Not only is it really great to play an indie horror game that captures the slow and thoughtful nature of old-school survival horror, but it's also refreshing to play a good old fashioned gothic horror game. So many indie horror games come off as feeling a bit pretentious with their reliance on suppressed guilt twists for their psychological horror plots. Song Of Horror bucks that trend by being a straight-forward horror story about haunted houses, possessed artifacts, and otherworldly mysteries.

Song Of Horror also ups the stakes by featuring a cast of multiple playable characters, each of whom can be killed off (and removed from the rest of the story) if the player screws up. So not only do we literally not know what eldritch abomination may lie around any given dimly-lit corner, or behind any creaky old door, but if you're not careful, whatever is around that corner or behind that door might put a premature end to a given character's life and story.

Strut and fret your hour upon the stage, and then ...

Song Of Horror was originally sold as an episodic indie horror game on Steam, but the collection of all episodes was released for console as a single game in 2021. It somehow slipped under my radar until last month, when YouTube recommended a video about it by Mert Kay Kay. Each episode includes 3 or 4 playable characters to choose from, each of whom can be permanently killed off if you fail to avoid or escape from the phantasms that haunt each episode. If a character dies, all the items and notes that they've collected will be dropped on the floor at the spot of their death, and that location will be marked on the next character's map. So you don't really lose any progress if a single character dies. If you lose all the characters in a given episode, however, then it's "Game Over"!

Each episode will introduce one or more new characters, but old characters can also re-appear as playable characters if they survived the previous episode(s). Thus, losing a character in an early episode may have the longer-term consequence of reducing the player's available lives (to borrow a term from old arcade parlance) for future episodes, and reducing your margin of error.

Each episode has 3 or 4 playable characters, each of whom can permanently die.

But even if you do manage to screw up and get all 4 characters killed in any given chapter, you only have to restart that chapter. Song Of Horror won't delete your save file and force you to redo the entire game. Each chapter takes 2 -- maybe 3 -- hours to complete on a first-playthrough, and can be done in well under an hour if you know what you're doing. It's actually a loss of progress that is somewhat on par with dying in an old Resident Evil game after doing a fair chunk of exploration without backtracking to a save point.

The legitimate threat of permanently losing a character will naturally raise the stakes of the game and of the horror. It will force the player to play cautiously, to be observant of your surrounding and of context clues in the environment, to pay close attention to sounds and shadows, and to not barge through every door in a rush. In fact, it may do this more effectively than even a game like Resident Evil. Dying doesn't mean simply restarting with the same character and retrying the set piece that got you killed. Dying means permanently losing that character, and having to try again with a new character. Restarting at a checkpoint doesn't simply reset the stakes, it doubles-down on them!

Furthermore, the actual jump scares and dangers are semi-randomized. You won't necessarily encounter the same jump scare or the same monster at the same place and time in any 2 playthroughs. This also keeps things tense, because even on a replay (whether it be a whole new playthrough, or just a respawn with a different character), you can't just memorize all the places to avoid.

With the New Frontiers Pass for Civ VI over, an "Anthology" edition of Civ VI on sale, and no news at all regarding future DLC or expansions, I'm assuming that Firaxis has finished with Civ VI. As such, I want to look back on the game and reflect on the things that I liked most about it, and the things that annoyed me the most.

After the lifespan of Civilization V had ended, I wrote up a pair of retrospective blogs about my personal Top 10 Good Ideas and Top 10 Bad Ideas that went into that game. I'll be doing the same thing now with Civ VI.

I want to stress that this is a list of 10 good and bad ideas -- not necessarily good and bad mechanics. Some of the good ideas will be ideas that I like in principle (or on paper), but which might need more iteration before they truly work as intended. In contrast, there may be some bad ideas that work fine mechanically, but which hurt the "flavor" or theming of the game, in my opinion.

This is, of course, a subjective list of personal favorite and disliked concepts in the game. I'm sure there will be a lot of disagreement, and some of the things I write here will probably be somewhat controversial with the rest of the player base. So I'm interested in reading others' feedback. So if you agree with any of my points, or you vehemently disagree, feel free to post a comment and share your thoughts.

This first post will cover my personal Top 10 Good Ideas, and I will follow it up with the next post being about the Top 10 Bad Ideas.

