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Modern PC Gaming

Wasteland 2 Review

Every location and they way you interact with the people in those locations affects the world in a large or limited way, depending on how relevant they are to the storyline of the game. Much like Fallout 2, this game is also filled with easter eggs, pop culture jokes, and inside jokes. Exploration is encouraged as the game will reward you with rare items which usually don’t seem useful but they may be useful to a character that you might meet after 10-20 hours of gameplay later. It’s this kind of depth that makes Wasteland 2 as enjoyable as playing all the RPGs I mentioned previously.

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Indie Games

Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land

You get your characters, your action points, your experience points, your oppressive 3D terrains, your campy but delightful plot, your spells, your otherworldly monstrosities, your cultists and your zombified soldiers in one of the most honest (and cheap) strategy games I’ve recently played. What you also get is a truly elegant adaptation of Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu rules, the first ever sanity mechanics to actually work in a wargame and a most successful atmosphere. On the downside, this is a really short game sporting ten or so missions, that will last you for roughly ten hours, and, irritatingly, a game with a few control problems. Apparently, its iOS roots haven’t been ironed out, but trust me when I say that you’ll very soon be used to its, uhm, eccentricities.

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PC

Urban Legend

The game offers over 30 levels of sheer strategic fun that will definitely appeal to the Fallout, Jagged Alliance and X-Com (a.k.a UFO) crowds, providing a very elegant action points based combat mechanic and an intuitive interface, that’s as simple as left-clicking to move and right-clicking to fire. Then again, moving and firing, admittedly with the added hassle of picking the right weapons and selecting/equipping a modestly sized squad, can be tactically challenging enough to test years of accumulated turn-based combat experience and even lead to frustration and/or insomnia. Thankfully genre beginners and tired middle-agers can always go for the easy setting.

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Interviews

The Interview: Nelson Gonzalez

I was with a friend of mine (who happens to be Hector Penton’s brother) in my kitchen one day and I pitched him the idea of custom building PC’s for gamers like us. I asked him what he felt about the name Alienware and he said it sounded pretty cool. At that point it just felt right. I immediately called Alex and asked him if he would join me in this new adventure. I told him that he needed to quit his job, give me like $5K and come to work immediately. To his credit he said yes without hesitation.

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Company Representatives

David Knippenberg: WarFactory

Up to that point, I’d never played a game where the atmosphere was so tense. It seemed like every choice you made carried great weight, especially once the turn-based squad combat started. Make a wrong move or don’t equip your team correctly, and you’ll lose your team to the depths. Very few games I’ve played since then have been able to replicate that sense of foreboding for me.

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Company Representatives

Chris Parsons: Muzzy Lane Software

Incredibly deep content: a mix of turn-based squad combat, RPG, and resource management. You carefully nurtured and grew your squad and it really hurt when some of your favorites died horribly. TFTD was the sequel to the original. It added multiple levels for the underwater battle maps, and once you had advanced armor, you could float to the top of ships, blow holes in the top and sides of the ship, and enter.

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