Dutch-DeVries

So this is it.  After eight-and-a-half years, one of the best and most underrated MMOs ever finally shuts its doors, and I have to admit: it took me a while to find it in myself to type this. I first started playing City of Heroes on launch day, almost by chance, really.  I'd read an interesting-sounding article about it in PC Gamer a year or two earlier, and then, curious about the burgeoning MMO scene, I had decided to give Planetside a whirl – but the weekend I decided taht, a friend on a comic book forum mentioned that some new superhero MMO was coming out, and it looked interesting.  It seemed worth a shot, so that Tuesday I headed out

The very best thing about the new XCOM, among a whole lot of very good things, is that it means I never have to play the original ever again. That is a compliment to both it and its forebear.  The fact that the original XCOM was not supplanted or surpassed by anything in eighteen years except its own remake is worthy of note.  It was a great game – one of the classics – but I think most people who aren't hopeless nostalgics or bitter grognards will agree that at a remove of nearly two decades it's hard to even play, much less fully appreciate.  That would require seeing past a 320×200 image cluttered with barely-decipherable little icons to

So we at To the Pain have been playing a lot of the new Kickstarted space-based "roguelike-like," FTL: Faster than Light, lately and I'm pleased to report that it's as good as everyone says it is. If you're not familiar with the title, it's a $9 indie game for PC and Mac on Steam or Good Old Games.  It places you in the captain's chair of a small scout ship for a deliberately generic Galactic Federation.  The Federation has been riven by civil war and the rebels are winning; your ship has a cargo of secret information that could win the war, but first you have to cross the breadth of the galaxy to bring that data home, pursued all the while