One of my biggest criticisms with the Gods & Kings expansion pack for Civilization V was that none of the features added really felt all that fresh. They were just redesigns of old features that were present in previous games. Granted, they were also the most highly-requested features by the player community, but as concepts, nothing really felt new or original.

The new expansion, Brave New World changes all of that by adding never-before-seen concepts to the game, and they add a great deal of flavor and dramatically change the way that the game unfolds.

Table of Contents

• Returning concepts
  • Trade routes are an obfuscated combination of physical units and abstract "lines on a map"
  • World Congress fleshes out diplomacy, but not enough
• The "pacification" of Civ V
• Completely original concepts adds fun and flavor to the game
  • Flourishing of the arts
  • It belongs in a museum!
  • Tourist attack
• Fun new civilizations make old civs feel mundane
  • Zulu and Shoshone make Germany and America look boring
  • Venice: the first playable City State!
  • Other civs provide plenty of variety
• Miscellaneous balance changes, improvements, and scenarios
  • Missed opportunities for reworking boring legacy civs
  • Interface updates
  • Scenarios are dull
• Brave New World changes the way the game is played, and adds whole new challenges and levels of player-engagement

A few more of the missing concepts from Civilization IV are re-introduced with a new coat of paint in Civilization V: Brave New World: trade routes and a world resolution system. Both systems are implemented differently than in the previous game, and both are kind of hit-or-miss this time around

I have long been asking for the introduction of some kind of international trade route mechanic to be added to Civ V. Without such a feature, the vanilla game (and Gods & Kings) were missing one of the key incentives to maintain peaceful relations with your neighbors. Well now we have such a feature. In some ways, it's a step forward from Civ IV's completely non-interactive trade routes, but it's also a bit clumsy.

Coastal cities might seem weaker due to the lack of gold on sea resources, but sea trade routes are more profitable and have longer range than ground routes, so coastal cities are still valuable.

This review was originally published 01/21/2011 on Game Observer (now defunct as of 05/13/2014). It has been republished here for archival purposes.

Across-the-board interface improvements and incredible new Pro Mode make this the definitive music-rhythm game!

This review is a bit belated. This is mostly due to the fact that I didn’t want to write a full analysis of the game until I had a chance to play the new PRO guitar mode, the controls for which weren’t available publicly until late December. So if you’re still on the fence about purchasing this game even though it’s been out since October, I hope this review helps.

Three new controllers for PRO Mode (top to bottom):
Fender Mustang controller (available late November 2010) has 102 buttons to simulate the lower 17 frets.
Fender Stratocaster Midi guitar (available spring 2011) is a console-agnostic, fully-functioning, 6-stringed guitar equipped with pressure sensors in the neck for finger-placement detection.
MadCatz Keytar (available at game release, but sold separately) is a two-octave midi keyboard that can be used to play keys, guitar, or bass parts of songs.

Analysts and sales numbers may be suggesting that the music-rhythm genre is dying, but Harmonix isn’t letting that stop them from trying to innovate. Rock Band 3 is a very ambitious project that adds a whole new instrument (the keyboard) and attempts to incorporate REAL INSTRUMENTS into the gameplay. I am thrilled to say that both of these new marquee features work excellently!

The game’s menus and interface have also been streamlined to include more filters for selecting songs and new menu widgets for each player that they can open and close anytime they want to change settings, drop in or out, customize their characters, and so forth. Speaking of character customization, you now have much more options for creating your characters’ faces by mixing, matching, and editing different parts of the face (similar to the customization options allowed in The Sims).

I bet you all want to know about how the new PRO Mode feature works, so I won’t waste anymore time, and I’ll dive right into this ground-breaking new feature:

I came across this story on Google News a little while ago:

Apparently, while performing a song from their new album Wasting Light, Dave Grohl (of my favorite contemporary band, the Foo Fighters) caught somebody picking a fight in the audience.

Grohl stopped the performance mid song to curse out the man who started the fight and have him kicked out of the arena. "You don't fight at my show, asshole," he started saying, "I don't put up with that bullshit. You people come here to have a good time, and that guy can fuck off!"

A video of Grohl's outburst is provided below: