gamer_152's Articles

The retirement of Halo Infinite's "Operations" was both unsurprising and unexpected...

Note: The following article contains minor spoilers for Buckshot Roulette, Carbon Steel, CORE, Crank It!, and Tartarus Engine. Throughout the first half of the 2020s, Mike Klubnika has remained a stalwart fixture of indie horror. An Estonian modeller, musician, VFX artist, and programmer, Klubnika is the emcee of oppressive and direful nightmares plated with rusting walls and tangled black cabl...

Note: The following article contains mild spoilers for Balatro. Maths can't mind its own business. Most other academic fields comment on a single area of interest: living organisms, the events of the past, human communication, etc. These subjects can stick to each other: you can combine biology and chemistry into biochemistry or history and art into the history of art, but each topic has a clea...

Note: The following article contains moderate spoilers for Buckshot Roulette, as well as discussions of addiction and suicidal behaviour. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, contact a suicide prevention organisation near you. For those in the US, you can reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or find them online at 988lifeline.org . If you are in the UK, you can call The Samaritan...

You know, there was a time when Microsoft added a dollar to the Xbox Game Pass price, and it was controversial, but no small number of us defended the decision. I was one of those apologists because between the launch of the service and that change, the company had stuffed the pass with video games like a ludological Christmas Turkey. I mean, maybe it wasn't fair in that anything a greedy trans...

During the last couple of console generations, it felt like we were on the cusp of emerging technologies transforming video games overnight. Motion controls, cloud computing, virtual reality, they were all meant to be a layer of chrome paint that would leave the medium unrecognisable and incomparable to what came before. In 2025, that techno-optimism feels like a faded dream. Many of us have be...

You know what's really the bee's knees? The Stop Killing Games movement. If you've heard their elevator pitch, you can skip to the next paragraph, but if you've not, a stinky quantity of games only run as long as they can phone home to a server, and we're all familiar with the agony of those servers going down and the games going cold. Stop Killing Games is a pressure group petitioning for laws...

Note: The following article contains moderate spoilers for Super Mario Sunshine. A couple of weeks ago, I discussed the burrowing camera and liberating spurting in Super Mario Sunshine, the GameCube's pride and joy. This week, we turn our minds to darker matters as we stare into the bad and ugly of this platformer, and decide once and for all, should Shigeru Miyamoto be executed? You are about...

Note: The following article contains moderate spoilers for Super Mario Sunshine. Between the Giant Bombcast and GB East's Steal My Sunshine, you might say that this site has extensively covered the second 3D Mario. Yet, I still haven't seen my Super Mario Sunshine experience represented here, and what is the world about if not me, personally? SMS was the first game I received for the second hom...

Here's a question: Is Tony Hawk's Pro Skater linear or open-world? Unlike Gunstar Heroes or Metro 2033, Tony Hawk's levels don't funnel the player along a single path to a definite end. Instead, like the map of a Witcher or Lode Runner, they are sandbox-like, and so are their objectives. In THPS 1's Warehouse, the player could choose to smash the crates, then grab the secret tape, then grind th...

Note: I'll keep repeating this throughout the article, but to be clear, I am not accusing any party mentioned in this blog of legal misconduct. During the Summer Game Fest this year, there was one livestream I sat all the way through, but couldn't turn into a blog. It was a show that caught my attention not for its content, but for the rabbit hole it dragged me down. That stream was the Green G...

Note: This article is to be used purely for educational and hobbyist purposes. You should never pick a lock that isn't yours and never attempt to bypass the security of any lock you're not willing to break. To play a different theme of game is to participate in different activities, and the Bethesda RPGs are as good an example of that as any. All of these roleplaying experiences contain similar...

When you see where people live, you can see how they live, and in the internet's favourite location-guessing game , you ogle a lot of homes, shops and other spaces people spend their time. Among the common refrains of the West's socially conscious is that the US needs walkable cities. Yet, for Europeans that haven't seen the States for themselves, it's hard to imagine how direly that remains tr...

Game developers are constantly trying to figure out how to paint worlds that feel ornamented, lived in, and as large as real countries. The Geoguessr team found a hilariously direct solution to this problem: Setting their game in the world we already have. If ARGs like Ingress or Majestic vacuum wrap a fictional layer over our reality, Geoguessr wonders why you'd bother with that obfuscation. W...

