A Green Mushroom

Overcooked is a multiplayer co-op game, one of my favorite genre's ever.  I picked it up on sale and then didn't get around to playing it until over the holiday break. In one night my entire family was hooked. Overcooked sees you take on the role of a chef trying to prepare meals under increasingly difficult circumstances.  The levels get crazy, but in a good way.  Like, having to run across ice flows between different halves of the kitchen.  Or cooking on a ship where the rocking of the waves moves your counters back and forth.  Or having a pedestrian crossing in the middle of your kitchen. Even though the levels get tricky the best part of the game is that it has simple controls so anyone can jump in and be playing decently within a few minutes.  Where we're playing on PS4 one analog stick moves your character, the X button picks up and drops off items, and the Square button interacts with a work station (like for cutting).  That's it. ...

After my brother and I played Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes at PAX last year we knew we would absolutely need to play it when it released on PC.  I picked it up right when it launched because it was fairly inexpensive and it sat unplayed on my computer until last week. We finally got around to playing and it was super fun.  I was the bomb deffusal player and he had the bomb manual.  As we got into more and more complicated ones to defuse he ended up spreading out every page of his printed out manual on a table so he wouldn't have to flip pages. We also started using shorthand verbal cues to identify different modules and patterns.  It's a game all about communication and it worked super well over headset. If you aren't familiar with it, the player in the room with the bomb isn't allowed to look at the manual and the manual player isn't allowed to see the screen with the bomb.  It's asymmetric and it's kind of amazing. You should take a look at...

Triforce Heroes is the newest Legend of Zelda game on 3DS.  It came out two weeks ago but I still haven't see much coverage of it.  Maybe it's because Triforce heroes isn't structured like a typical Legend of Zelda game, it's basically a follow-up to The Legend of Zelda Four Swords. If you don't know what that means... it's essentially multiplayer Zelda. The main conceit in making Zelda multiplayer is that the open world exploration is completely gone.  Instead, the game is structured into zones which contain levels which contain stages. You connect online and choose the zone you want to play in.  This will match you with other people who also want to play levels in that zone.  Once you have a party of three you enter the zone and cast your vote for the level you want to play.  It does a little roulette spin and choose the one of your three votes randomly.  Then you actually enter the level and play through the four stages within it as a team...

Trenched is the most interesting take on tower defense that I've played in awhile.  This game came out of nowhere, it wasn't even on my radar, but when I tried the demo on XBLA and I was hooked. The second I got into a "mobile trench" I knew this game was something different.  The World War I/II mech setting somehow works and really drew me in as I played.  I did the first couple of missions solo while I felt out the mixture of laying down defensive turrets and charging with guns blazing. Then I discovered the best part of the game, multiplayer!  All of the missions can be played with friends or with a random set of allies online.  Once I played a map with allies I didn't even consider going back to solo.  Not only is four more fun than one but getting to see each player's customized Trench is a treat. There's all the customization I've come to expect from a mech game.  Various chassis (basically classes) with different strengths and weakne...

Sitting down to write is always the hardest part of writing. A really good friend of mine died last week, so I haven't felt much like writing. But, it's time to start getting back into my daily life.  I miss writing already, but not all my thoughts today are gaming related. I've known my friend since we were around 3 years old.  I have memories of playing all sorts of games with him over the course of the last 20 years from NES to Xbox 360.  One of the memories that kept flashing through my head this last week was about playing couch co-op games with him while we were roomates in college. Freshman year we lived in the dorms and we also got a little game called Guitar Hero.  We ended up socializing with a ton of people on our floor because we would rock out with Guitar Hero and leave our door open.  But the best part of the game was knowing that every night we could both relax for a while and hang out together.  Working on our skills and learning to m...

I already posted my co-op review for Splinter Cell Conviction, but I sat down the other day and played through the single player game as well.  Overall, I liked it and I would recommend it to stealth fans.  It is a good game and consistently fun, but I still prefer the co-op campaign. If someone were to ask me to recommend the best stealth game I had ever played I would tell them to check out Batman Arkham Asylum but Splinter Cell Conviction is a close second.  If they asked me to recommend the best stealth co-op game I would most definitely tell them to play Splinter Cell Conviction. But, today I'm talking about the single player campaign. The first thing I noticed - and loved - was the persistent experience across game modes.  All of my experience, weapons, gadgets, and completed challenges from the co-op campaign carried over into my single player campaign automatically.  It was seamless and awesome.  All games with co-op and single player campai...

A quick update on what I'm playing and what I intend to play. I'm investing a lot of time in StarCraft 2 and in writing posts for my StarCraft 2 Newbie Guide .  I hope they are clear and helpful.  They are all things that I didn't know 2 weeks ago when I started playing StarCraft 2. I beat the Splinter Cell Conviction single player campaign.  I liked it, but not as much as the co-op .  I'm doing a second playthrough on the hardest difficulty and playing around with some of the extra modes in the game.  Going for the P.E.C. challenges keeps me busy too.  I hope to do a second playthrough of the co-op campaign on a harder difficulty as well.  I'm really enjoying my time with Splinter Cell, but the co-op is much more impressive than the single player. I have Darksiders from Gamefly on the floor next to my Xbox 360.  I haven't put in the disc yet, but it is next on my list. I'm still dabbling in the Blur beta .  I can't believe how muc...

I spent 7 solid hours with the Splinter Cell Conviction Co-op mode just now.  I wanted to write a post right away even though it is 3:45am and I should sleep instead.  I'm shooting from the hip with my thoughts, but here it goes. This game is fun!  The Splinter Cell Conviction Co-op campaign is worth your time if you are interested in playing a co-op stealth game.  The campaign is only 6-8 hours but it is entirely separate from the single player campaign, which adds value in my mind.  I played the entire campaign without taking a break and I was never once bored.  From me, that is huge praise.  I get bored of games quickly when I feel like they have nothing new to offer.  Splinter Cell Conviction delivers. Part of the reason I liked it so much may be that I could never really get into the other Splinter Cell games.  I struggled with the controls and generally got frustrated/bored.  I am coming to Splinter Cell as completely new expe...