Dead Space is a third person linear sci-fi horror game. ("Linear" isn't derogatory!) You are Issac Clarke, a mute (but not amnesiac) ship engineer. The game begins as you approach Ishimura, a mining ship that has sent a distress signal. Once you land, things quickly go from the worst to... more worse. The inhabitants have mutated into zombies (called "necromorphs"), and your ride gets destroyed. The ship starts going through an asteroid field without defenses, and the air is slowly being poisoned. You discover that the planet that was being mined below struck an alien artifact of some kind. This was a beacon to a cult that believed the government was covering up alien life. They stole the artifact, started worshiping it, had hallucinations, and everything went to hell.
You remember the Humble Bundles, right? I remember when I looked at my Steam game list years ago, and realized that most of them were from Humble Bundles, and that I hadn't even played most of them. So I picked one from the list and started playing. Aquaria was at the top of the list, so I started with that. That was over 5 years ago.
Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is another episodic series of games based on a web comic. These games are RPGs, not point and click adventures. Like the Homestar Runner comics, I wouldn't call myself a fan of Penny Arcade. To me, their humor is mostly a crapshoot, because half of their material is making in-jokes about games I don't have or aren't interested in.
Star Wars: Battlefront II came out recently. I thought something weird was going on, and tried to remember the last time I stepped into a time warp, but couldn't. For some reason, people were very angry at how this game has pay to win microtransactions. That's strange, because I don't remember those, nor did I remember it looking that pretty. Then I realized that it's another one of those rebooted "let's release new games with the same name as old" games. Unoriginal lowlifes! So let's review an old game with the same name as a new one!
Road Redemption is a motorcycle-based street racing game. It's a sort-of spiritual successor to Road Rash. I say sort-of, because none of the original people involved in it made this. I backed this when it was on Kickstarter several years ago. It went on Steam Early Access not long after, and I've been playing it on and off since. It recently came out for real, and it has been a great ride!
I'm not enthusiastic about "remastered" games, so when Blizzard announced when they were remastering StarCraft, I was suspicious about it. I know that an incredible amount of these remasters are for games that haven't even been out for 10 years. The original StarCraft is like 20. That's four console lives! Okay, fine, I guess I'll take it.
Hey look! I can play and review a game without it taking forever. Here's a game that's (probably) the last in a series of not-RPGs. True to form, this is still not an RPG, but at least this one ends well.
