PixlBit

Hey Kickstarter people with too much money on your hands: how about trying to fix Social Security?

If you were given 13 grand, would you use it to make a sequel to an Atari Lynx puzzle game? I can't say that would be my first choice, and I bet it wouldn't be yours either, but could nearly 400 Kickstarter backers go wrong? (I can see Takedown: Red Sabre players are reaching for pitchforks; easy, folks, this is nothing like that. Stand down.) Another adventure in crowdfunding has resurrected one man's decades-long dream, and after playing the final product via Desura, I consider my brain partially teased, moderately amused.

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My clone has more aspiration than this game

Have you ever played a game that was such a blatant clone, you literally had the urge to punch digitized ones and zeros in hopes of transforming it into something better? Have you ever felt the desire to quit   purely because you could predict what was coming? I wanted to with Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death, which feels like it’s been done so many times before. What initially began as a promising journey through the depths of life and death, love, and betrayal fell shorter than a pass from Tim Tebow.

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Another year, another Skylanders game.

Three years later and the Skylanders craze is still in full swing. From kids to adults, it seems that everyone loves collecting and playing with these colorful characters. The latest iteration of the series brings a new wrinkle to the toys as well as to the game, but neither truly changes the tried-and-true formula. Platforming mechanics add a bit more depth to the traversal and combat mechanics, while the swap ability makes it a bit more fun to play with the physical toys by mixing and matching tops and bottoms. There’s no doubt that the whole kit is quite nifty, but as a game, Skylanders Swap Force still leaves something to be desired.

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