When I was in high school way back in the early days of the 'aughts, I owned a PlayStation. Owned, not played, you see, as my system usually sat collecting dust for various periods of time. Sure, I was busy with school and work and whatnot, but I was still playing games. It was around my freshman year of high school that I was introduced to Nesticle and ZSNES, emulators that allowed you to play old-school 8- and 16-bit games at home on your PC. Growing up as a rebellious teen, I didn't just game; I gamed like a badass. (Or so Metallica would like me to believe during my early days as a pirate) The many, many hours I spent playing the games of my youth (and actually completing them!) spurred heavy feelings of nostalgia because, even in the latter days of the 90s, they just don't make games like they used to.

Developer Silicon Studio not only re-created the feeling of playing an 8-bit generation game, they re-made that rush of excitement I used...

I loved Deus Ex, and for some odd reason I rather disliked the sequel Deus Ex: Invisible War. There was a certain something missing from the second game. Maybe it was how they had cut out large chunks of the RPG aspect of the game, instead focusing more on the action side of it. Or maybe it was in how the game was advanced far enough in the future that it had lost all connection to the intricacies and oddities of the conspiracies that formed the core of Deus Ex. Actually, it was probably in how all the complex character development and shifting plots were dumbed down from X-Files complexity to Stargate complexity.

So given what happened with the last game, I’m not too excited about the Deus Ex’s upcoming prequel Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I figured that with studio Ion Storm Inc, and designers Warren Spector and Harvey Smith having jack to do with this new game, it isn’t really worth getting...

Normally, patches are a good thing. A developer or publisher rushes a game or half-asses the play testing and it hits the shelves with a few nasty bugs. Sometimes, as was the case with Fallout 2, the bugs are game killers and no one can play the game, requiring the developers rush out a fix ASAP. Other times you have developers who keep toying with a game long after it ships and they find ways to make the game run better. The patches these groups release often tend towards game mechanic tweaks or little bits of additional content. A great example of this style is Galactic Civilization 2. The game’s developer, Stardock, released dozens of patches designed to improve the game, culminating in one massive patch that completely upgraded the game’s graphics engine.

Then there are the bad patches. The updates that do little more than make you wish the developers would just stop screwing around with the damned game. For a long time Fallout 3 was a game that...

You have to love a game that has the balls to, at the end of the tutorial, reference how great the rest of the experience is going to be. Upon being sent through a crash course teaching me the gameplay, my new boss had a few parting words for me before my first mission that went something like this:

Fresh off my review for Split/Second, it's time to look at Blur from Bizarre Creations. Honestly, in my first few hours I can't add too much to what I said in my preview of the game. The powerups, which I covered extensively in the preview, are more or less entirely unchanged from the beta. The multiplayer still feels intense and, now that the level cap is removed, feels rewarding to sink tons of hours into. New to me, though, is the single player.

Blur's single player spans nine events, each based around a different "boss" character. Each event has different races to play along with some new modes. Checkpoint is your standard dart-from-checkpoint-to-checkpoint-to-extend-time game mode with the addition of nitro powerups and time extension...

We made a lot of changes here at Crispy Gamer over the past couple of months and I wanted to share with everyone what we’ve done.

At the end of 2009, Crispy Gamer acquired 360voice.com, gamerDNA.com, TweetmyGaming.com and the gamerDNA Alliance Network of publishers.  Shortly thereafter, the board of directors, wanting the company to focus on the Alliance Network by growing advertising revenues, laid off most of the editorial staff at Crispygamer.com and gamerDNA.com.

I was an intern at crispygamer.com at the time, uploading video and screenshot assets. The new management team offered me a job in February, working here as Associate Web Producer for crispygamer.com. I took it.

Since that moment, we have established a completely new staff of writers, all young writers trying to make their break in the...

Mario games know how to get right into the action. Within the first 20 minutes I have gone through an introductory stage highlighting the basics of Mario's movements and I see that Bowser has captured the Princess again. Ho hum.

Really though, I couldn't be happier with this game. Mario moves just like he did in the previous game and the inclusion of Yoshi brings back the excitement I felt when I first discovered him in Super Mario World. The galaxies vary from grassy lands to icy terrain to abstract puzzle levels and each area feels unique.

One noticeable difference is the “World Map” layout. In the first Super Mario Galaxy, there were different hubs that contained sets of levels. In the second game, your Mario spaceship (which is a gigantic Mario head by the way) moves across a map similar to ones in New Super...

Back when Alan Wake was officially announced at E3 in 2005, the Xbox 360, the system the game eventually would be released on, had not even been out. 2005 seems like a long time ago these days, so now that it was officially released this week, how does Alan Wake match up to our fervent expectations? After popping the game into my 360, I was introduced to our title character, his wife Alice, and the quiet northwestern coal mining town of Bright Falls.  The first episode finds Alan exploring this idyllic town and its mysterious inhabitants shortly after his wife goes missing.

So far, I've been enjoying nearly every minute of my time with Alan Wake. Sure, character animation might be a little dated given the amount of time the game's been in development and the game's combat system might need a little bit of work, but color...