Alex Riviello

I’m going to be contributing to the Alamo Drafthouse’s new magazine, Birth.Movies.Death., along with a bunch of other Badass Digest writers. Absolutely can’t wait. There’s something about seeing your words in print that makes it that much more exciting, especially when your words will be placed in Alamo Drafthouses across the country.

You’ll be able to read the magazine online here for free when it finally hits. The first issue is Kaiju-themed in honor of Pacific Rim and I haven’t had the chance to read the other writer’s stuff yet- can’t wait!

In sixth grade at my new fancy private school we were instructed to make a dust jacket for a fake book we had authored. This is what I ended up with- it’s still one of my favorite things I’ve done.

Front cover

Back cover

Inside flaps

Not bad for an eleven year old on his parent’s lousy typewriter (we couldn’t afford a PC yet).

I’ve signed on as Gaming Editor for Badass Digest. Incredibly excited. Love the site and everything about it- its voice, its readership, the incredible writers they already have on board, who are all experts in their specific fields. I’ve been bouncing around from site to site the last couple of years so for me to have a steady home like this means everything to me, and I can’t wait to be able to write about things I really want to write about. 

Can’t wait to really get things started.

Well, I’ve gone and moved to New Jersey. It wasn’t something we planned (is it something anyone plans, really?) but an opportunity came up for a great apartment that’s twice as big as my last one for 50 bucks more… and well, we needed the space. Two kids in a one and a half bedroom wouldn’t have worked for very long. As a native New Yorker from the Bronx it’s just weird to live in a place that I’ve done nothing but mocked for 30 years. Every single time I’ve ever traveled here I’ve gotten lost and pissed at everyone and everything in it.

But the neighborhood we’re living in is beautiful and clean, and we’re just a quick bus ride away from the city whenever I decide I need a quick whiff of bum piss or other human interactions.

There’s certainly good from here- Lou Costello, Springsteen, The Sopranos, E-Town Concrete, Chiller Theatre, The Toxic Avenger. But still- Jersey.

This is going to require a lot of soul searching.

I wrote two lists this year, both about games!

For Tapsauce I wrote a list of the Top Ten iOS games. My iPhone 5 has been getting a helluva workout the last month, and I’ve got it loaded with something like 60 games right now. These are my favorite ones of this year.

http://rocksaucestudios.com/tapsauce/post/top-ten-mobile-games-of-2012/

Badass Digest asked me to supply a Top Ten Videogames list so I kept it mostly retail games for consoles. Lots of great games came out this year, but I decided to spice it up with a few fun awards at the end.

http://badassdigest.com/2012/12/27/alex-riviellos-top-ten-games-of-2012-and-more/

My life right now consists of wrangling babies and packing boxes, because I’m moving out in a few short days, both from my apartment and from NYC. Crazy stuff, but more on that adventure later…

Six years ago, the Wii was released. I waited on line in the morning for a couple of hours in the freezing cold to pick it up after staying up all night for a party, coming home exhausted only to break it open and play Wii Bowling all day, with more friends coming over at night to keep things going. I wrote an article about the experience that pretty much kicked off my career writing about games.

Yesterday, the Wii U was released. I stayed home.

My plans for this year’s New York Comic Con fell through magnificently, but I did manage to attend an event for Gearbox Software and Sega’s Aliens: Colonial Marines. Sadly I wasn’t too impressed, even though I got to see Lance Henriksen and play the enjoyable multiplayer.

Full article is up here at Badass- http://badassdigest.com/2012/10/15/gearbox-softwares-aliens-colonial-marines-hands-on-nycc-preview/

I’ve been reading August Derleth’s Cthulhu Mythos stories for the first time (I know!) and really enjoying them. For those unaware, Derleth was a contemporary of H.P. Lovecraft who basically became the caretaker of his work after Lovecraft’s death in 1937, even expanding upon the Mythos in a series of stories. That Elder Sign, the five-pointed star with the eye in the middle that’s supposed to keep the Great Old Ones at bay? That’s Derleth’s. (Lovecraft’s description of it looked more like a stick.)

Read More →

These days it’s almost refreshing to see a major new vdeo game without a large number at the end of it. Thanks to Bethesda Softworks we have a new IP from Arkane Studios (Dark Messiah), a studio who once worked on an unreleased Half-Life installment called Return to Ravenholm. It feels like they finally got their chance at something similar with Dishonored, a game that meshes the dark and ruined world of a Half-Life or Bioshock with the stealth right out of Thief. It’s just amusing that the first original game we get in a while is such a mash-up of others.

Read the rest here: http://badassdigest.com/2012/10/09/video-game-review-dishonored/ 

Man, there’s nothing like caring for kids to sap your creative energy. My youngest is three months right now, my oldest two years and change. Working nights and watching them both a few days out of the week is incredibly draining. I’d never change it for anything- how many men can say they spend so much time raising their kids?- but it’s really getting brutal as far as my creative output. Sometimes when I sit down to do some serious writing my brain simply won’t work and I end up just staring at the screen, my mind blank. It’s frustrating and infuriating all at once, even more so when I’m content to do things I don’t usually do, like sleep, whereas before I was writing like a insomniac madman. I haven’t lost that drive but I just have less and less time to be able to let it loose.

Fortunately I’ve got a few projects in the wings, including covering beer fests and the New York Comic Con, and I’m still working steady on my weekly Tapsauce review column. That last one’s been a great gig and thanks to it I’ve played dozens of games I never would have tried, but I really need a new damn phone. My Droid X is falling apart, most recently becoming completely useless as an actual phone. If I call someone it sounds like I fell down a well. I love Android but I’m looking at picking up an iPhone 5 merely for gaming. (Google Play’s catching up but every developer prefers the app store.)