Here we are, at the end of all things, or at least Summer Game Fest. We're concluding with a two-parter. An example of what games showcases shouldn't be and then one suggestion of what they should be. Interlude I screw the cap back on the Mountain Dew and jam one of my crumb-encrusted fingers onto the TV handset. I'm ready for my seventh Attack of the Show this evening, but something's wrong. T...

It's weird that since E3 died, the number of video games revealed every summer has increased rather than decreased. Once, not that long ago, the only conferences were hosted by Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, EA, and Ubisoft. One person with a few disposable hours could see every announcement, on-stage demo, and awkward crowd interaction for that expo. Now, we have shows from Microsoft, Sony , Bethe...

There's this thing that keeps happening at the glitzy gaming extravaganzas where a presenter will get up on stage and give a speech about how games are all about stories, artistry, and bringing people together, and then proceed to show you twenty trailers for games that are about action, spectacle, and commercialism. These are usually the same shows that betray a lack of confidence in games as...

It's a destabilising thing to keep to a regular posting schedule for years on end and then suddenly break that chain. It's not what I wanted to do. I enjoy the consistency and sense of productivity that comes with expressing my thoughts here every week or two, but in the last month, my personal life got in the way. I cannot recommend becoming involved in such a thing, and I can't guarantee this...

Looked at on a historical scale, the United States is a bouncing baby of a country. Many nations have a diary stretching back hundreds of years, if not more. If you live in China's Shaanxi Province, you can commune with local sculptures from the 3rd century BCE. The other month, excavators found the ruins of a Roman basilica under a London apartment block, but for the States, time doesn't begin...

Across the PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, input and output are so standardised that they often fade into the background. Nintendo, on the other hand, is the last bastion of the conspicuous feature. It is the single console manufacturer that uses unique controls and modalities to deliver an experience that can't be ported. Another studio might be reticent to develop a game that they knew couldn't se...

Best estimates are that as many as twenty computer games are published every year. With that warehouse of downloadables to peruse, finding fascinating titles on the fringe can be like looking for hay in a needlestack. That's why I have a thread of blogs featuring starling-size projects that didn't ever get to soar. In that spirit, here are six more Lo-Fi Plays. Short Trip Not to be confused wit...

Here's a question you might not like: Is Super Mario 3D World a 3D Mario platformer? It sounds open and shut. The acrobatics of Mario 3D World span three axes of movement, and it's an official platformer in the Mario series. Yet, here's another question that makes that argument sound less salient: Is every game in which we play some role an "RPG", or, despite the name, are RPGs only games that...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Arcade Paradise. It also briefly mentions suicidal ideation. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, contact a suicide prevention organisation near you. For those in the US, you can reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or find them online at 988lifeline.org . If you are in the UK, you can call The Samaritans on 116 123 or visit...

When other commentators write their GotY Lists, they sieve the ten most gleaming nuggets from the year's sand, but this isn't like other GotY lists. This is worse. Most of the games I play aren't new; they're old, so my list should be old too, a grey cabbage crumpled at the back of your crisper drawer. In purely alphabetical order, here are the ten games I played this year that weren't expunged...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Critters for Sale. Of previous blog , uploaded same day as birth of Andrija Štampar. Of game Adios statement made: We will dig with a shovel for an ending when media does not provide one. How to make player to become investigator, scrutinise stronger: General mystery, multiple similar stories/no clear thorough-line. [sic] Segue: Critters f...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Still Wakes the Deep, Dagon, The Horror at Martin's Beach, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Firewatch, and Life (2017). It also contains minor spoilers for The Shadow Over Innsmouth. If you've never been out to the middle of the ocean, the sight is sublime. On land, the features are distinct enough for us to perceive our surroundings as a field...

The vast majority of product slogans are either not consciously noticed by their targets or are understandably received as empty, corporate fluff. Yet, Civilization's audience fervently repeats its unofficial tagline in chorus: "One more turn". I believe players opened their arms to welcome this axiom because they came up with it; that's why it's authentic to them. If you're one of those player...

Last week , I talked through the basics of strict geographic determinism: the argument that the environment of a people defines them and lays the track to their historical endpoint. I said that the interactivity and social simulations of Civilization VI bit back at racist theories of predestination. However, the game also doesn't have to write like Thomas Jefferson to Tipp-Ex over the cultures...

When you start a new game of Firaxis's strategy epic, it doesn't open on your first city or by asking you where you'd like to screw your capital into the bedrock. It parts its curtains on a mobile unit, the Settler, which you can consume to found your first human village. Why do the designers have us use a unit to raise our Munich or Babylon rather than simply clicking a tile on the map? We cou...

