The Nerd Next Door

  Recently I've been playing the 2020 indie hit Hades quite a bit. It takes me a while to get adjusted to a new game but I found the addictive groove of Hades ' rougelike and random design to my liking. It's also a great game on Steam Deck, when I've got 30 minutes to kill at work I power up the Deck and go for a quick playthrough.  But the more and more I played through Hades' story the more I began noticing similarities to another rougelike I've played, Returnal . With Hades II announced and the PC port of Returnal out I figured it would be a perfect time to talk about how the two master one thing very well, story integration. Namely how the two games integrate story into the design to tell two radically different tales in terms of tone. The first is Hades , casting the player as the titular lord of the dead's son, Zagreus, as he tries to escape his father's domain. Problem with that is he keeps dying; the good news is that as an immortal Zagreus just...

 When I was 12 in 2008, I played Portal for the first time, specifically the Still Alive XBLA Port. I loved the game but at the end of it I thought, how cool would it be for someone to mod a game to allow portal guns. It's something i never looked into, a mere idle curiosity if anything, I was more obsessed with going "The cake was a lie." until everyone got sick of it. It would be 11 years before anything came of it with Splitgate: Arena Warfare, a new First Person shooter from indie studio 1047 Games that borrows from Portal and combines it with Halo. So if you play on PC and want a Halo fix, this is it unless you wanna try that awful PC port of 1 and 2 or try the unoffical Halo Online, well at least until Microsoft drops Halo the Master Chief Collection on PC. But is Splitgate good enough to stand with the big boys, or is it doomed to obscurity? On a graphical level, this game looks about on par with most games of this generation, nothing fantastic, but it's n...