I love Paper Mario. In particular, I love the first two games, Paper Mario and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. With the recent announcement of the Origami King, I can say I’m at the very least cautiously optimistic. I’ve been burned before after all. Super Paper Mario, Color Splash, none of the later entries in the series scratched that same turn-based itch that I started to get post-Super Mario RPG. Apparently the team at Moonsprout games felt the same way since their new title Bug Fables is a truly unapologetic clone of these classic Mario adventures.

I find open-world action games are at their best in the midst of chaos. I’ve been attacking people on this dock for about twenty minutes now. Boats full of bounty hunters have been coming in swarms as I attack the helpless swimmers, sunbathers, and surfers. Oh, by the way, I’m a shark.

In Tripwire’s new action RPG Maneater you take on the role of a Bullshark hellbent on getting revenge on the Cajun fisherman who killed your mother. You eat, fight, swim, and on occasion launch yourself into a pool to feast on some unsuspecting tourists. It’s stupid, over the top fun, even if it starts to feel a bit repetitive before finishing the roughly seven-hour story mode.

Gears of War and tactical combat are a match made in heaven. It may not seem like it at a glance, but The Gears series cover-based shooter heritage was begging to be Brought into the top-down perspective. After all, Gears has always been about football linebackers taking position behind sandbags, lobbing grenades and flanking hordes of the Locust swarm.

So you’ve found yourself in the Shark’s grotto. This is the Chomp Blog. A space we’ve been planning here at Sword Chomp for a long time now. A lot of you might already know that my history in the game’s industry was as a review write. As much as I love the discourse about games among my lovely Chomp cohorts I found myself missing a place to jot down some of my bigger thoughts on games.