Richard Heil
With a nearly six-month hiatus in the middle of this year, our actual review count in 2015 is not particularly numerous. With that in mind, we’re stretching our usual boundaries for our game of the year. Usually we require a game to have been reviewed here on AAGH to receive the award, but considering how many titles we missed over the course of this calendar year we’re going to include every title we have extensive hands-on experience with.
We’re going rattle off a series of mini-reviews to make up for lost time this year, starting with Super Mario Maker for the Wii U. These will be shorter and less complete than our full reviews.
If you ever played a Mario game, at some point you surely thought to yourself, “I bet I could make a great Mario level.” The time to put that to the test has come, and it turns out that some people make evil Mario levels.
With the chorus of Elton John’s 1972 classic running through my head, I happily hum along as I play Psyonix’s excellent rocket-car soccer/football hybrid, Rocket League. As a huge fan of the (unrelated) Unreal Tournament 2004 mod Deathball, Rocket League’s concept strikes a very good chord with me, but is it really hitting on all cylinders, or could it use a tune-up before hitting the pitch?
Time does fly, doesn’t it? It has been six months to the day since there has been a new article posted here on AAGH. Chaos is Gaming has seen a few updates in that time, but All Around Gaming Hub has sat, a still, idle monument, waiting to be reawakened. Today is that day. Arouse from your long summer slumber, AAGH – we have work to do.
We have not yet reviewed Grand Theft Auto 5 on AAGH. It originally came out in 2013, and has been re-released twice, first on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 and then, most recently, on PC. We have reviewed Grand Theft Auto 4 (twice) as well as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (also twice), but not Grand Theft Auto 5. Today we plug that gap in our resume by reviewing GTA 5’s latest incarnation on PC. Is it overrated, or did we miss a gem twice over?
To the surprise of very few, WildStar – Carbine Studio’s colorful MMORPG – is going free to play. The transition to the new model is scheduled to take place this fall and according to the developers the game won’t change or hide features behind a paywall once this occurs. This is better than the likes of Champions Online, who flaunts features and options that you can’t access without paying, but rather than go the Guild Wars 2/Elder Scrolls Online model with an upfront game purchase, WildStar is going to follow more in the tracks of Star Wars: The Old Republic and go completely free to play.
Grand Theft Auto 5 is a good game, one of the best from the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 era, and it still holds up today. However, its online component – Grand Theft Auto Online – is a slightly messy but all around brilliant experience, and for me at least has completely eclipsed anything from the single player mode. There are always things happening, things to see and things to do in GTA Online, and here are a few things that I have run across in my time with the game.
With another Ludum Dare game jam starting tonight, AAGH Games – our game development wing – is revving up to enter once again. This will be the third straight Ludum Dare for AAGH Games and as is customary for us, we will be broadcasting it live on our Twitch channel. When the theme is unveiled tonight at 9 PM EDT (click here to translate that to your local time), we will update this post with the theme and any other relevant information as it comes along. If you’re interested in game development, you can tune in and hang out.