Hello enemies, you are reading Lo-Fi Plays, the series that redirects you to a donation page and requires unzipping. In each edition, I talk about six obscure indie games worth your time or five if I am sleepy this week. Here are your video games for this September weekend. Leaf Blower Man: This Game Blows! Have you played Sheep for the PS1? It was an endearing but frustrating toy that Leaf Blo...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Adios, Depression Quest, and The Transformers: The Movie, and moderate spoilers for Paratopic. The terms "first-person narrative game" and " walking simulator " don't beam a lot of information into your head. That's because the media they name shirk the challenge-centric play of their buddies, leaving them with only an interactive story an...

If you clicked on my last blog , you read me relating how video games slowly fell out of love with leaderboards, but the mechanic and the medium don't have to be on bad terms. Player rankings aren't right for every game, but they might be right for you, and when I see a drab implementation of them, it's not because the concept is universally bad. It's that games have priorities that don't alway...

Note: The following article contains mild spoilers for Adios. In the golden era of the arcade, there was no honour higher than having your name appear on a leaderboard. One of the magic qualities of video games is that they can take an attribute as ephemeral as skill and put a number to it. To have your initials posted on a leaderboard was to prove that you had the number supreme, and the idle...

There's this boilerplate paragraph I sometimes post at the top of my blogs when they discuss sensitive topics or contain spoilers. I feel like I should write a template I can paste at the top of every Halo Infinite article to tell you the game's technical quality is still unprofessional and that it couldn't appropriately match players if its life depended on it. It's always true, and its life d...

I know I said that my last blog was my final word on 2024's ersatz E3, but as they say at these conferences, I do have one more thing. It's widely observed that not having to present at E3 has been a boon for many publishers; they don't get drowned out in the clamour of trailers and keynotes, but not every developer can break from the pack. The creators in the Wholesome Direct or Black Voices i...

Well, tarnation. We weren't expecting out-of-towners at the gamer ranch this weekend, but seein' as you came by, why don't you grab a rope, and we'll get to lassoin' the most fascinatin' games of Not E3's big publisher conferences? You won't mind if I jump around with the topics a little. That's the way we get things done around these parts. Sony Between Concord, Marvel Rivals, and FragPunk, yo...

Geoff Keighley is the absolute king of coordinating lavish, meticulous, and aesthetically modern video game events that are deaf to what the moment calls for. The Game Awards has long garnered criticism for sidelining its eponymous accolades to cram in more trailers for upcoming products. One reason that the games industry isn't great at honouring developers is that any time you spend looking b...

Note: This article contains major spoilers for Half-Life and Half-Life: Blue Shift. Last week , I unpacked Half-Life: Opposing Force, and I didn't make my disappointment with it much of a secret. Valve's Half-Life delicately integrated you into its setting , but Opposing Force's Black Mesa kept you at arm's length and, in the late game, rallied Shock Troopers and Voltigores to snipe you the sec...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Half-Life, Half-Life: Opposing Force, and Half-Life: Blue Shift. The Gearbox Software of today is barely recognisable as the fresh-faced Texas developer that launched in 1999. The studio did its stint in the WWII shooter genre with Brothers in Arms and is best known for its firepower delivery chute, Borderlands. Yet, for its first six year...

Note: The following article contains moderate spoilers for Half-Life. Over the past fortnight, I've been revisiting the original Half-Life, and its remake, Black Mesa, chewing over their weapons, setting, and place in FPS history. Now, I want to pick around the edges, to talk about the trivia. We're going to take some time out to explore the physics of Half-Life further. The Anti-Mass Spectrome...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Half-Life and Black Mesa and minor spoilers for Half-Life 2. A Year in Games Ask long-standing fixtures of video games the best year for the hobby, and chances are their modal response will be "1998". It marks the birthdays of Metal Gear Solid, Ocarina of Time, Spyro the Dragon, StarCraft, Banjo-Kazooie, and Dance Dance Revolution. It also...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Cocoon and minor spoilers for Gorogoa. Now and then, a game gets so popular within its niche that its magnetic field stretches beyond its genre's devotees, attracting players from across gaming's wide spectrum. Super Smash Bros. did this as a fighting game, The Last of Us did it in the narrative drama sector, and it's happened myriad times...

