Despite its generic name, Nightmare House 2 is a stand-out horror game. It’s not even truly a sequel, since Nightmare House 1 is included as the “prologue”. Sure, it pays homage to everything in the horror genre before it, but frankly it outdoes most of the games of the genre.

With a chill-thriller like this, timing is everything. Do you remember your first time playing FEAR or Silent Hill? You know the moments that really got to you, ..read the full article

Personal Stories for player characters are being touted as the next big thing. I’m really not sure how that’s going to work and I’m not entirely convinced that the devs of the latest upcoming games do either. Star Wars: The Old Republic, Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World are highly anticipated games that all have an element of personal story experience.

Watching the latest trailer for The Secret World (see header above) reminded me more of single-player games. The trailer ..read the full article

Brink looks more and more like it will be the well-rounded co-op shooter I’ve been looking for. It caught my eye last year when they released

Valve’s given out info on the upcoming (October) DLC for both Left 4 Dead 1 & 2 and the big deal is they’re overlapping some of the content within the two games. At least in the direction of Left 4 Dead –> Left 4 Dead 2.

Both games will get the new campaign The Sacrifice, with the spoiler-ish title (at least if you played The Passing). Complete with new campaign ending scenario.

The overlap comes with No Mercy, which will be ported ..read the full article

I had to take deep breaths before posting this. And an extra day.

I’m still in a weird head-space about it.

I’m going to try hard to not make this about Tycho and Gabe. I love Penny Arcade, but as industry insiders I think they may have lost touch with everything outside of their own realm.

Tycho voiced something I’ve heard before. A sentiment I fully understand, because in moments of recklessness, I’ve had this thought myself: He equated buying used games ..read the full article

I share Brad Wardell’s particular opinion (on this topic) that obstructive DRM is a bigger blight than piracy. I generally feel that nothing productive comes out of aggressively protecting against piracy. I also feel that under the guise of protecting themselves against piracy, Corporations are finding convenient excuses to implement protections against competition and protections for exploitive business models.

When I examine these issues, people often mistake my intent and believe I am somehow pro-piracy. I’m not.

I’m just as susceptible as ..read the full article

As you read this I’m counting sheep.

Either asleep, waiting for a new dawn of Worms, or awake and choosing which variation of exploding sheep I will send against my opponents.

I was an Amiga nut, so I’ve been playing Worms since the beginning of the Wormage. I’ve been particularly excited about this new Reloaded version though. The convenience of a fully Steamworks enabled Worms has me jumping in my hot seat, eager to play. Pre-order early access starts today.

If you ..read the full article

Atari & Cryptic have made it official: A new Neverwinter game will be coming from them in 2011.

Did they have to reuse the Neverwinter campaign name again? There’s got to be some other areas in the Forgotten Realms they could have tapped. This name has a serious pedigree when it comes to PC games. Plus, wasn’t the city of Neverwinter destroyed for the D&D 4th edition?

Well they’ve decided to go there. I like Cryptic, more than most people do, ..read the full article

I’m definitely getting back into game modding. I’ve been dipping my toes into the water this past year, trying out this & that and now settling back to good ol’ Half-Life (well, Half-Life 2 / Source). What better way to kick off my renewed interest than highlighting someone else’s modding results? – The

This article should be a lot more enjoyable for me than the technical vs legal details post, which I felt compelled to write but didn’t really address why I had an interest in the topic.

MaNGOS is server software, designed for running an online RPG (theoretically an MMORPG, but generally with less users online). The software is typically used to emulate a WoW server when combined with a WoW-derived database, scripts and collision detection vmap files. Without those additions however, regardless ..read the full article

Private servers are a sticky, almost taboo topic around the MMORPG community. I can’t help but think that’s one of the biggest problems with them. If private servers weren’t pushed so underground, maybe some sanity could come with legitimacy.

Legitimacy? Did I just say that?

I have no interest in treading on any game’s Copyrights (and by that I mean Berne convention, not the over-reaching U.S. DMCA). And I don’t want to play some hacked-up version of a game so I can ..read the full article

I’ve changed the look and feel of NecroRogIcon to reflect my posting habits and perhaps encourage myself into some new habits as well. The “NecroCore” theme has been built from scratch with handwritten code. It’s still powered by WordPress and I use some widgets and icons from elsewhere, but overall it’s felt great to make my blog uniquely mine again. This is not based on any other specific design.

The core premise: Each page has only one article, putting the ..read the full article

I’ve been pretty quiet here lately and it’s because I’ve been gaming more than talking-about-gaming. After that mega Steam sale in June, I dove head first back into co-op gaming.

One thing I’ve noticed is that during the usual summer lull, Steam has had huge numbers of concurrent users playing during peak hours, daily topping out at more than 2.2 million players. That’s on par with last Christmas season (when typically a lot more people are gaming) and it’s about double ..read the full article

On the morning of May 21st, my friend and fellow gamer Philip woke up with his arm and the side of his face ‘asleep’. Like most of us would, he assumed he had just slept in an odd position. As he got up though, it became clear that he was quickly losing usage in the entire left side of his body. He twittered through the experience:

“LOL woke up and the left side of my face is numb and my ..read the full article

Chicken before the Egg? Content before Combat systems?

It looks as though the devs at ArenaNet have been studying coop games and the results could be very good. No healers? No traditional tanks? Falling down instead of death? This sounds a lot more like a few recent FPS games than a holy-trinity laden MMORPG. Good.

I love how they’re shaking up the tried & tired formula. The big question: Can they pull it off? I doubt I’d be asking that question if ..read the full article

Blizzard’s “Real ID” plans are rubbing me the wrong way. This isn’t just a “don’t post on the forums” issue. This is a company dipping their toes into the water to see how cold or warm it is, leveraging their primary means of product support.

I’m sure that many people cannot relate to my alarm. I’m posting this so that perhaps others can see the potential impact on at least one person. Generally I don’t whine about my personal space nor ..read the full article

Steam has a huge sale going on until July 5th, plus additional one-day-only sale items each day until then. I’ve already ranted about it on my Twitter the last few days. I don’t feel the least bit ashamed that I’ve fallen into Valve’s marketing blitz.

With Co-Op on my mind, I’ve been sharing the love with some friends by picking up multiple copies of:

Over at Grumpy Gamer, Ron Gilbert has announced the imminent arrival of Deathspank for consoles and I can’t help but sigh waiting for (as he puts it) the [REDACTED] versions, which I assume includes PC.

Call me a cynic, but I assume the lack of [REDACTED] is due to the publisher’s platform bias. EA doesn’t have much on Steam or even PC in general these days. =(

Look, I get the whole avoid-PC = avoid-piracy thing and the general success of ..read the full article