Video Games

hardrock’s Best of 2013

Best of 2013 012013 was another very interesting year for video games. Reboots, new console launches and the subject of DRM among other things. Plus it was a year I personally learned that retro gaming is just as important as modern games, game collecting can become a full time and expensive hobby, branching out into more different ways of gaming can be fun plus much more. So it was an interesting choice of picks when I sat down to write almost all the games I played this year, and what I would ultimately pick as my favorite ones of 2013.

While most people/sites will only put games that were released this year, I don’t get to everything as soon as I would like too. Plus being a game collector and retro gamer, I sometimes discover and play games that were released years ago. So this list will contain the best and noticeable games that I played during the year in no particular order. Except the final game which is marked as my Game of the Year of 2013.

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Fuse Review

Fuse 01
Insomniac Games has been known to produce some wildly imaginative and creative games: Resistance and Ratchet & Clank, among other series. Insomniac have partnered with Electronic Arts to release their first multiplatform game for both the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. For some this would mark the first time playing anything from such an accomplished studio, while others would already know the level of games that have been released in the past. But would this mean that their latest release, Fuse, would be met at such a level of quality?
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Remembering: Half-Life 2 (Updated)

Half-Life 2I’m going to try out a little project. Being a (somewhat) retro gamer, I decided to go back and re-play some of my favorite games. One of them being the incredible Half-Life 2. As I started getting screen captures from the beginning, I started remembering my amazement the first time playing (ironically on the PlayStation 3), and some of the upcoming best parts of the game. So I decided to post some of the screenshots I get throughout my play though. Call it, a “Visual Journey” to see if it triggers memories and thoughts for people that have experienced these games. I haven’t finished the game yet, so this is a work in progress and will be updated periodically with as many images as I can.

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BioShock Infinite Review

BioShock Infinite 01

How do you challenge yourself to create a near perfect game?

In 2007, Ken Levine and Irrational Games were given near perfect praise for their game BioShock. The setting of the underwater city of Rapture and its inhabitants told a perfect tale of a man-made dystopia that showed the evil (virtual) man was capable of given powers that would pollute their mind. Even more, it showed that video games could also be considered on such a level as books and movies in the terms of modern storytelling. So when their latest game, BioShock Infinite, was released expectations were primarily high. Would the developer be able to bring another game as memorable and accepted as their game released years ago?
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Re: Finding Lost Treasures – RE-Bought And Un-RE-Turned
Re-Finding Lost Treasures

Some people collect coins, others stamps. I collect video games.

If you have been reading this ongoing series, first thank you, second, I love horror games. The Resident Evil franchise holds a special place in my gaming memories. After all, Resident Evil 2 and my love of zombies brought me back into gaming after being off it some years ago. RE2 remains one of my personal favorite games of all time. But as I had been in a retro-gaming mood, I had been collecting Nintendo GameCube games as of lately as I had discovered earlier that the system did have a few games of interest to me. This being that I only owned this system earlier for a small amount of time for a particular reason. A reason I will return to later.

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