Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons - Innovation or just another generic Adventure?

Starbreeze Studios made the decision to try out something new and invented the term "One-Player-Co-Op" with their game Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Did they succeed in doing so, though?

Only one of the many gorgeous locations in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

Brothers is published by 505 Games and was released for the PC, the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 at the third of September 2013. You can say it is an Adventure game, but it definitely is a unique game.

It is called a "One-Player-Co-Op"-Game because you play two characters at the same time on one controller, using the left half of it to control one and the other half to control the other. The riddles the player has to solve are easy at first but get gradually harder the more one progresses in the game, but do not become too hard to be fun. 

The story of the game is that of two brothers who go on a journey to a place where they can find medicine for their dying father. On their way, they need to solve several riddles and earn themselves the help of different fantastical creatures like trolls or giant birds. The way is dangerous and they will face death more than once.

Their story is touching through and through and one can see how much effort has been put into writing a great, emotional story. 

Graphically, the game is not the most impressive. Some of the textures are not well-made and several models could have been done better. Other than those two negatives, the environments are well-built, the atmosphere is spot-on most of the time and characters have a certain personality, which is not only because they were modeled well, but also because of how their animations are made. The art style in general is not the most unique, though. There are trolls, giant birds, giants, big wolfs that hunt the protagonists and other than that there are humans. 

To sum it up, the game is probably one of the most touching stories I have played in a very long time. The gameplay is something new and it is surprising how intuitive it gets after a short while of getting used to it. I definitely recommend the game to everyone and you can get it on steam for 13.99€ or your regional equivalent.

You can find the game's website here.

Art Fundamentals - A book that actually teaches

3DTotal Publishing has always been known for publishing high-quality, sometimes high-price, books for learning different things about digital painting, drawing and art in general, and they have been very successful at what they are doing.

The book's cover, showcasing many different paintings or drawings.

"Art Fundamentals" is one of their books for beginners that want to learn to draw and paint. It covers fundamental topics such as colors, light, composition, perspective and depth, anatomy and displaying emotions on a painting.  It's cover consists of a compilation of paintings and drawings that showcase what one could do when he or she masters the fundamentals of art.

Every page has at least two paintings or drawings as examples of the techniques that are covered and the pictures have a very high quality due to the paper being very thick and good to print on, also making it very hard to be ripped. Of course, the articles being written by game and film artists, the pictures also consist of mainly Fantasy and Sci-Fi pictures.

The many articles in these 272 pages are written by experienced artists from the game and music inudstries such as Gilles Beloeil or Andrei Riabovitchev. The authors all have a very informative writing style and they write their articles in a way that even those with no knowledge at all about art understand everything they explain. The language they all write in is English, because the book is aimed at an international audience and not one country in particular.

Being written only by experienced artists, the credibility of every article in this book is very high and the reader can trust in what they read and also apply it to paintings or drawings of their own, even while still reading it, because the techniques explained are not only easy to understand and apply to the things that are used as examples but also to every other painting or drawing.

All in all, the book is a good example of how to teach someone something they have not tried before without talking to them in person. Chronologically, it is put together very well, starting with a topic that connects to the next one almost seamlessly.  It is suited for everyone, from total beginners to experienced artists that want to find inspiration and refresh their knowledge about art in general.

You can buy it for 49.00$ or your regional equivalent here.

The MSI GE60 - Do Gaming Notebooks hold their promises?

Gaming Notebooks are a much-discussed subject these days, considering how many big manufacturers there are selling them; MSI is just one of a growing population of notebook companies.

This particular notebook, the MSI GE60, has an Intel Core I7 - 3630QM, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 660M with 2 Gigabytes of VRAM, 8 Gigabytes of RAM and a 15.6" Monitor, having a Resolution of 1920x1080. It has two USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 slots.
When looking at it you can see the quality of the case is robust and when starting to work with it you can feel the quality of the components.

Copyright © 2013 Micro-Star Int'l Co., Ltd. All rights reserved

The Keyboard is manufactured by SteelSeries and feels comfortable even after typing for a long time. A negative aspect about it is the Enter-button, though. It's slim and long instead the usual big and high one, but after some time of getting used to it, that is not a problem either.


Above the keyboard, there are 6 buttons with different functions; turning it off, activating Turbo-Mode for gaming, turning the fan to maximum performance, deactivating the wireless functions, turning off the screen and opening the CD-Drive. They are implemented into the design nicely and can come in pretty handy.


Now, the speakers are not the best, lacking the bass and not having the highest maximum-volume, but their sound quality is great and they are definitely enough for gaming and listening to music, but using headphones is still highly recommended.

The machine's monitor has a good color-depth and can get very bright if needed and the high resolution makes sure that games and movies look on it.

Being a year old, the hardware in this machine is not the newest anymore, but it can still run most games at a decent frame rate if the Graphics settings are set up right, depending on the game of course.


Small issues with the keyboard, the speakers not being the best and the CD-Drive being manufactured poorly make up the only problems with this otherwise decent notebook. It is perfectly suited for working and moderately good at playing new games at an acceptable frame rate. For the price of 1089€ or your regional equivalent, this machine has a high performance-peak and there is very few negative aspects about it that might bother the user.

Here's a link to the manufacturer's website.