Recent reviews by Defiant

Fairly good video game implementation of the traitor mechanic I enjoy from board games, if a bit more mob-justice focused, given the speed. Works well with 2 impostors and 6-8 crew.

This game revolves around office meetings. Each day, you're presented with a problem or issue, and you're given a choice of how to respond to the problem with four different responses. The type of reponses include serious, laid back, more thoughtful or more lighthearted. For example in one question, you needed to cut down on paper usage, and so the answers boiled down to things like using both sides of pages, moving stuff that would be on paper onto computers, getting rid of toilet paper or (I think?) making people buy their own paper.

You choose a response, and everyone at the meeting respondes to the suggestion with their happiness meter going up or down some amount. The people at the meeting go from the director, accountant, IT manager, security chief all the way down to trainee and janitor. Successfully impress people for long enough and you get a promotion. Not clear why you would need to impress some of the people though (do they all get an equal say in your promotion?), but that's the gameplay. Oh, and you can skip going to work for a day, but I never tried that option.

Currently, the gameplay would be ok as part of a larger system, but by itself, as it is now, it's kind of lacking. But it's still in Early Access, so this is understandable. I would prefer waiting until more of the game is developed before deciding whether to recommend the game or not, but the review system requires I choose. I'll try to revist the game down the line and update this review as necessary.

Cute game in the style of Sierra's earlier adventure games, but with lucasarts' lack of permanent deaths. You're the first officer of a ship on an expedition to check the viability of a planet to become a new homeworld. The puzzles were fair and were fairly easy for this veteran adventure gamer. The game took me about 25 minutes to complete, although I still have yet to get all of the achievements like finding all of the deaths in the game, and I have yet to find the last two points in the game.

The writing was good, and I enjoyed the humor. The interface, graphics and music are all fine and do the job of trying to give the sierra-style game experience. The parser is a little souped up, although that felt unnecessary to me given the short game length and ease of the game.

A fairly solid interactive Choose-Your-Own-Adventure movie where you play a part in a heist and then have to deal with the repercussions. The video and audio quality are solid, and the quick (but plentiful) decisions are handled smoothly and without affecting the pace. The acting was fine.

In my single playthrough that lasted roughly 75 minutes, there were 59 (out of a total of 180+) decisions and I saw 12 of the 14 scenes available. Though I assume that the same scene can have a different flavor based on your decisions - in the trailer, someone is holding a girl at gun point in a car park, whereas in my playthrough, the girl had already left, and I was the one being held at gun point. But I would guess that the same basic plot with a few significant alternatives, with many of the decisions branching back to the main path. Some of the decisions I made early on, though, did have a role in events later in the game.

The playthrough I had was satisfactory but didn't have a happy ending. The game advertises seven endings, but I don't know if these all occur at the end of the game, or if maybe one or more occur earlier in the game.

My guess is that you would probably need 2-3 playthroughs to see the vast majority of the game, and maybe there would be incentive enough to go through all 7 endings, although the amount of new stuff you would see would probably have gone down a lot.

Also, I played all in one sitting - I'm not sure if there was a savegame if you left in the middle, but there certainly wasn't an option I saw to save multiple savegames. Which means if you want to play a similar game but wanted to change your decisions midgame or towards the end, you would have to replay the entire game. That's the one negative I have about this game.

Played the heck out of the mobile version of this, and now I'm enjoying the PC version. One of my favorite games of the past couple of years. Well worth playing!

Gaming in Color is a documentary about the gay gaming culture. I donated to the kickstarter of it a couple of years ago, looking forward to a documentary that covers an aspect of who I identify as, and I'm glad it got made.

The documentary discusses aspects of the gayming community, and in particular some of the difficulties (and successes) it has had. It interviews a number of gaymers - I agreed with much of it, though not all of it, and there were some insightful things said (not just about the gayming community and the problems it faces, but occasionally about gaming in general.

It addressed a number of issues, most of those that I would have wanted addressed, although some not in as much depth as I would have liked, but given that it's only an hour long, that's not suprising - this serves as more of a springboard for discussion. It discusses the (lack of) representation in games, the harrasment of gamers online, the struggles of feeling accepted, the creation of safe spaces, reasons why some gamers gravitated to gaming, peoples experiences, and so on.

I would have liked to hear about more people's personal experiences (this could have been an excellent space to make people who aren't LGBT gain empathy in the issues faced), some more discussion about the history of the issue (eg, those rare LGBT characters in gaming that were almost exclusively negatively portrayed, EA's LGBT conference, more coverage about GaymerX (since the documentary clearly was made during it)), the proposing of more LGBT people being involved in the creation of gaming to try to address the problem of representation, etc. The documentary also focused on video games (thankfully also including some PC games), but overlooked tabletop gaming - while it doesn't face as many of the issues that video gaming does (probably in part because it's played face-to-face), it still should have deserved a mention.

Overall, this is a good documentary to give you some insight into the gayming community and the issues it faces.

