Watchmen - the comic book - is one of the artistic high points of the form. Watchmen - the movie based on the comic book - is a fairly close reproduction of the graphic novel, with some mostly forgivable divergences. Watchmen: The End is Nigh - the videogame based on the movie based on the comic - is, despite grand production values, the shameless cash-in that fans feared the film would be.
The character you play in The Whispered World is called Sadwick, a young clown in a travelling circus. His name is apt, because he’s constantly glum and morose, possibly in an attempt to personify the mumbling teen stereotype we all loathe so well. Curiously, he talks an awful lot as well, considering he’s meant to be sullen and broody...
Vectorpark’s Flash-based games raise the bar with their mix of beautiful art, exploration, and a strong sense of glee. Windosill finds a pitch-perfect balance between Magritte-inspired surrealism and an old-world craftsmanship for building children’s toys. The result is a short, sweet adventure of a wooden train making its way through a series of puzzle rooms.
What would Baron Manfred von Richthofen make of the fact that people are playing games based on his aerial exploits over 90 years after his death? It’s possible he wouldn’t appreciate it at all, given that he slammed his own ghostwritten autobiography for being ‘too arrogant’. He wanted to be remembered as a man who was doing his duty.
The console version of this WWII flight-not-quite-sim was blessed with an IL2-Sturmovik prefix, but the publishers clearly knew they’d be playing with fire if they waved that revered title around willy-nilly on the PC. Sturmovik is the first and last name in combat flight simulation.
First things first: Winter Voices is not an RPG. Not really. It sits somewhere at the crossroads of Final Fantasy Tactics, The Longest Journey, and a demo tape from some high schoolers' emo band. You get a few RPG elements, like leveling your character and putting stat points into things, but these stats really only affect combat, and to a lesser extent some dialogue options, because that's really all you do in Winter Voices: talk to people and fight...
Not many games get a second chance, but we’re glad that The Witcher is one of them. We went into it the first time around with low expectations, and after an opening chapter so boring you could use it to mine for diamonds, came out grinning at the first genuinely good, ‘proper’ RPG in years. There. We admit it. We liked it a lot.
There’s no denying this is inspired by Katamari Damacy: both share the idea of a thing moving around a landscape, collecting objects to add to its bulk. But we don’t have the PlayStation’s strange adventure game on the PC, so TWEotW will have to do.
And it does. In the face of an impending apocalypse, brought about by a giant fish head, you must collect all the nice things you’d like to take with you. Your body
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