Warp Zoned Presents
Most Recent: Top Story
The Games of August 2014
There are a few really great titles silently creeping up on us, and we’re pretty excited about them here at Warp Zoned. At least, some of us are! The rest of us are looking forward to digging into our backlogs these next few hot weeks. Read on to see what we’re excited about! (more…)
Warpback: What We Played in July 2014
July was a fairly quiet month for us at Warp Zoned. Most of us were digging into backlogs, while others were just getting through some of the recent games that came out. For the most part, it seems like we’re all ready for the influx of new games we know is coming! Read on to see what we played in July. (more…)
Kickstart This! The Common Creative Wealth Edition
For all the sports fans out there who are saddened by the end of the World Cup and Wimbledon, fear not! The Commonwealth Games have kicked off in my backyard in the Scottish city of Glasgow. The royal baton ran right by my house last week, and it was great to see so many people out in the typically wet Glaswegian weather, clapping and cheering the baton bearers on.
Of course, this is what we do with Kickstart This! We pick out projects that we want to see succeed, and cheer them on along with all of our readers around the world. It’s humbling to think that somehow our words have managed to bring just enough extra donations to make the difference between a game being released and a development team drowning their sorrows in a stale pint of beer.
So which games do we have the need to see succeed in this edition? First off is the cartoony tower defense game Fire With Fire, followed by comical point-and-click adventure Kaptain Brawe 2: A Space Travesty. After that, we jump into 2D foodie platformer Bacon Man, cutesy platformer Snot, and, last but not least, Subject 13, a new 3D adventure thriller from Flashback creator Paul Cuisset.
On your mark, get set, go! (more…)
Shovel Knight Review: An Ace (of Spades) Retro-Styled Platformer
Even though we’re in the middle of a second golden age of side-scrolling platformers, very few of them attempt to recreate what was so great about the graphical look of games in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras. Most of them (Mega Man 9 and 10, Contra ReBirth, Gradius ReBirth) just serve as distant sequels to some NES favorites. So it’s amazing that something like Shovel Knight, a wholly original game from Yacht Club Games, was able to perfectly capture the mood of late 80s game design. It feels more like a lost cartridge rediscovered in the modern day as opposed to a modern game created with modern gamers in mind. Yacht Club’s Sean Velasco told us last year that the company’s goal is to create “really awesome retro/modern fusion games.” I’m glad they got the chance and I’m not sure I’d want it any other way. (more…)
Bethesda’s Decision to Keep the Doom 4 Demo Under Wraps is a Stroke of Genius
Hi. My name is John and I’m a Doom fanboy. It all started back in 1995 when my cousins gave me a copy of the game’s shareware edition. A year later, I bought a blazing fast IBM Aptiva with a Pentium processor (133 MHz!), a massive hard drive (2 GB!), and Windows 95 pre-installed. With a little leftover money, I purchased The Ultimate Doom on compact disc. After playing around with the first episode for over a year, the full game just absolutely blew me away. It may have been one of the earliest first person shooters around, but I’d never seen anything like it, before or since. It is what made me a lifelong fan of the franchise. (more…)
Continue Countdown #7 – Our Favorite Games From the PS3/Xbox 360/Wii Era
With the Wii U, PS4, and Xbox One now available in stores, it’s time to look back fondly on the PS3/Xbox 360/Wii Era. A lot of great games were released during gaming’s seventh generation and we talk about eight of our favorites as well as several dozen more in a rapid-fire Lightning Round. Did your favorite make the cut? There’s only one way to find out.
8 Games (+ Honorable Mentions)… 30 Minutes… And Go!
For Our Readers… For My Brother Interview With Crooked Tree’s Katy Levinson
Last year, developer Lat Ware and his team successfully launched a Kickstarter campaign for the brain-bending title Throw Trucks With Your Mind. Now that team is back under the guise of Crooked Tree Studios with a fresh puzzle platformer, For My Brother, which was featured in the latest edition of our monthly look at interesting crowdfunding campaigns, Kickstart This!. We chatted with Katy Levinson, the co-founder of ArcBotics and now Business Development Manager for Crooked Tree, about social media campaigns, art design, and Michael Bay’s The Rock. (more…)
Posted in Features, Interviews, PC, Top Story
Tagged For My Brother
Ignorance Is Strength: Gaming’s Permanent War With Nazis, Terrorists, and PMCs
In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell introduced us to a profusion of concepts that are especially relavant in today’s culture. Terms like Big Brother, thoughtcrime, doublethink, and Room 101 have all spread through modern society, but there is one line that resonates strongly in the world of video games: “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.”
In the novel, it’s a prime example of doublethink, where people can simultaneously agree with two contradicting points of view. While doublethink is all over video game punditry in a thousand different forms, it’s this last part that I feel needs to be focused on. “Ignorance is strength” is the idea that the masses can live in blissful and perpetual incomprehension of the truth, and somehow gain a sense of power from this. (more…)