Also, there are no Closed Captioning that I could see (Not sure if this is the movie or steam)

Edit: Never mind, closed captioning is available.

Edit: As can be seen by the Neo-Nazi comment made below (as well as the discussion forums, the incorrect tagging, etc), this is the kind of trolling that validates documentaries like this.

It's a fun L4D2 stye game, but asymmetrical, with 2 sharks vs 4 treasure seeking divers. It's different in that rather then going from one point of the level to the end, you're escorting steve the robot (who unlocks some safes down below), which means divers are forced to go and stay at vertain locations for a set number of time. While he's doing that, you can pick up treasure, fight off sharks as well as fix steve (if he's been injured by a shark).

Parts of the environment is destrutable and add to that that shark attacks can come from *any* direction, and it's more challenging than L4D2. I've mostly played as diver, as I've done poorly as shark, although most people seem to prefer shark. I think the diver aspect is a little more strategic, as you're trying to keep an eye on other survivors, as well as fixing steve, setting up sonar to get some warning of sharks, or mines to injure them (watch out, though, cause those mines can hurt the other divers and steve as well).

I'm not wild about the inventory system. You can only buy, for instance, one type of consumable and it doesnt feel like enough. And you can only buy them when you're dead, so you need to die in order to buy additional equipment (!).

Additionally, you get money for picking up treasure and giving it to steve (and, I think, when you kill opponents), but people seem to still search for treasure throughout the level, even towards the end (when they presumably have had enough money to get everything they need and then some). I guess people are doing it for points, but I would think at the point youve gotten enough money, you should concentrate on keeping an eye out on your friends and on potential shark attacks.

Given that most people prefer to play sharks, althoguh I had no problem when I did, it might benefit the game to do some sort of vs swap mode, where you play the game three times and everyone has a chance to be shark. Not sure if that would be used (or whether people would drop out once they play shark) but it wouldnt hurt to have it as an option.

Also, sometimes, you can get put into games with people who are much more experienced than you. A system that would rank you and match you with others in a similar rank would be useful.

Pros
- L4D2 style play, but more challenging, good teamwork play.
- The atmsophere of the setting is nicely done.
- There are, I think, 9 maps, and theres also support for creating new maps.

Cons
- Not wild about the inventory system and that you can only buy when you die.
- Might get matched with people who are much better than you on the other team.

I've played through the second episode. This game is amazing. It's the closest I can think of of a game being a TV series. It gives me a very strong vibe of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Veronica Mars (if more serious/less comical). Part of this comes through the story and part through the very strong characterizations, but also visually and especially the soundtrack all work together. The setting of a high school was well done, though there were a few oddities, like a high school having dorms.

There are also lots of choices to make, some of which you will realize when they're presented to you, and some only after you've made the choice - a notification will tell you that the decision you made will have consequences. It isn't entirely clear what those consequences will be, but from what I can tell, some are minor but not all are, though you might not see the consequence for a while.

Pros:
-Solid story
-Great characterizations
-Visual quality
-Audio quality
-Lots of options
-For the most part, puzzles seamlessly fit in with the story and don't seem like puzzles.

Cons:
-Theres only one save that autosaves. Mostly this is an annoyance for completionists (since you cant just save at every decision, you would largely have to replay the entire episode to make a different decision, apart from the last decision made.
-The lip sync doesn't match (From what I understand, it's because the game was done in French first?). I honestly didn't notice this until after playing the first episode and having it pointed out to me there was a lipsync problem.
-puzzles are mostly fairly easy (if you're looking for a puzzle game).

It's a nicely designed, but very short (30-60 minutes long), FMV game where you (mostly) play the part of a kidnap victim who's trying to escape. The kidnapper enjoys toying with the victim (eg, his "Play with me" message at the start of the game), and thus has put a lot of puzzles that the player needs to solve in order to escape (eg, locked rooms, etc).

The puzzles all tend to be of the locked room/inventory style puzzles. Although there are some cut scenes with dialogue, you never interact with people (which is a shame, as IMO, FMV games would lend themselves to character heavy games, given it's medium). Still there's enough story and atmosphere here that I was happy.

Also, note that there are a few (very few) timed portions to the game. They didn't cause me any difficulty, though.

If you're like point-and-click adventure games, and don't mind the very short length, I recommend it.

A fun Mafia-esque game. While it doesn't quite have the social aspect of playing in person, the software version enables a number of roles that wouldn't be feasible in in person games (like the Jailor, the Spy, etc).

Everyone has their own role to play (with some people working towards the same objective), and most have some related power to use, so you're not just a generic villiager. There are still some roles are more fun/powerful/better than others (eg, Jester, Executioner and Survivor are probably among the least fun) .

Overall, a good game if you like Mafia-style games. I do wish they would improve the lobbies, though. There are a few lobbies with a set configuration and one thats user-defined, but no way of grouping people togethr who want the same user configured game , or grouping people together by how well they play. Hopefully this gets improved in the future.