Topware Interactive is releasing Two Worlds II: Velvet Game of the Year Edition on October 18 and yes, there is velvet.  The velvet covers the entire box -- black for PC and Mac, red for Xbox 360 and PS3 -- along with me...

After Haemimont rejuvenated the Tropico series with Tropico 3 and its Absolute Power expansion, Tropico 4 ended up being another great city builder, if not a huge leap forward for the series. While the changes to gameplay and...

It's cold as hell in my office. I'm under a blanket, and I have my feet tucked under my dog. I'm chilled straight through and my nose is running.  But things look quite the opposite in these new Tropico 4 Gold Edition sc...

Weekly deals are a normal industry practice at this point, and starting right now, you can grab Trine 2 for 600 MSP (half off the original 1200 price) -- as long as you're an Xbox Live Gold Member, of course. The sale will co...

I've always wished that free-to-play games would allow me to pay a certain amount of cash upfront and just give me everything I want. Well, Tribes: Ascend is doing exactly that, starting February 15. Stop reading my dia...

Even if you haven't touched a TrackMania before, you likely are familiar with the series through its often remarkable presence on YouTube. If it's a clip of an inspired, logic-defying track in which the person playing seems infallible, chances are it's TrackMania footage you're watching. The question then usually comes down to "Is it as fun to watch as it is to play?" Well, is it?

Tower defense games are somewhat an addiction of mine; instinctively strategic yet part determination and endurance, these titles have always delighted and frustrated the wits out of me. Lately, there’s been a surge ...

The "Gold Edition" repackaging of Total War: Shogun 2 with the game's two expansions, Rise of the Samurai and Fall of the Samurai, is now available for purchase in North America and will find its way to Europe and Australia t...

After what feels like forever, the Torchlight II mod tools, nicknamed GUTS, have finally been released. In order to access the GUTS editor, simply go to your install folder and open up the "Editor" executable. Since modd...

I whiled away many hours in my youth playing Cannon Fodder on the Amiga, mostly replaying failed missions. It could be a brutal game, and its anti-war message was completely lost on my young mind, but I delighted in my victor...

A week ago, the Humble Indie Bundle 8 impressed us as one of the biggest and best collections to date, including titles such as Hotline Miami, Awesomenauts, and more. Indie game fans ravenously scooped up the bundle and trade...

By now, you all should be intimately familiar with the Humble Bundle, which lets customers pay what they want for DRM-free copies of videogames, often includes soundtracks, and puts a portion of the proceeds toward charity. ...

Another week, another Humble Bundle. You all know the drill. Pay what you want, designate money toward charity, get games and soundtracks. Pay more than the average (currently around four dollars) to get bonus content. Take ...

Amusing story: I was sent a beta code for They Bleed Pixels so that I could get a little hands-on time before the official release. For some reason, Steam wouldn't run the game, forcing me to spend the bulk of the evening and...

The Witcher 2: Assassin's of Kings developer CD Projekt RED has released its REDKit suite of mod tools in open beta as a free download -- you'll just need to own the game to partake. This has been a long time coming and shou...

The instant I saw The Whispered World I knew it was one of those games that I was going to have to play. I'm a sucker for point-and-click adventures, and the promise of hand-drawn animations and backgrounds sucked me in lik...

At the heart of episodic Walking Dead video game lies a unique experience tailored to the many ambiguous moral choices that can be made by the player throughout the progression of the story. In this new trailer (beware the s...

This video contains huge spoilers! You have been warned. The Walking Dead from Telltale won all sorts of praise and awards for their amazing episodic series. Part of that had to do with all the choices you can make, with some of your actions determining some of the events that took place in the final episode, No Time Left. So, what did you all choose to do?

I'm not one to boast, mainly because I'm terrible at it, but on occasion I have been known to state my belief that in a zombie apocalypse I'd probably do alright. I have no idea why I think that years of sitting on my arse, r...

If you're yet to play the penultimate episode of Telltale's harrowing tale of survival and zombies, then don't watch this video. Don't even read this post. Go back to whatever it is you were doing, or, better yet, go and pla...

Hey, have you heard about The Walking Dead game from Telltale? It's kind of a big deal. I mean, it did just win our Game of the Year for 2012. In fact, it's been winning best of the year awards left and right all this month, ...

Describing The UnderGarden is a very tricky prospect, because every description you could give automatically runs the risk of turning potential customers away. It's a slow-paced game, with no narrative to speak of, and your o...