Besides that I’ve also been doing much more beer brewing and some great praise from my friends who say the beers have been getting better and better. That might be the alcohol talking but I’m definitely learning more and more about the craft.

I’ve also gotten ridiculously enamored with board and tabletop games over the last couple of years. I still play video games but for a guy who doesn’t get to go out much my best chance at socializing is by inviting people over, and I’d much rather scream at my friends over a table than over a headset. It’s been a blast to explore this new world- all kinds of games from Arkham Horror and Battlestar Galactica to Small World and Risk Legacy. I even started up a Pathfinder campaign a few weeks ago. Getting geekier in my old age and loving it.

But family takes up most of my waking hours and right now I’m looking for something to ease my schedule. I’ve been working nights for two years now and it’s starting to really get to me. We’re trying to get my wife to be able to stay home (she works part-time) with the kids, so the job search is on…

I’ve had a copy of Inversion sitting on my shelf for a while now. I hadn’t heard anything about it and hadn’t really anticipated that changing, but a couple of days ago I decided to fire it up. It may have been late and beers might have been involved. But it was nice to find out that it’s certainly not a bad game, although it’s a familiar one. A very familiar one.

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I wrote this review before I sold it, figuring I could place it with one of the usual sites I freelance for. That week one of them decided that they’re not going to be featuring game reviews anymore and another was broke from Comic Con. So here it is- another great installment in the Lego franchise. Just when you think you’re out…

Traveller’s Tales keeps cranking out those Lego games, but it’s to their credit that they keep honing the experience. While there were bound to be a few missteps when there’s been a new installment or three every year, nearly every title adds new features that helps keep people coming back. Lego Harry Potter Years 5-7 (my review) was perhaps the pinnacle of the series thus far but Lego Batman 2 manages to build on that and add some completely new gameplay experiences. (Look, up in the Sky!)

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I’ve spent the last few weeks researching and writing a massive, 101-article list for Guyspeed.

It was a ton of work, but incredibly fulfilling. Finally, my lifetime of playing videogames paid off. For about a week I walked around with a notebook jotting down games whenever they came to my mind, eventually ending up with a list of about 120 entries. After I had them all down in an excel file and had started to organize them a bit I started looking at some game ranking sites to make sure I hadn’t forgotten any obvious ones… it wouldn’t do to write a list like this and forget Pac-Man, or something. But I’d done a pretty good job, although I soon realized that I’d really stocked it up with way too many PC adventure games and obscure 16-bit titles. A few got the chop that broke my heart (I’m sorry, Chakan! Please forgive me, Broken Sword 2!) but with the help of my great editor and in the interests of making a list that represented every genre, era and system, I think I managed got a good mix.

Before I wrote the entries I replayed as many of the games as I could. I went into my closet and dug out my big box o’ games (as pictured on top), hooking up some of the old systems for the first time in years. Nomad! Saturn! N64! …Virtual Boy! (Shockingly, no Virtual Boy games made the list.) Even the Wii, actually- which according to the internal calendar I haven’t played in about a year and a half. But it was worth it to find the Wii remote just for Okami.

Really quite the trip, and it made me happy to see that so many of the older games are still readily available in downloadable form. Great games never die.

Love to know what you folks think! You can start in on the list right here - 100 Greatest Games Ever.

A great soundtrack while you’re reading this? Here’s some stuff I blasted while writing this-

Minibosses. Always. And their album Brass is a free download!

Random and Lost Perception’s Black Materia.

Adam WarRock, who just released a great hip hop soundtrack to Bastion.

Video Games Live, whose second album got played on Spotify on repeat.

Regardless of the quality of the game, this is pretty hideous. 

I used to do that! I’ve been incredibly busy working a project that’s been sucking a lot of my time away. I’ve still been able to start a new homebrewing blog (New York Home Brew!) and get a bunch of reviews written, though…

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition

I unabashadly love this game. I just picked up the first book from the series that inspired the game and am doubly impressed by how faithful a translation it is. Fully plan on going back through it on the harder difficulty, and I barely ever do that.
Review on Guyspeed

The Walking Dead

I’m loving that this game is finally getting some attention with mainstream press, including a massive article in the New York Times this week. It really is a great game, and both that increasingly middling tv show and Telltale’s Jurassic Park disaster seem to be convincing people not to bother with it. Their mistake- it’s one of the most exciting zombie properties in years.

Review on Badass Digest

Death Worm

Fun little game, even if there isn’t much to it. The Lite version was fun enough to earn my buck- I was just sad to find out that I’d already experienced all it had to offer. But hey, closest to a Tremors videogame we’ll ever get.

Review on Tapsauce

Sniper Elite V2

The most brutal Nazi destruction since Inglourious Basterds. I ain’t kidding when I say this one is pure, violent catharsis. I really, really need that DLC that lets you assassinate Hitler.

Review on Guyspeed.

Really love this one. This and Sine Mora in a few weeks? Xbox Live Arcade’s on a roll again. Not too sure how smart they were releasing it on Good Friday/First Day of PAX, though. Especially since most Xbox 360 gamers are used to Arcade titles hitting on Wednesday. Of course, it doesn’t help that the console’s new Games Marketplace is absolutely awful at letting you find anything. What a shitty redesign.

Anyway, definitely go for this one if you’re a Tower Defense fan. Plus, it’s only 800 fantasy points!

Full review at Guyspeed.

Had a nice half-hour chat with the three guys behind the Shroud level on Tuchanka in Mass Effect 3, a spoilery interview that shows just how much your choices matter in the game. Indeed, how much they’ve mattered in every single game in the series- you might be surprised to see all the things that can change depending on your actions.

Really proud of this interview. You can read the full thing here- http://badassdigest.com/2012/04/05/the-badass-interview-mass-effect-3-developers-talk-about-curing-the-genopha/