A Green Mushroom

The holiday break has given me a chance to start catching up on my PC gaming !  Here are my first set of impressions from all the PC games I'm trying out. Mini Metro So good.  So surprisingly good.  Usually I hate early access games, but this might be my new favorite action/puzzler. You take the role of city transportation planner and try to keep the trains running as the city slowly expands around you.  It's amazing and I can't do it justice with words, you need to see it in motion. I can tell you I started the game intending to try it for 5 minutes before bouncing to the next game... and the next time I looked up it was an hour and a half later as I was emerging from some kind of zen state.  Connecting stations, adding trains, rerouting existing routes, making bridges and tunnels.  It all adds up to a ton of fun.  It works really well. This game is so fun already and it's only going to get better as early access progresses.  Go pi...

During my latest exploration of the XBLA offerings I not only picked up Clash of Heroes but also stumbled upon a gem called Outland.  Outland is a platformer that any metroidvania fan would feel right at home with.  Throughout the course of the game the player slowly gains more abilities which in turn open up more sections of the map. The real fun starts when polarity is introduced.  Obviously drawing inspiration from Ikaruga , the hero can be in one of two states, Blue or Red.  Or, in the mythos of the game, "good" or "evil."  The important part is that projectile attacks don't hurt the player if they are the same color as the hero and only enemies of the opposite color can be hurt.  This leads to a continuous on-the-fly adjustment of polarity between colors. This is one of the few games lately where I've lost myself in the flow of the gameplay.  Figuring out and executing complex patterns of polarity switching while running, jumpin...

Tiny Wings is about momentum, reaction time, flying, and an adorable bird all at the same time.  It's a fun experience and it only takes one button to play.  Well, one touch at any rate. In Tiny Wings the world is made up of islands and each of these islands has a series of hills on it.  Your goal is to help the bird cross as many islands as possible in one day.  With a touch of the screen the bird folds his wings and gains momentum downhill.  When you release your touch the bird flaps his wings and tries his best to soar majestically with the momentum he's gained. Stringing together hill jumps makes the bird go exponentially higher and farther.  It's a simple gameplay mechanic that I can't seem to get enough of.  The sense of accomplishment I get from executing jumps successfully is amazing. The game not only has cute graphics, but they're procedurally generated too.  The hills and islands change colors and designs every day.  That's...

Halo Reach is out and I like it.  It's a pretty sweet game.  I don't think it's the be-all end-all of first person shooters like a lot of reviews have made it out to be, but I certainly can't bash Bungie for the level of polish they put into their games.  Overall, Reach is Halo refined, with a few new features thrown in for good measure.  It doesn't revolutionize the Halo series but I can say for sure that if you liked any of the previous entries in the Halo series you will like Halo Reach. The first thing I noticed when I started the campaign is that I got to play as my own Spartan.  Since the main character doesn't have to be Master Chief the player is free to create their very own Noble 6.  The armory options lead to a lot of personal touches on your Spartan.  I felt that I was more connected to my character as I played through the game simply because he was mine and not some pre-determined entity.  Many of the cutscenes play out through th...