Spinoff Comedy co-editor Sam Brooks sinks his cyber teeth into the polarising Mass Effect: Andromeda and finds a game that’s passable – but only just. About 12 hours into Mass Effect: Andromeda I came across a side quest almost out of nowhere. I was wandering around the desert, and a little notification came up on my screen … Read more
Summer is over now and with the impending cold comes the roar, when deer go on heat and the stags fight for a mate. Time is ticking away, and only the keenest of hunters will take down an animal. With that in mind, veteran hunter Don Rowe demonstrates how to bag a stag this season. … Read more
A new game ten years in the making attempts to adapt naturist Henry David Thoreau’s classic Walden. But far from the rich and luscious text of Thoreau’s hippie bible, Walden, a game is closer to a bowl of plastic fruit, writes Don Rowe. Few games start with an advertisement for endowments in the arts and humanities. But … Read more
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road set the standard for our current film fetish for post-apocalyptic desolation. Ashen, the first game from Wellington-based Aurora44, looks to do the same thing with games. Don Rowe speaks to CEO Derek Bradley and Animation Director Simon Dasan about the maturation of game design. You might expect that a game developed in Avalon Studios, … Read more
Video games are crafted, introspective experiences. Frequently though, these small worlds demand or produce skills that spillover into the physical world. Expert gamer and at-least-average real world person Dan Taipua sets out some of the better skill trees developed through a life of gaming. 1. Hooking up If you’re going to play video games, you … Read more
No-one knows who they are in the ‘real world’, but the members of Viva La Dirt League are famous in the only place it counts: the Internet. They tell Hayden Donnell how to walk their path to success. Until six months ago, Alan Morrison, Rowan Bettjeman and Adam King were just workaday losers like you … Read more
After nine years in development hell, The Last Guardian has finally been released. Don Rowe enters a mysterious and melancholy world and finds the masterpiece of director Fumito Ueda’s career. The first time I calmed Trico the bird-dragon with a gentle pat I felt certain he was going to die. Nothing in the plot would … Read more
The Spinoff once again reshapes the media landscape, this time with The Spinoff Snapchat Gaming Review. This week Madeleine Chapman gives Out Run a hoon. Follow the old Spinoff on Snapchat at the_spinoff. Thanks. The extent of my gaming ability ends as soon as two hands are required, working in unison. Which is why old … Read more
After two and a half years of part-time development, Auckland indie dev Steven Wu has released his first game, Ink Wars, on the app store. Don Rowe speaks to Wu, by day a project manager at Spark, about the challenges and triumphs of building a mobile game while holding down a job, and why Kiwi devs … Read more
Diehard fanboy Matthew Codd has his jaded eyes scrubbed clean by the latest in an infinite number of Final Fantasy titles. I had a lot of skepticism going into Final Fantasy XV. Like many other lifelong Final Fantasy junkies, I was disappointed with the direction that Final Fantasy XIII took the series; prior to release, … Read more
Matthew Codd slinks his way through steampunk assassination simulator Dishonored 2 and becomes almost constantly overwhelmed by a grueling style of intricate level design. Dishonored 2 has some of the most fascinating level design I’ve seen in a game. Each area is made up of a complicated network of streets, buildings, and passageways, giving you … Read more
Forza Horizon 3 is a gambling addict’s dream disguised as a high quality racing game, writes Don Rowe. Forza haunts my dreams, whispering in the night, winking at me from beside the TV. ‘One more spin’, it says. Points for crashing, points for not crashing, extra points for getting points. It’s rats and cocaine water all over … Read more
The Donbox is a regular series where killing machine Don Rowe watches a movie based on, inspired by, or just damn ripped from a video game. This week: Doom’s 2016 iteration has been celebrated the world over for it’s faithful honoring of the franchise’s roots. How does the 2005 film adaptation compare? Two minutes into … Read more
Microsoft first announced their move into the action-adventure genre when they scored temporary rights to Rise of the Tomb Raider. Now with ReCore they have their own title – but is it any good? A couple of years ago, Microsoft announced they had obtained exclusive rights to Rise of the Tomb Raider, at least for … Read more
