How many times have you read game reviews and said to yourselves, “That guy’s a hack! I could do better than that!”? Well, we’re giving you the opportunity to put up or shut up. Avault is searching for PC game reviewers. The big holiday release season is just starting to heat up, and we’re staffing up to cover as much of it as possible. If you’re a knowledgeable gamer and a strong writer, we want to hear from you. If you’re motivated and interested, send three writing samples (no resumes, please) to michael@avault.com with “PC Writers Wanted” in the subject line. Several former Avault staffers have gone on to successful careers in the gaming industry, and you could be next!

Publisher: Iceberg Interactive
Developer: Kukouri Mobile Entertainment
System requirements: Windows XP SP3/Vista/Win 7, 1.8 GHz Core2Duo/2.0 GHz AMD X2 64 or better CPU, 2 GB RAM, 256 MB Nvidia 7900/Radeon HD 2600 or better graphics card, DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound device, DirectX 9.0c, 500 MB hard-drive space
Genre: Shooter
ESRB rating: Not rated
Release date: Available now

Playing games on mobile devices has become big business, despite the small prices we have to pay for the games (outside of the devices themselves and their monthly fees, of course). The popularity of the mobile gaming genre has made developers sit up and take notice, with several mainstream games now having small-screen versions. But it’s rare that a mobile game takes the reverse trip of moving from iPhones and tablets to the PC. One of these is Tiny Troopers, Finnish developer Kukouri’s squad-based shooter featuring pint-sized soldiers firing full-sized weapons.

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Jack-of-all-trades software publisher ValueSoft Cosmi has brought developer Rubicon Development’s successful iOS/Android turn-based shooter Great Little War Game to the big (gaming) screen with Great Big War Game (sensing a trend here). The new, super-sized game offers 50 single-player and 40 skirmish/multiplayer maps for you conquer with pint-sized fighters and artillery. ValueSoft Cosmi, which is also a leading publisher of personal productivity software, is offering Great Big War Game at retail outlets and on Steam for the pint-sized price of $9.99.

Publisher: 505 Games
Developer: Biart
Genre: Shooter
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: Available now

The final frontier for shooter games is the ocean, and for good reason. Most projectiles tend to be less than effective when traveling through water, and most heroes have to breathe. Developer Biart has taken a step into this brave new world with Deep Black, a traditional third-person shooter that spends almost as much time in the deep blue sea as it does on dry land.

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PC gamers with a sense of history will fondly recall the 1995 Apogee classic Rise of the Triad. After almost two decades, Apogee and developer Interceptor Entertainment are giving the game the Unreal Engine 3 upgrade it has long deserved. The video on the left shows Interceptor CEO Frederik Schreiber building a section of a level of the game, starting virtually from scratch. It’s seven minutes of fascinating time-lapse photography that anyone with an interest in game design should enjoy. ROTT is scheduled for release by the end of 2012.

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Developer: Minority
Genre: Puzzle/Adventure
ESRB rating: Everyone 10+
Release date: Available now

When we play games, we don’t usually think too much about the story behind the story. There are plenty of games in which a writer’s personal experiences have been used as inspiration for their stories, but seldom have they been more prominent than in Papo y Yo, a colorful, evocative kids game with a very adult message.

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Publisher: Nordic Games
Developer: King Art Games
System requirements: Windows XP SP3/Vista SP2/Win 7 SP 1/Mac OS10.6, 2.0 GHz Pentium IV/2.4 GHz Athlon/1.4 GHz Intel Mac Core Duo CPU, 128 MB graphics card with Pixel Shader 2.0 support/64 MB Intel GMA-950 (Mac), 2 GB RAM (1.5 GB Mac), DirectX 9.0c, 6 GB hard-drive space
Genre: Adventure
ESRB rating: Not rated
Release date: Available now

Jim Croce was right. You don’t tug on Superman’s cape or spit into the wind — and you certainly don’t make a point-and-click adventure that takes longer than three average shooters to finish. And yet, that’s what developer King Art has done with The Book of Unwritten Tales, a sprawling, artistically gorgeous PnC that just doesn’t want to end.

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Editor’s note: The following first appeared on the Windows blog TuneUp. It is reprinted with the permission of the author.

Written by: Tibor Schiemann, co-founder of TuneUp Utilities

For the longest time, there was a chorus of gamers forecasting the death of PC gaming. But the number of naysayers is rapidly evaporating—recent reports show PC gaming is now poised to overtake consoles by 2014. And in some ways, this trend has been years in the making if you consider that, unlike consoles such as the PS3 and Xbox 360 that are based on six-year-old hardware, PCs can be upgraded and tweaked to accommodate the newest games.

