No Payne, No Game

With the recent announcement of Spelunky 2 , a lot of gamers are powering up their devices and downloading the major hit from 2012. Spelunky, a game originally released for free in 2008 as a small, innovative 16-bit platformer, made huge waves when the developer polished it up for a release on the Xbox 360's Xbox Live Arcade. The Arcade is gone now, but Spelunky is alive and well. With ports to PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, Derek Yu's first shot at game design is a ubiquitous title that has made itself one of the most well-known independent titles to date. The premise is simple. An adventurer of a similar style to a popular Nazi-fighting archaeology professor sets off to explore a mine with a dangerous legend. Upon entering, a curse is placed upon him, and his pursuit of treasure becomes an unending cycle of death and rebirth. If he is able to leave at all, it must be by retrieving the treasure at the end of the tunnels. From a gameplay standpoint, Spelunky did something...

Hey folks, and welcome to No Payne, No Game, my small games review blog. I'm a college student in Communication Arts looking to pass my classes and start building up a small cache of reviews to point at when people say "can you do any work?" I'm also an avid games enthusiast. I've been playing games since I was five or six years old. The advancements in technology and narrative effort in the decade and a half that I've been gaming have been incredible. My first gaming loves were JRPGs, with their incredible narrative efforts, and over the years I've been moving over to Western RPGs which allow for more of a customized, individual experience. My first game that I can remember falling in love with was Square Enix's Kingdom Hearts, which came out when I was very young, and the Disney characters were appealing. My favorite game in the past few years has probably been Bioware's Dragon Age: Inquisition, a massive undertaking which I poured 100 hours in...