Final Fight ★★★

Beat’em ups have the reputation of being a dumb genre. The idea of punching your way through group after group of enemies, once appealing, has become synonymous with boredom and repetition. Like many, I thought the genre was lifeless and dull, a matter of punching enemies harder than they could hit you.

And yet, when I played Final Fight and took the streets of a fictionalized New York city I realized it didn’t matter how hard my character could punch. What mattered was who.

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Theme Hospital ★★★

The average hospital wasn’t lucky enough to be designed from scratch. Most were forced to grow organically, absorbing new buildings as they ran out of space and new treatments were developed.

Medical centers that started out curing common diseases like Invisibility or the cheese-induced Bloaty Head could find themselves overrun by many, much more difficult patients just a few years later. The constant threat of earthquakes, epidemics or health inspections only made it worse, making it more and more difficult to fulfill a hospital’s most important goal: To turn up a big, nice profit.

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Gwent: Condottiere under another name

gwent-1-condottiere “So it’s just like Condottiere” I remember thinking when I first heard about Gwent. And when I first saw it on the table and played it, there was no doubt; Gwent was quite literally the same game. Same rules, same cards, same weather-inmune heroes and same scarecrow that returns cards to your hand.

At first I thought it was a new release based on Sapkowski’s fantasy world but I soon started to have doubts: The credits of the game did not mention its designer, but another man: Damein Monnier. Continue reading »

Chess ★★★★★

ajedrez-1-jaquemate Chess is in an odd place, critically speaking. It’s seen as the best game ever made by a general public that plays few other games and doesn’t see the medium as having any cultural significance and yet it’s barely acknowledged by those that do. But Chess…Chess is a game like any other and doesn’t gain from blind praise nor obscurantism. It should not be taken for granted, but talked about, contextualized and compared. How does it work? What makes it different from other strategy games? Why is it good? Continue reading »

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