As far as my experience with iOS gaming goes, the original “Battleheart” by Mika Mobile was the first I ever completed. The game offered me both the fast-paced elements of a straightforward strategy supported by the fundamentals of an RPG. Not so surprisingly, a band of heroes is assembled to fight through the increasingly dangerous lands of Haggerdom. Is there a great evil to defeat at the end of the game? You bet! The events of the sequel, “Battleheart Legacy,” take place 500 years in the future of the original, though the world is still a medieval setting filled with…

In 2006, Roget Ebert, the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote that video games can never be art. And before he could capture the words and stuff them back into his mouth, it was too late. He was bombarded by a deluge of messages claiming that if he’d only play this one game he’d change his mind (which would all add up to a lot of games that, I’m sure, are the “one”). And in a somewhat direct response in 2007, author Clive Barker reacted to Ebert’s claim. I’m not going to rehash the tit-for-tat, but it’s available on…

A confused mixture of sighs and laughter ensued as I read Brian Doherty’s column on Reason Online titled “Rorschach Doesn’t Shrug: The Watchmen’s hero as Objectivist saint.” The entire premise of Doherty’s essay was an effort to paint Rorschach as the “moral center” of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen. Doherty, a published author and senior editor at Reason magazine, presented several examples of the bone-breaking and murder-friendly vigilante that framed him as someone to be admired instead of feared and pitied. Doherty reflected on Rorschach as a misunderstood but morally outstanding figure, smeared and misconstrued by whiny and weak liberals.…

Many of Eric Devlin’s nights are spent pouring over a sketchpad. His workroom is filled with flooding bookshelves, action figures standing guard and posters collected from various comic book conventions. A stereo fills the room with pounding rhythm as his pencil glides across paper—drawing life into the visual stories he loves to tell. Mr. Devlin’s love for comic books began at a young age. He immersed himself so deeply into the genre that he has trouble remembering what his first comic book was. “I am willing to bet it was a Spider-Man book though,” Mr. Devlin said. He recalls feeling…