Warp Zoned Presents
Video Game Canon- Meet the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2025: Quake, GoldenEye 007, Defender, and Tamagotchi
- The BAFTA Games Awards Polled the Public and Shenmue is “The Most Influential Video Game of All Time”
- 2024 GOTY Scoreboard: Astro Bot, Balatro, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, More
- The Strong Museum of Play Acquires Prototypes and Development Documents from Volition’s 30-Year History
- Minecraft’s Volume Alpha Soundtrack Has Been Added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry
Warp Zoned Presents
- Video Game Research Library
- It’s beginning to feel like gaming isn’t for everyone – Digital Trends (2025)
- 22 years later, modders are keeping SimCity 4 alive – The Verge (2025)
- The B-movies of Paul W.S. Anderson double as acts of devotion to his muse, Milla Jovovich – The AV Club (2025)
- Breakout, Ripoff, Genre: How Fiction Outgrows Originality – Uncanny Magazine (2025)
- ‘I Could Make “Fart Fart Boobie Fart: The Game” and Maybe It Would Eventually Get Taken Down’ – Devs Reveal Why the Consoles Are Drowning in ‘Eslop’ – IGN (2025)
Most Recent: Top Story
Warpback: What We Played in September 2015
We were all over the map this past September here at Warp Zoned. We played everything from mobile games, to sweeping PC betas, to games we nearly forgot were in our backlog. There’s everything from indie to AAA, from Alphabear to Skyrim. Read on to see what kept our hands busy this past month. (more…)
Extreme Exorcism Review: This House Was Cleaned… With a Twelve-Gauge Double-Barreled Remington
Golden Ruby’s Extreme Exorcism is what you get when you combine the single-screen baddie-bashing of something like Mario Bros. with the pattern memorization requirements of the most chaotic Treasure shoot ’em up. Toss in a throwback retro look and an Army of Darkness-style arsenal, and you’ve got yourself a game.
But there’s got to be more to Extreme Exorcism than that, right? Of course, and the power of Christ compels you to read on… (more…)
Kickstart This! Anniversary Interview: Chewing the Fat With Bacon Man Director Neal Laurenza
It is perhaps somewhat ironic that Bacon Man appeared in July 2014’s Common Creative Wealth Edition of Kickstart This! While athletes from around the world competed in the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, the developers at Skymap Games were hard at work campaigning for their project, which stars an anthropomorphized version of the fatty foodstuff in a surreal Earthworm Jim-style platformer. The game achieved its funding target of $20,000 (with an extra $1,280 to spare), and is expected to be released for the PC and Xbox One before the end of the year.
Neal Laurenza, Managing Director at Skymap, recently sat down with us to share a slab of bacon and to discuss Bacon Man. While we pondered if the breakfast staple proves the existence of God, we also talked about the game’s Kickstarter campaign, how bad emails can do good things, and other sizzling topics. (more…)
The Games of September 2015
The Warp Zoned staff doesn’t always agree on what we’re most looking forward to, but this month, we’re all in agreement about one game… Super Mario Maker! We’re all ready to hop in and start building Mario levels and going through each other’s creations. Other than that, it’s a pretty varied month here at Warp Zoned!
Hit the jump to see what’s got us the most excited this September. (more…)
Warpback: What We Played in August 2015
Our gaming habits were all over the place during the month of August here at Warp Zoned! Even though Nicole finally got a Wii U, she didn’t touch it at all. We’re all hoping it doesn’t go the way of her Wii, which is primarily a dust collector nowadays. But he one unifying factor here seems to be portable games!
Hit the jump to see what kept us busy this hot month of August. (more…)
Kickstart This! Anniversary Interview: Bendik Stang of Snowcastle Games Takes A Turn to Talk About Earthlock: Festival of Magic
Earthlock: Festival of Magic was one of those rare Kickstarter projects that immediately grabbed our attention with its strong, colourful art direction, firm sense of genre, and polished gameplay. Its ambition was only matched by the passion of small Norwegian outfit Snowcastle Games, who, with only a couple of games under its belt, sought $150,000 to make a huge RPG for both PC gamers as well as the new generation of consoles. Originally featured in March 2014’s Guinness Aftermath Edition of Kickstart This!, Earthlock: Festival of Magic is expected to be released for the PC, PS4, Wii U, and Xbox One later this year.
We caught up with Bendik Stang, Snowcastle’s Game Director, earlier this year to talk about the team’s progress from campaign to nearly-finished product, as well as their experience at the 2015 Game Developers Conference. He even shared two brand new pieces of concept art with us… (more…)
Posted in Features, Interviews, PC, PS4, Top Story, Wii U, Xbox One
Tagged Earthlock: Festival of Magic
Pulling Back the Curtain: The Importance of the Double Fine Adventure Documentary
Recently, 2 Player Productions wrapped production on Double Fine Adventure, a documentary series that followed the development of Broken Age. It was revolutionary in the gaming scene, being the only documentary to ever follow a studio developing a game from its conceptualization through its release and aftermath. Before it, the average game player had only ever seen brief snippets of development from single-person games or small indie teams. Double Fine was the first developer to pull back that curtain on game development, a feat arguably more important than its rocketing of Kickstarter into the mainstream, and unquestionably having a bigger impact on the industry and the community than Broken Age itself. If we’re being honest, Double Fine completely mismanaged their Kickstarter funds, and Broken Age isn’t great. But by “showing how the sausage gets made,” as studio founder Tim Schafer put it, Double Fine made their campaign more than worth it, and left a long-lasting contribution to the industry.
Until DFA came out, game development was a mystical secret that no one outside the industry could begin to comprehend. So much of it was mysterious that many who wanted to be in the industry viewed it with rose-tinted glasses: a dream job where they could play all day. All we knew about game development beforehand were the two extremes. There were the developers that talked in interviews about how great it was, coming to work and hanging out with cool people, getting to create great games that everybody loves. We also read the headlines about developers losing their jobs, and studios being shut down. That or it was about developers going mad in “crunch time” having to work 80 hour weeks. In fact, Double Fine gives us a good example with the Tim Schafter episode of G4’s Icons, when he took us briefly behind the scenes of production on Psychonauts.
We never knew what it was really like, not until Double Fine showed us. (more…)
Mega Man Legacy Collection Review: A Potent Mixture of Retro Perfection
The Mega Man series is built on patterns. Every time out, a robotic warrior clad in blue battles eight “Robot Masters” in an order chosen by the player. As he pushes through the game, Mega Man acquires an arsenal of new weapons from the vanquished Robot Masters. And after defeating all of them, he challenges the evil Dr. Wily in a fiendishly hard multi-leveled fortress. After delivering the final blow (usually with the game’s worst weapon), Mega Man rides off into the sunset, ready to return if the world needs him again.
I know these patterns. I first learned them in 1987 with the release of Mega Man for the NES, and I received a refresher course roughly every year thereafter thanks to the five sequels that followed. Through trial and error (and believe me, there were many, many trials), I eventually learned how to traverse each game’s set of levels with near flawless accuracy.
After ignoring the series for several years, Capcom decided to compile the first six entries into the recently released Mega Man Legacy Collection. I still know the patterns, but even two decades removed from their original release, the games included in the Mega Man Legacy Collection hold up in a way that few do. (more…)