Agoners

Yomi: An Intimidating Introduction?

There’s been precious little in the way of competitive video games that have interested me recently. Whilst I’ve spent time in competitive games of Halo Reach, Street Fighter 2 HD Remix, StarCraft II and even Gears of War 3 lately, none are quite perfect to my taste or are lacking in some way to my gaming design ideals of how I’d like them to be implemented as online games. Other games I’ve read about or even trialled seem to be just hopeless; all doing something massively different from my personal taste, and worse, generally always being afflicted by varying degrees of grinding stupidity which is annoying in challenge videogames, but …Read More

The XBox Live Fail Update

The Xbox Live Fall Fail Update Late last autumn there was the usual “Fall Update” to Xbox 360s connected to  Xbox Live, this year with the moniker (as is the trend these days) of the “Metro” update. I hoped to write about this when it was more topical, but I wanted to wait until I’d had a chance to try out all of the new features myself, and also the typical holiday festivities got in the way . However this was well worthy of an Agoners report & update, even if I’m somewhat “late to the party”, as it’s an ongoing topic for this site, as long-time readers will know. …Read More

Alawishus Pixel – Review

Title: Alawishus Pixel Format: XBox Live Indie Games Reviewer: Remy77077 Approximate Time Spent playing at time of writing: 1 hour Modes of play: Single Player According to the XBox Marketplace description this videogame will “test your mind and dexterity”. Whilst that is true, it’s not a very hard test! It’s quite ok while it lasts, this title just feels like an intro to something that could’ve been much better. The levels and mechanics are all very simple and only one level provided any real challenge to me, and I completed the game in only around an hour of total playtime. It’s an extremely basic platform-puzzler with little to recommend it …Read More

Stacking – Review

Title: Stacking Format: XBLA Reviewer: Remy77077 Approximate Time Spent playing at time of writing: 18 hours Modes of play: Single Player Stacking is another single-player challenge title based purely around puzzle-solving – unlike titles like Braid, Portal or The Ball, there’s absolutely no dexterity skill tests at all. Puzzles are solved simply by moving your character around and single button presses to activate abilities. As such it’s great to have a pure mental-challenge title for once, and one that can even be played as a bit of  “mong game“. At it’s best, Stacking becomes an interesting logic puzzle. How do you ruin someone’s printed maps? Find the character with a …Read More

The Ball – Review

Title: The Ball Format: PC Reviewer: Remy77077 Approximate Time Spent playing at time of writing: 16 hours Modes of play: Single Player, Steam Online Leaderboards The most obvious comparison to The Ball that will probably be familiar to most readers is Portal – it’s a single player first-person puzzle challenge title. The basic mechanics are the normal “FPS” style movement of your character (well, your disembodied arms at least), and also your ability to push and pull the titular Ball around you. There’s also a variety of environment variables added to the puzzles, such as buttons that are activated by yourself, or Ball – but they really don’t go far …Read More