Unwinnable

Like many before him, when Ben Ruiz of Team Colorblind saw our giant bean bag chair, he couldn’t help but flop down in it, beer in hand. And who could blame him after the exhausting week that is GDC 2013?

Ben was showing off Aztez, a beautiful side scrolling beat-em-up/strategy game with a bloody Aztec theme – and now we’re excited to show it off to you. For more on Aztez, visit the development blog or jump right in and play the most recent build! (more…)

Richard Hofmeier’s Cart Life – a realistic and sometimes brutal portrayal of street vendors struggling to make ends meet that swept the Independent Game Festival awards during this year’s Game Developers Conference – is a deeply affecting game. Hofmeier isn’t interested in his indie limelight, however, and made sure everyone attending GDC knew it with a spraypainted endorsement of Porpentine’s Twine game Howling Dogs over Cart Life’s space at the IGF pavilion the day after the awards. Team Unwinnable’s Sam Machkovech interviewed Hofmeier at Unwinnable’s secret game salon following GDC to get a feel for Hofmeier’s thoughts on Cart Life, GDC and sharing the wealth. (more…)

I like trying to break games. (more…)

I went back to Dishonored some time after finishing it and skulked around on exposed industrial piping and lampposts, turning myself, as the vengeful assassin Corvo Attano, into a brooding, silent observer over the rotten cobblestone streets of Dunwall. Unlike my last visit, this time I was not here for bloodletting. Instead, my mission was an unnoticed vigil spying on what remained of the city’s citizenry – mostly gang members and petty thugs – and the totalitarian foot soldiers of the Orwellian-cum-Victorian city night watch. I was there to test and tinker with Dishonored’s AI systems, to see what they did when they thought I wasn’t around, to provoke and harass (and yes, sometimes puncture their necks with my blade – a little unexpected violence is sometimes necessary to trigger a response) and look at their reactions as test subjects in my own loosely controlled study. (more…)

If the voting for this list is any indication, 2012 was an incredible year for games. Over 40 contributors nominated 91 games – a dizzying cross-section of games across all platforms from PC to console to mobile. Every top ten list a contributor submitted dramatically changed the standings. There were moments when games as different as Borderland 2, Hotline Miami and Dear Esther all occupied the top spot. Almost every contributor’s list had a game on it that I had never heard of before – Howling Dogs, Zaga-33, Dead Trigger and more. Mobile and downloadable games went toe to toe with the biggest AAA titles. Even more surprising, they won in a landslide.

There was a lot to love this year. The top standings wound up being so interesting that I could not limit it to a mere best ten games of 2012. A baker’s dozen seemed much more appropriate. So, without further ado, dive in to Unwinnable’s favorite games of 2012!  (more…)

Every year, we struggle to compile the lists of the things we loved over the course of the year. There are so many of them, the movies, the games, the stories. We debate and vote and hem and haw for the entire month of December, trying to distill them perfectly.

The same can not be said of the things we hate. The worst of 2012 – that’s easy to see… (more…)

I know better than to go to a film showing before 8 p.m. on a Friday night, but recently I found myself doing so anyway against my better judgment. With all its almost-year-round rain and drear, Portland rarely feels alive apart from at the end of the workweek. If you catch a movie past the end of Happy Hour, most who you might’ve shared theater space with have probably already started the migratory shuffle to their restaurants and bars. (more…)