In fact, recent blockbusters such as Diablo 3 and Max Payne 3 are designed to consume serious amounts of CPU resources, thrash your hard disk and give your graphics card a major beating. With PCs, you can make adjustments so that your computer can endure this, whereas consoles simply leave you with a suboptimal experience. But if you want to actually enjoy this “PC advantage,” you’ll first have to ensure that your computer is truly equipped for gaming. After all, behind software such as AutoCAD or video-editing programs, gaming ranks as the most resource-hungry application, so your PC should be prepped to handle the onslaught.

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Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Developer: Nihilistic
Genre: Shooter
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: Available now

The Playstation Vita’s advanced hardware capabilities make it a prime candidate to bring the depth and detail of console shooters to a handheld for the first time. Developer Nihilistic has taken a dive into the Vita shooter pool and has emerged with Resistance: Burning Skies, a five-to-six-hour journey into the world created by Insomniac Games for the PS3. But like most first steps into a new world, this one takes more than a few wrong paths.

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It’s hard to believe that it’s been five years since the relaunch of the Adrenaline Vault. Angel Munoz, who founded Avault way back in 1995, and editor-in-chief David Laprad gathered together a ragtag bunch of newbie reviewers and set us loose on the gaming world. Since then, we’ve published more than 800 reviews, plus countless blog posts, news items and forum conversations. It’s truly been a long, strange trip.

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Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Yager
System requirements: Windows XP SP3/Vista/Win 7, 2.0 GHz Core2Duo or better CPU, 2 GB RAM, 256 MB GeForce 8600/Radeon HD2600 XT or better graphics card, DirectX-compatible sound device, DirectX 9.0c, 6 GB hard-drive space
Genre: Shooter
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: Available now

“I love the smell of white phosphorus in the morning.” Not really; that would make me a homicidal maniac. But the farther I progressed through developer Yager’s long-awaited shooter SpecOps: The Line, the more parallels I uncovered between this game and one of the greatest war movies ever made, and the story upon which it’s based.

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Publisher: Smudged Cat Games
Developer: Smudged Cat Games
System requirements: Windows XP, 2.0 GHz dual-core CPU, 512 MB RAM, 128 MB graphics card with Shader Model 3.0 support, DirectX 10, 82 MB hard-drive space
Genre: Platformer
ESRB rating: Not rated
Release date: Available now

After spending dozens of hours raiding tombs, searching for hidden civilizations and saving the galaxy, every so often it’s good to go old-school and put in some time on an old-fashioned platformer. Thing is, sometimes the simpler a game is, the worse it is on your blood pressure. This can easily be said for The Adventures of Shuggy, which can be totally controlled using the fingers of one hand, yet can be frustrating enough to cause the utterance of rather colorful oaths.

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iD Software’s John Carmack isn’t sold on the idea that the next generation of consoles will launch us into a new era of gaming excellence. Carmack, who manages to find time to run his own aerospace company outside of his work at iD, figures that we won’t be able to do much more on the NextBox, the PS4 or the WiiU that we can’t do today; it’ll just look prettier. “When people ask how tapped out is the current console generation, PCs are 10 times as powerful but you really are still not technically limited,” Carmack recently told Game Industry Biz. “If you take a current game like Halo, which is a 30 hertz game at 720p; if you run that at 1080p, 60 frames with high dynamic frame buffers, all of a sudden you’ve sucked up all the power you have in the next-generation. It will be what we already have, but a lot better.” Instead, Carmack believes that the future lies in virtual-reality gaming tied to mobile devices. “It won’t sweep the world in a year or two, but so much of what we’ve always been trying to do with games is simulate that holodeck experience and put you in a different world. [VR] could do it in a way that you could never, ever get in a traditional game.”

While most of us had to content ourselves with streaming coverage of the recently concluded Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, Avault’s own Chip Henson was right in the thick of it, having snagged a prime spot as a Community Ambassador for Eidos Interactive. While at the show, Chip had an opportunity to join his fellow ambassadors in a sit-down interview with Karl Stewart, Global Brand Director for the upcoming Tomb Raider game. Stewart talks about how the new Lara Croft adventure compares with the previous ones, secondary characters you’ll meet, and Lara’s progression from scared shipwreck victim to bow-and-arrow-carrying badass. A transcript of the video interview can be found here.

Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft Shanghai
Genre: Adventure
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: Available now

I’ve always been a big fan of the end-of-the-world genre of mass entertainment. It’s fascinating to me to speculate about what I would do if I survived some sort of universal holocaust. So, in theory, Ubisoft’s survival horror opus I Am Alive should be right up my alley. But in all the years that I’ve been playing games, I can’t remember a darker, drearier and more depressing 12 hours spent in front of a TV screen.

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