It’s Icy Tower meets Flappy Bird meets Election 2016. Don Rowe speaks to the Auckland-based designers of Jrump, the game that puts The Donald in the hands of the people, rather than other way around. Kiwis are famous for our seemingly innate ability to make light of serious situations. But these days, what with people … Read more
The Donbox is a regular series where killing machine Don Rowe watches a movie based on, inspired by, or just damn ripped from a video game. This week Don watches 1993’s Super Mario Bros, a hellacious shit of a movie based on a premise dreamed up by a stoned 15 year old. Neil Gaiman, a visionary … Read more
Joseph Harper plays Pokken Tournament, the definitive Pokémon title for gamers who prefer dog fights to collecting stamps. For me, the best part about a Pokemon game is always catching lots of gorgeous baby Pokemon, giving them funny names, and falling deeply in love with them. Apparently though there is a subset of Pokemon fans … Read more
The Intel Game Chamber was held in Sydney on Wednesday to showcase gaming and VR all run by Intel’s latest processors. Madeleine Chapman, a bad, almost-non-existent gamer, went along and tried not to get pwned. Grasping my brush tightly, I eased into a stroke, watching as bright orange paint was left in its wake, a beautiful exhaust … Read more
The Donbox is a regular series where killing machine Don Rowe watches a movie based on, inspired by, or just damn ripped from a video game. This week Don revisits the first Pokémon movie and finds a film about about friendship, adventure, the thrill of battle … and the agony of existing in a meaningless … Read more
Candy Elsmore is a seasoned veteran of Ingress, the Niantic-developed predecessor to Pokémon Go. Here she compares the two, and puts Pokémon Go in its rightful place. Ten days or so ago, Pokémon GO hit the world like a giant Magikarp in the face. Before that, the concept of real world gaming was somewhat of a … Read more
In the final installment of our E3 coverage Kermath spends some time on the showroom floor. He surveys the maze of booths offering punters face time with the video game industry’s games and hardware and asks: is this expo in danger of dying? The Electronic Entertainment Expo, held again this year at the LA Convention … Read more
Josh Drummond re-enacts Game of Thrones’ Battle of the Bastards in Total War: Warhammer, and it makes much more sense than it did on TV. The television world went barking mad for the ‘Battle of the Bastards’ episode of Game of Thrones last week, with viewers howling at their TV screens at the sheer drama as … Read more
Don Rowe lives out his childhood dreams on the battlefields of Total War Warhammer, the best thing to happen to strategy games since priests went ‘wololo’. The far shores of Lake Rotoma in the central North Island seem a strange place to find a small child painting warhorses, but I was always a strange child. Sadly, … Read more
It sounds like a bureaucratic bore, but Auckland’s Tripartite Economic Summit, with guests including a British YouTube superstar and an American political “rock star”, is the hottest ticket in town. Tim Murphy reports from day one. YouTuber Tom Cassell – who is globally famous as Syndicate Tom – has been walking and talking around Auckland, … Read more
Back in the days before 30gb download files and region-locked downloadable content, video games were delivered on floppy disk with a physical tome of instructions. Liam Maguren explains why Doom had the best of them all. Modern games pour a lot into their prologues. It’s very tricky to balance a well-rounded gameplay tutorial with a story … Read more
In honor of the New Zealand Comedy Festival Joseph Harper dives deep into a few comedy games. But it turns out that games based on comedy aren’t actually that funny. The Comedy Fest is happening at the moment and nobody loves to laugh as much as me. So this week I decided to highlight some … Read more
The latest installment in the Doom franchise is just around the corner. Over the weekend Liam Maguren tried out the open BETA and found it great fun to play, but disappointingly ordinary. The first trailer for the new Doom punched its way onto the scene with a fuck-you-flavoured fist through the zombified jawbone of E3. That’s an … Read more
Got a hankering for a bit of split-screen co-op? Tough bikkies, writes Don Rowe, because local multiplayer is all but dead. There once was a time where myself and several associates kept Griffins afloat in the snack business. Slouched hideously forward and wrapped in blankets like miser pilgrims, we’d play the Halo 2 campaign from start … Read more
Starting with the Nintendo Entertainment System, Save State presents five gaming relics that every collector needs in their shrine/garage, from the very essential basics to the very rare and frustratingly pointless. 5. Two Controllers It’s dangerous to go alone; take these. A second controller is essential for the Nintendo Entertainment System for two main reasons: 1) … Read more