Dusty Gamer: All about games since 1978

Category: Games

  • Looking for Burnout

    Looking for Burnout

    The best car/ driving/ racing/ speeding/ adrenaline/ wheels game of all time is Burnout 3: Takedown (2004, PS2, Xbox). Its impeccably crafted highways that demand excessive speed or you feel like you’re doing them a disservice, its kilometer-long drifts, its picture-perfect scenery blazing by, its blink-and-you’re-gone, laughter-inducing crashes with cars flying hundreds of meters into…

  • RPG mechanics on table and screen

    Running my current D&D campaign, I’ve been thinking about mechanics a lot. I want to make the game mechanically interesting: it should be a good game, any other qualities notwithstanding. As the play has become more regimented, I don’t feel that we’ve lost any of the freeform creative air of a tabletop RPG, paradoxic as…

  • Narrative and context: Thomas Was Alone/Catherine double feature (PS3)

    Narrative and context: Thomas Was Alone/Catherine double feature (PS3)

    THOMAS WAS ALONE (PS3) Thomas Was Alone is a simple puzzle platformer in which you switch control between different shapes and sizes of moving rectangles to navigate through a side-scrolling maze. It’s one of the most important narrative achievements in games. The power of abstraction is not to be dismissed. If you pay attention to…