It seems as if Sherlock Holmes is more popular than ever; whether it's Robert Downey Jr.'s slow-mo charmer, Benedict Cumberbatch's gruff genius, or Johnny Lee Miller's American-based version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's detect...

It's always refreshing to be introduced to a game mechanic that you've never quite seen before. It's even better when that game takes said mechanic and elevates it to something pure and sublime, something that, to borrow a cl...

The Sims 3: University Life is expansion pack number nine for The Sims 3, and it's essentially a re-hash of the University expansion for The Sims 2. If you decided today you wanted to start playing The Sim...

The Sims series will always have expansion packs. It's part of the experience to slowly add more content to the game. Usually these packs add active content like new town locations, new interactions, or new career paths for y...

As the elderly, yet oddly toned kung-fu monk decapitated my time-traveling, identity-losing hero-with-nothing-to-lose for the fifth time in as many minutes, I couldn't really be blamed for impotently throwing my mouse at the ...

Oh deary me! You haven't forgotten about The Real Texas, have you? It left quite the impression on me, to say the least. I would say that not a week goes by in which I don't think about it. I've been waiting for the soundtrac...

If there's one thing that's more overplayed than zombies, it's reviews for zombie videogames talking about how overplayed zombies are. Truly, nobody can win anymore. We're worn out on the zombie thing, and worn out by our own...

I hated and loved in equal measure the end of the summer holidays as a child. My impending return to gloomy classrooms, smudged jotters, and uncomfortable uniforms only made me take advantage of my final days of freedom all t...

The latest game from Runaway creators Pendulo Studios is a throwback to a bygone era in more ways than one. It's a classic point-and-click adventure game in the tradition of the glory days of the '90s. It's also a bit of a ...

The Journey Down was a classic-style, 2D pixel art adventure game which you can still play for free. Now it's a slightly larger, fully voiced, gorgeous adventure game that mixes 3D animated models with painted backgrounds. Th...

I didn't know what to expect before playing The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing. I've seen the movie, but I don't remember much from it other than Wolverine fighting a lot of monsters. Luckily, that basic knowledge was a...

For those of us who like to celebrate Halloween with a horror-themed videogame marathon, a myriad of choices has opened up to us in recent years. Along with the old survival-horror standbys, we now have a new breed of team...

Episodic gaming was championed by Valve, but after no sign of Half Life episode 3 or even any SiN episodes after the first one (remember that?) it was Telltale who showed gamers that the episodic method of distribution c...

Getting stuck in an adventure game is one of the most frustrating experiences in gaming. When you're playing a platformer or an action game of some sort, you're usually tested in your reactions and your command of the mechani...

Indie puzzle platformers seem like they're a dime a dozen these days. Start with an art style, something unique or just simple pixels, add some cool gameplay hook, and then make some levels. It’s a standard formula that...

Whilst it's still to early to tell whether or not Double Fine's Kickstarter project will be a success or failure in delivering a top-quality game, it has succeeded in showing there is still demand for adventure games. In a bi...

Point-and-click adventures were big in the '90s and Wadjet Eye Games looks to bring them back with the Blackwell series: four episodic games that follow a reluctant detective and her ghostly relative. Each game tells ano...

When The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth was announced, I was puzzled by some of the folks were annoyed with the new graphics, deeming them "pointless." They seemed to think that because they liked the original game's visuals ...

When we first heard of The Banner Saga and its success on Kickstarter last spring, it was a single-player focused turn-based RPG. Since then, it has split off into two releases: a narrative-driven single-player game to come a...

The Baconing is the third DeathSpank game. I was tempted to end the review with that sentence, as it really contains all the information many would need to make an informed decision about it. It can be either a wholehearted r...

Any game bold enough to be titled The Asskickers -- which would have been an awesomely apt and uncomfortably juvenile name for Stallone’s ensemble action flick The Expendables -- better be able to back up its brash atti...

I'm extremely happy that the racing genre seems to be picking up again.  In 2010 we had some spectacular titles like Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, and Gran Turismo 5 so I couldn't wait to see what was in store for 2011.&n...

When death comes in Teleglitch, I can feel a part of myself being replaced with a weighted ton of soulcrushing loss and hopelessness. So goes the roguelike, a genre that has increasingly proliferated among bedroom developer...

[This post originally ran as impressions on the open beta and is now updated to reflect the full release, which came two weeks later.] Call of Duty has dumbed down the modern shooter to being about planting bombs, capturing p...