Great news about Steam: in anticipation of Portal 2 later this year, the device has been modified to dispense Portal for $0 until May 24th.  If you haven’t played this yet, you absofuckinglutely must download it now.

There’s not much else to say… one of the seminal games of our time available for free, legal downloading?  Why are you still here?

If you’ve been following my sporadic Evony coverage, then you’ll be glad to know the game seems to be dying off.  Whether as a result of bad press (look at all the links in the comments), their attempt to silence the press causing a Streisand Effect, bad management (hilarious read), even worse management (a much more disturbing read), or bad customer service, players are finally getting the picture: the official forums are littered with people who have proudly left Evony or been banned for speaking negatively about it or its developers (the game DOES originate from a dictatorship).  Now, with versions coming out by far more professional companies, even the few that enjoyed the game itself can find a new home.

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It’s been a little over a month since I last beat the Evony\Civony dead horse.  In that time, I’ve stumbled across posts that demonstrate the game’s plagiarism of art and text, as well as the suspicious iEvony client, a post that shows the early progression of the ads from normal to stupidly raunchy, and a bunch from Bruce Everiss - fellow game blogger, former Codemaster, and veteran marketer - who is being threatened with cease-and-desists to stop talking about Evony’s abuse of AdSense among other things (frankly, I’m a little jealous I haven’t gotten a C&D yet).  These tidbits… they are interesting, but they hardly make up the meat of a post.  I prayed and prayed to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and He delivered a completely original, totally fresh game: Kingory.  Naturally, I had to have a look.

–[ If you’re not up to speed on Civony\Evony, you might consider reading my original post, and both of my updates before taking the plunge ]–

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As a business major, I find myself questioning the marketing decisions of just about every company.  How many people actually know what Aflac sells?  Is Flo from the Progressive commercials funny to any demographic?  Do fast food and annoying pop music ever meet outside of the board rooms of desperate executives? Still, most of these commercials at least get the product name across.  The ad above?  It’s selling a video game, the one noted in the very top left corner - yeah, that text that’s illegibly tiny.  But if you think that’s bad, wait until you see what’s after the jump (Not safe for many workplaces)…

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When you talk about graphic adventure games, people have a lot of questions, not least of which is “What’s a graphic adventure game?”  It’s baffling that such a fantastic genre with exemplary titles has disappeared from gaming, and if for no other reason than to encourage a revival, today’s ROMiniscing is about Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle.  This game is easily one of my favorites of all time for reasons too numerous to fit into one post, but I’ll give it a shot anyway.

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There are only so many variations to the Platforming model, but when the market was saturated with this genre, we gamers were treated to every possible iteration. Whether they were inserting RPG elements like in E.V.O. or pushing the model to its limit like in Kid Chameleon, developers built some amazing experiences from the “Platformer” scaffolding. One game that demonstrates this particularly well is Enix’s Hack-and-slash platformer\City-building Sim ActRaiser. And so, let’s ROMinisce.

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Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea brought the Tactical RPG to non-Japanese gamers, but the genre obviously predates these landmarks.  With Fire Emblem establishing the genre only years prior, Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen had a virtually blank slate to work with.  Like the band whose songs the series’ titles pay homage to, this classic is both enduring and incomparably brilliant.

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Naturally, Atari games set the standards for every style of video game we’ve come to love.  Pitfall! is many people’s first Platformer and River Raid their first console shmup, but even these icons can’t claim as many “firsts” in gaming as the subject of today’s ROMiniscing: Adventure.

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Before we resorted to classifying games in the megahybrid genre of “Action,” there was “Action-Adventure” and its sub-category - the iconic “Platformer.”  These games were the mainstay of the industry through two decades of evolution, and the trademarks of this genre are ubiquitous in gaming as a whole.  From Pitfall! to LittleBigPlanet, the best Platformers have always pushed us to the jump-landing, ledge-grabbing, death-defying limits.  Since you and I both have a masochist deep down inside, let’s ROMinisce about a Genesis gem: Kid Chameleon.

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