Jam Walker
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Writing For
Stevivor 
Checkpoint Gaming 
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I am not a car person – I drive a 1999 Mitsubishi Lancer that carries less resale value than the laptop I am writing this review on. Yet, the Forza Horizon series has been an immense source of joy for me since I first gave the Australia-set Forza Horizon 3 a bash several years ago.
I’ve long held Corey Koniecska’s 2008 Battlestar Galactica board game as the absolute high watermark for game adaptations. It’s a masterwork of design where every one of its mechanics plays deftly into the tone and theme of the 2004 Syfy show that serves as its basis. Everything is stressful, nobody can be trusted, you’re frequently left with no better move than to compromise upon two or more abjectly bad options, and on top of all of that, a sudden intense crisis is likely to occur a...
Star Trek Voyager was the first series in the franchise that I ever really watched. Chaotic, late-night scheduling plagued it for much of its Australian airing, but I was the kind of kid who would typically fall asleep with the TV on anyway. Having now as an adult watched Star Trek right through from the original series up to the modern streaming era shows, I can’t say that Voyager is my favourite – Deep Space Nine is just a masterpiece – but it is the show that I do truly have the most...
I was obsessed with real-time strategy games as a kid, and when I hit my teens I gained an intense love for tabletop wargames and Civilization. I find myself firmly in the back-half of my 30s now, which feels just about bang on time for a foray into the world of historical grand strategy games.
2001’s Stronghold has held a delightful little home in my brain ever since I first played the demo off of some magazine cover disk. It was wickedly addictive, utterly gorgeous, and had a wonderful British humour that helped set it apart from other historical strategy games of the era. I eventually bought the full game and fell completely in love with it; I then rekindled that love with the Definitive Edition remaster we got back in 2023.
2012’s Far Cry 3 is undoubtedly one of the most influential games of the HD era. It wasn’t the first open-world action game of course, but its enormous critical and commercial success quickly made it the blueprint for just about any and every such release that followed.
Broken Roads attempts to put an Australian spin on the classic Fallout formula. Unfortunately it succeeds just as much at aping vibes from the modern iterations of those games, as just like each of them, it’s also releasing in a dramatically buggy state. At this stage, I can’t in good faith recommend a purchase of the game at launch.
I never played Pillars of Eternity, so when Avowed showed up offering a whole new angle on its universe, my reaction was pretty much that of a shrug. I’m so glad I jumped into it though, because not only have I loved playing it through, it’s also gotten me invested enough in the Pillars world to download and install the original game.
I’ve always had a soft spot for earnest ‘B’ games. Games that clearly had aims of being a top-tier product that just couldn’t quite get there. Typically they fall short for reasons of time and budget, but often also for being burdened with an overly ambitious vision to begin with. By all rights Computer Artworks’ 2002 The Thing is a game that should’ve been dead, buried, and forgotten forever. It was never praised especially highly in its day, and licensed game adaptations of its ...
The video game industry is shockingly bad at preserving its history.