Twitching on the Floor: Hotline Miami

My eyes sting and my hands hang claw-like over the mouse and keyboard. I have spent the last three or so hours hunched over my glowing laptop dispensing quick precise death. Or at least for part of the time. The rest has been taken up with frantic gasps between badly aimed gun shots, misplaced punches, and strange backward movements which more often than not have left me leaking florescent red stuff over some indistinguishable hotel lobby.  

Horrible Murdery Game Out Tomorrow

Sooo.... Hotline Miami is out tomorrow and, though there's loads of other important, life maintaining work to be done, I'm really looking forward to spending the evening bludgeoning and being bludgeoned within a sleazy 80s neon malaise (bloody remains apparently spewed over a post-modern hotel interior).

Torchlight et al : A Haphazzard Defense of Genre Refinement

I posted a  review a couple of weeks ago on Critical Gamer for Runic Games' RPG sequel Torchlight II. As the review attests it's a superb action RPG in the vein of Diablo etc. Despite the much aggrandised looting I actually found the most exciting and enjoyable aspect of the game to be the combat. This was mostly down to two things:

1) lots and lots of enemies

2) variety of enemy attack patterns.

So a  lot of the time during combat I was a bit lost amidst the flashing colours; which also left my puny laptop struggling for breath. But I never felt like my many, many deaths were unfair; my mortality only ever recalled thanks to me taking my eyes off the Diablo style health-bubble-thing for too long. It was a lesson quickly learnt - though also one surprisingly easy to forget when being pummelled by masses of tentacley djinni-beings.