Games can grip you for many reasons; good stories and characters, interesting gameplay, or a fun setting to name just a few. With their independent title, Machinarium, Amanita Design has combined a point and click adventure game with traditional puzzles and an entertaining story of lost love and robots.

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“Friday Old Games” is a series of articles in which we review a game from the older generations of consoles, share why we picked it, and whether or not it holds up with time.

Cross-platform games are nothing new, but looking back at Flashback: The Quest For Identity is a little ridiculous. While originally for the Amiga, Flashback has appeared on everything from DOS to the Sega CD. I played the version for the Super Nintendo, as it was my main gaming console of the era, so that is the version I played for review.

Flashback was developed by Delphine Software International, the same people behind the similar (though graphically simpler) title, Another World.

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Hey WingerDamagees. (Is there a good phrase for the readers of this site yet?) This is MrColinP, taking a quick reprieve from my temporary Wing Damage exile to let you know about a series of LucasArts themed illustrations that I just completed for the great LucasArts and post-LucasArts centered news site MixnMojo.com. It’s been a dang eventful and joyous few months for MixnMojo and the fans of what they cover, what with the new Monkey Islands, the imminent arrival of Brutal Legend, the comparatively quiet release of A Vampyre Story and the just previewed DeathSpank.

MixnMojo is running a series of retrospectives on each of the classic LucasArts adventure games and were nice enough to let me do illustrations for three of them. Three of the best ones, actually. Links below the break.

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“Can I have that bucket?”

“Why?”

“Because it’s there.”

“Tales of Monkey Island: The Siege of Spinner Cay”, the second episode in Telltales new Monkey Island episodic series, picks up immediately where the first game left off. While most Telltale episodic games can be played out of order without leaving the player completely lost, this is not the case with Tales. These episodes are written along the lines of old movie serials.

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"Here There Be Monkeys"

Can I first start by saying, seeing the Lucasarts logo at the front of an adventure game again really gave me a warm fuzzy feeling? Because it did.

Now it is time to come clean. While I love Lucasarts’ classic adventure games, pirates, and comedies, I have never actually played a Monkey Island game. This gave me a unique perspective going in to the new “Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal”, the first in a new episodic series from Telltale games.

In a way I’m glad, as the game did not have to live up to some high bar it’s predecessors have set for many gamers. I have played several of the Telltale adventure games already, so there is the second bar, another high one, that I’m sure many will be judging this game by.

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We all have those games that we miss the first time around. With the busy release schedule of modern gaming, no one has time to play everything. That is why we at WingDamage present to you “Fashionably Late Reviews“. This is our series on games from the current generation of consoles that we may have missed on their initial release, but have gone back to experience now.

For me, playing Tomb Raider: Anniversary on the PSP was a lot like coming home.  Unfortunately, it was a lot like coming home to find out that your bedroom has been converted into your parents gymnasium.

When I was 12 or so, my uncle gave me a Playstation and three games: Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider 2 and Test Drive: Offroad. I think to date, I’ve finished the first two Tomb Raider games at least six times. So when I picked up Anniversary on sale for the PSP, all I could imagine was pure win. And truth be told, there are a lot of really amazing things about this game. The graphics are beautiful, the sound is clear and I never cease to be amazed at how clean everything looks, even on a hand-held.

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"It's just like Zelda, only completely different."

Pleasantly surprised. That is the best way I can describe my experience with Fable 2.

Back at PAX 2008, I played the two player demo they had on display. Overall, I was not impressed. It was a trail of breadcrumbs leading from one bandit fight to another on a low-end LCD TV that was set up for someone way shorter than myself. The screen being inches from my face made it look blurry and jaggy. I’m pretty sure it was turned up too bright on top of that.

I still wanted to give the game a fair shake, knowing the code at PAX was the same from E3 months earlier. What I had played of the first game on the original Xbox I had enjoyed, but never finished. I decided to go back and finish the first game, just in case it tied in, and to see why I was excited for the sequel in the first place.

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