Action Button is a recent video game review blog that reminds one of Howard Beale from the 1976 flick Network-- they're mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore! The reviews are honest, harsh, and to the point, if a bit full of florid vocabulary.

Their modus operandi, according to their "about" page, is rather lengthy, but it boils down to being rather refreshing-- "We're going to play games for a bare minimum of two hours each and we'll let you know when, where, and why we stop playing; a great game should make us forget our day job."

Let's take a look at a few excerpts from some of Action Button's reviews. One thing I appreciate about them is that they don't give a good review unless they mean it.

Pardon our mess...As is no doubt already abundantly clear, Armchair Arcade has received an upgrade. Hopefully this upgrade will address all remaining performance issues from too much site activity. Unfortunately, in the mean-time, it will take us some time to get the looks and menu structure back to more or less what it was. We appreciate your patience and sticking with us through what will hopefully mean a vastly improved experience.

-Bill

Great news for those of you who don't use newsreaders/blog aggregators. We have just added the ability, through FeedBlitz, for you to receive all new Armchair Arcade blog posts daily via e-mail. Obviously we greatly encourage you to visit the site as often as possible, but with the ability to sign up for an e-mail with the content as its updated daily, you can make even more efficient use of your time. Look under the Syndication heading on our top left-hand side menu, where you'll see "Get email updates:" and a clickable orange and white icon. The process is direct and simple and you can opt-out at any time. Thanks for supporting us!

Most freeware software can either be great, or horrible. Kenta Cho, the man who runs ABA Games has created many great freeware software. While most of his creations are 2D shmups (and by the way they're all great), his Tempest-inspired Torus Trooper is a must play for all Tempest fans.

Shmup fans would also really want to check out TUMIKI Fighters for its intesting gameplay elements and art style.

ABA Games

Looks nice!

Any progress on the double login bug? It seems to be very specific now. When you go to http://WWW.armchairarcade.com/neo , it has the login. You login, then it changes to http://armchairarcade.com/neo and requires the second login with the same name and password. Perhaps masking the URL would solve this?

Why in one week? We have to change platforms ahead of time because we’ve grown very tired of our site repeatedly displaying hacked political statements. The continued hacks cannot be properly avoided if we continue to use the current e107 software or update to version 1.7, so we decided to make the transition as soon as possible. So by May 16th the AA website will look very different. The new Drupal-based site is not completely finished and needs to be seen as ‘a work in progress’, but we feel the continued defacing of our site makes this early transition necessary.

What does this mean for you guys? I am very sorry to say that everybody will loose their account at AA because we have no means of transferring your old account to the new system. In order to preserve at least a shimmer of what we have here, we will freeze the old site with the forums as a static ‘AA Classic’- part of the new and improved AA that we are working very hard on. The new Drupal platform offers forum-functionality too and we hope you’ll bear with us and re-register on the new site. We are very sorry we need to take such drastic actions but we see no other way, as our new work is in danger of being destroyed aswell.