Mark Steighner
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Writing For
COGConnectedLatest Reviews
Atomic Heart
We live in a complicated world. Well, maybe we always have, but the links between the entertainment we enjoy and the political or moral entanglements of its creators have more and more become an issue. Some cloudy skies are hanging above Atomic Heart and Cypress-based developer Mundfish. Denied allegations of...
Wild Hearts
Ok, let’s push this elephant in the room right out of the way. There’s a lot of similarity between Wild Hearts and Monster Hunter. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Koei Tecmo’s Wild Hearts is just a knockoff of Capcom’s popular franchise, but you’d be wrong. Dismissing Wild Hearts as...
Although it has a faithful fan base, the Spellforce franchise has always flown just a little under the radar. Since the series launched in 2003, there have been over a dozen sequels, expansions, and improved editions of older games. Twenty years ago, Spellforce did something new. It was a hybrid...
Once the source of wild speculation, our neighbor planet Mars is now a pretty familiar place. We’ve all seen the pictures, thanks to the amazing Mars landers and rovers. It looks eerily like our own southwest, it has weather and seasons and if you’re Matt Damon you can grow potatoes...
Forspoken
It’s said that the essence of creativity is taking old ideas and rearranging them into something new. That’s certainly true when it comes to narratives. There are only so many ways to spin a yarn. The hero’s journey was probably already old news when Homer–the Greek, not the Simpson–wrote the...
Samurai Maiden
I’ll admit right up front that I’m probably not part of the intended demographic for Samurai Maiden. For one thing, I’m not well-versed in all the subgenres and flavors of Japanese anime RPGs. For another, my status as a middle age man means that the tale of young girls forming...
The Chant
Back in the 1980s, an Indian guru named Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh founded a commune outside the rural Oregon town of Antelope (less than an hour’s drive from where I live). Hundreds of followers came to the sprawling commune, attracted to promises of spiritual enlightenment, sexual freedom, and countercultural expression. Rajneesh...
Well, it has taken six years — a lifetime in videogame years — for Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End to wind its way to PC. The game made a couple of stops en route, including a remaster on PS5 that paired Uncharted 4 with its standalone DLC, The Lost Legacy....
Love ’em or hate ’em — and I kind of fall into the first category — Suda51‘s games are always audacious and entertaining at the very least. This is certainly true of No More Heroes 3, which was released just over a year ago. Now the game is coming to...
When it comes to music, are you like me? Do you go through periods when, for weeks or months, all you listen to is one style of music? I’m kind of like that with metal. I’ll wake up and think, it’s a Mastodon kind of day, and I’m hooked for...
Steelrising
France at the end of the 18th century was a hot mess. Revolution was in the air. So was political oppression, counter-revolution, warring factions, and a desperate desire for change. A little known fact — at least according to Spiders’ new game, Steelrising — is that there was also an...
Ask a long-time gamer about humor in video games, and they’re likely to mention Double Fine’s classics. It makes sense. Games like Psychonauts and its sequel, or Escape from Monkey Island are classic examples. But, as Destroy All Humans! 2 Reprobed reminds us, smart and funny writing does not exclusively...
