Show me the games that will piss off Breitbart. I stop by IndieCade to get in some time with the games there and get caught up talking with a friend, who tells me that Breitbart is supposedly on their way to play some of the resistance-themed games. Checking back in at the desk, I find that there’s nothing else I’m scheduled for. I play for a half hour, getting my satiating fill of violence before finally bowing out before the demo’s end. The dudes around me progress slightly faster, and I can almost feel their judgment. Perhaps overcompensating for the Call of Duty demo the day before, I play on the hardest level. I don’t get much out of the skimpy cut scenes.
I didn’t play the prior entry in the series but as a seasoned FPS player, the demo is satisfying, while light on substance. I arrive at Bethesda, sweaty and breathless, for the only Bethesda demo I’m scheduled for this E3- Wolfenstein II. Consulting my schedule, I realize I’m supposed to be at Bethesda. Upon arriving at Nintendo, I run into an old friend and chat for fifteen minutes while waiting for the PR rep to confirm my appointment. Parting ways with my new drinking buddies, and ignoring their pleas to be my +1, I head for Nintendo, preparing my set of questions for their head of marketing Doug Bowser. They proceed to drink several cocktails and beers and prod me to have a second beer. I’m surrounded by a team of IT guys who, upon hearing my credentials, take a sudden interest in my career.
Those damages most likely amounting to a haunting image of your Windows desktop permanently embedded into your display.Ī common nineties computing myth is that if you don't protect your monitor with a screensaver that activates after 30 seconds of no computer usage, then you will suffer irreparable damages to your screen.Before I go, I snap a few pictures of the Total War Warhammer booth, one of the best in the show. Well, this is, in fact, complete nonsense. Unless you have a monitor that's manufacturing date reaches back into the mid-eighties (and if it's still functioning, then congratulations because you own a freak of technology), it's unlikely that your screen would ever have images burnt into the glass without serious, intentional abuse. However, this doesn't mean screensavers are useless - on the contrary, they can not only be wonderfully stimulating entertainment, but they also serve an even greater purpose. They are an endless distraction to the work you should be doing (always a good thing, no?). The After Dark series became known for being a leader in the field of the screensaver 'art,' producing many variety of fun and humorous modules, introducing original characters in often zany situations, and generally just being downright more amusing than a bunch of flying Windows logos (damn, I still see those things in my sleep. And hey, isn't that worth the $50-80 price tag that used to accompany them? Game time MICROSOFT ROOF RATS GAME WINDOWS Well, guess what? After Dark Games - "it's not just a screen-saver anymore!" - is a collection of "challenging and addicting" games, many featuring the characters that screensaver freaks will have come to know and love by now from the After Dark series. In actuality, what we have here is a bunch of 'time-filler' games that are obvious alternatives to Microsoft's own procrastination-encouragers, Solitaire and Minesweeper.
Although, oddly, one of the 11 games included in this package is Solitaire, albeit Berkeley Systems' own variation of it.
The games span a small range of genres including arcade, trivia, word games and puzzles, with the common factor between them being anybody - and we are talking absolutely anybody here - can play them.
Not everyone will be able to compete at the same level, of course, but they will at least be able to participate. The 4 arcade games in After Dark Games are, as expected, nothing to write home about. Each of these games will very likely have a different effect on a vast spectrum of people - following closely with the ancient analogy, "one man's meat is another man's poison" (not politically-correct for the vegetarians out there, I know). Personally, I enjoy two of them enough to play for at least 10 minutes or so at a time, and do keep returning, while the other two I've not loaded since the moment I felt I'd played them enough to evaluate fairly for review. My personal favorite is Mowin' Maniac which bears undeniable similarities to the all-time classic Pac-Man as you ride your mower around hazard-filled gardens, frantically avoiding angry gardeners and zombies (!) - that is, of course, until you get yourself a power-pill (gas can), at which point, your mower enters turbo mode and you're able to run down and bag the misanthropes for a short period of time.