ends up stranded on an alien planet and gets trapped in a sandstorm. However, a sandstorm…
By Kimari Rennis Apparently, it’s an ongoing trend for me to be unaware of the hidden gems that lie within the gaming industry. My ignorance of the Monster Hunter series is an example of how narrow my horizons are. Monster Hunter World for the PS4 absolutely blew me away. All the hype that had…
“Each one of us has, somewhere in his heart, the dream to make a living world, a universe.” By Harold Goldberg This year would be different, I thought. Instead of watching demos from a plethora of games at the Game Developers Conference and dragging by day’s end, I’d check out the education (and narrative) talks…
By Harold Goldberg Good news came via Gmail today. I’ll be speaking at the Games for Change Festival in New York City’s New School in late June. The subject of the talk is “When Journalists Educate With Games: How and Why the New York Videogame Critics Circle Mentors Students and Older Adults.” What I hope to…
By Harold Goldberg While I think it’s a real honor to go to and cover the Game Developers Conference, I found one bothersome character trait coming through in personalities who led almost all of the education and narrative-oriented talks I was privileged enough to attend. It’s too much ego. One of the tenets of the…
Editor’s Note: There are spoilers below. By Desiree Bonilla Florence, from Australian studio Mountains, is the most beautiful mobile game/interactive comic I have ever played. I say interactive comic because when you play Florence it does not feel like playing a game. It feels as if you’re just flipping through a comic and picking what…
By Harold Goldberg It’s a busy, occasionally frantic time. But I did have direction. My goal at the Game Developers Conference was to spread the word about the New York Videogame Critics Circle’s non-profit work with students and older adults. Along those lines, I eschewed most (not all) of the game demos this year to…
By Ronald Gordon Aliens. For years, we humans have studied the concept. But we never really understood the important question. Are aliens hostile? The Station is a first-person, sci-fi, narrative-oriented game about an unnamed, disembodied protagonist who is sent to a space station called the Axiom. You’re sent there because the crew aboard the station…