As you’ve probably noticed, most zombie survival games take a serious approach to making you survive the undead apocalypse.
But by striking a different tone — and a slightly different viewpoint — the third-person single-player / co-op Welcome To ParadiZe (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC) manages to put a different spin on the genre. Not a better one; not a worse one; but one that’s certainly different, which, in turn, makes it rather fun.
With four previous novels based on the Halo games under her belt, it’s not surprising that writer Kelly Gay’s newest, Halo: Epitaph (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), would connect to the other novels she’s written about the titular sci-fi shooter series.
But as she explains in the following email interview, this installment is actually more connected to someone else’s Halo novels than her own.
Released in 1994, the cyberpunk sci-fi first-person shooter System Shock has since become one of the most influential games of the last thirty years. Not only did it inspire numerous spiritual successors (BioShock, Thief) and other sci-fi shooters (Half-Life, Deus Ex), but also third-person games in the stealth action (Metal Gear Solid) and survival horror genres (Resident Evil).
And yet, it is considered more a cult curiosity than a known classic among many gamers, especially those who didn’t play it when it came out…or weren’t alive at the time.
Which makes it all the more curious, and a pleasant surprise, that System Shock is being honored by the good people at Zen Studios with the release of System Shock Pinball, an add-on for their games Pinball M and Pinball FX (PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X / S, Xbox One, Switch, PC).
Doubly so since the table is as ’90s as the original game.
As a fan of acrobatic action games, I’ve been waiting 14 years for Ubisoft to make another Prince Of Persia in the vein of 2010’s The Forgotten Sands.
But as someone who goes back with this series to the days of old, when it was a side-scrolling hack & slash action game, I’ve also been waiting 21 years for Ubisoft to make a Prince Of Persia that brings me back to when I used to play the original and 1993’s Prince Of Persia 2: The Shadow And The Flame.
Well, twenty-five year old me can now rest easy, as Ubisoft have given us Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown (PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Switch, PC), which is not only the best Prince Of Persia game since Sands, but the best side-scrolling one since Flame.
With Tom Clancy’s The Division: Hunted (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), writer Thomas Parrott is concluding the Operation Crossroads trilogy of technothrillers based on the titular video games, which he started in 2022 with Recruited and continued later that year with Compromised.
In the following email interview, Parrott discusses how this third installment finishes the story (and how he feels about that) as well as what influenced this final novel.
Video games have been around since the 1970s, and in all that time, there’s been one underlying rule: the controls must be good. If your controls are bad, your game is bad.
And yet, somehow, the good people at Rocksteady who made the open world, third-person superhero action game Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC) managed to get it from the drawing board to digital stores without ever asking anyone, “Are these controls good?” Because they’re not, and it’s that — among other things — which ruins what could’ve been an interesting game.
Whenever I play one of the Diablo games, I feel a lot of different things. Excitement. Tension. Accomplishment. And sometimes, hunger.
Yeah, hunger. That’s because Diablo III, Diablo Immortal, and Diablo IV are so effortlessly fun that I just lose track of time, and sometimes forget to eat.
But that will never happen again (yeah, right) now that I’ve got Diablo: The Official Cookbook (hardcover, Kindle), which presents “Recipes And Tales From The Inns Of Sanctuary.”
In the following email interview, Rick Barba, the writer of the “Tales” parts of the book, explains how he came to co-write this book with Andy Lunique [The Ultimate Gamer’s Cookbook], as well as which of Andy’s recipes made him the hungriest.
Sure, 2023 wasn’t as good a year for video games as 2022 (few years are, especially lately). But there were a bunch of really fun games, as you can see from my “Best Video Games Of 2023” list.
But it was just as bad, as you can see from the following list of my least favorite games of the year (which I present in the order I played them).
Though not as good as the year before (few years are), 2023 was still a really good year for video games. Or at least for the kind of games I like to play.
Here, in the order I played them, are my favorite games of 2023.