Over the last decade and a half, the breakout stars of the puzzle genre have tended to be those titles that stun on sight. The showmen with core mechanics you can understand from the briefest flash, but that bend both reality and your mind. There is the Lego rule-rewriting of Baba Is You, self-cloning in The Swapper, the subjective resizing of objects in Superliminal, the time loops of Outer Wi...

Lo-Fi Plays is a series in which I set out in search of games that are compact, developed on little to no budget, or that otherwise lurk in the shadows of obscurity. This is not a safari of the technologically extraordinary; I am combing for pet projects that do something innovative, charming, or otherwise noteworthy. Here's the crop of downloadables for March 9th. Everything on this list is fr...

This is Springdale, a Cities: Skylines sandbox, as it existed on 2nd March 2036. It's a sprawling hive of commerce and leisure with a population of 135,000 and has all the organs of a functional metropolis: roads, hospitals, shops, universities, and so on. But that population is about to fall precipitously, and all of Springdale's services will grind to an abrupt halt. This city is about to und...

Note: The following article contains moderate spoilers for Potion Craft, and mild spoilers for COLDLINE, Runescape, and Terraria. What Are Information Spaces? Back when I wrote about COLDINE , I said something is a space if you can exist at a range of positions within it but only move to the points adjacent to your position. What it means for two points to be adjacent is that you can pass direc...

Note: This article contains major spoilers for Pikmin 3 and moderate spoilers for Dead Space and Dead Space 2. Pikmin 1 and 2 are widely considered banner releases for the Nintendo GameCube. That makes it confusing that there was no original Pikmin on Nintendo's follow-up console, the Wii. Shigeru Miyamoto had floated the news of Nintendo working on Pikmin 3 as early as 2008, but it was 2013 by...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Pikmin and Pikmin 2. There are a few details which remain inconsistent between the first three Pikmins yet are vital for the character of each: The number of protagonists. The items you collect. The pikmin you use to collect them. We're going to deconstruct how Pikmin 2 handles these areas of the ludonarrative. But before we can start talk...

I was in two minds about whether to write this. The question of whether Halo Infinite is now a professional, finished game is moot. Of course, it's not; it's Halo Infinite. It's like asking whether the Sun comes out at night now. But that's not why I had misgivings about this blog; what held me back were the precise bumps and scratches that never buff off of Infinite. There's the danger that in...

On a cold December night, a lone gamer looks to the infinite wisdom of the heavens. His forehead glowing with IQ, the stars realign before him, breaking from the ancient mundane constellations of hunters and bears to reform as terrifying vampires and legendary pinball machines. The time has come for my end-of-year article where I describe the most flooring titles I played for the first time in...

There aren't many people who've been making video games for as long as Jeff Minter. Writing his first games, like Deflex, in 1979 , Minter's most recent release was this 2023's Akka Arrh, putting forty-four years of interactive media experience under his belt. If you ever feel as though video games are getting long in the tooth, consider that you can be an elder statesman in this discipline at...

Providing informed, up-to-date information about video games means running all the big new names on my machines, keeping on top of every fresh release, and that's why I've been playing 1993's Side Pocket for the SNES. At least, it says "Side Pocket" on the title screen. Here's a question: How do we know when we have two distinct games and when we have two versions of the same game? I'm bringing...

Over the last couple of articles on the rot of Magic: The Gathering, we've chomped on big topics that we can sink our teeth into. Imbalances and randomisation are complicated enough that they each needed an essay by themselves. But there are many more issues with the game we've not gotten to, issues that can summarised faster but that don't have a uniting theme apart from invoking a feeling of...

There's a common misunderstanding in the gaming community that adding more randomisation to a game makes it less luck-based, and pulling back from random elements increases its basis in skill. However, if you use RNG right, you can get a game that tests players' skills more scrupulously. In many action games like Ghosts 'n' Goblins or Destiny, some enemies will use random number generation to d...

When assessing a piece of media, a lot of audiences like to use a scale-based approach, where they list its achievements on one side and its failures on the other, and they see which weighs more. It's also a technique I've seen hobbyists use to try and determine whether a game review's score is justified by its text. There are circumstances under which this Column A/Column B approach to media c...

Note: This article contains major spoilers for Scorn, Die Hard, Get Out, and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. When horror has terrified audiences, it's traditionally done it by exploiting the viewer, reader, or listener's relation to the main characters. If the work is knowingly fashioned, the person interacting with it can put themselves in the shoes of the protagonist, so when that charact...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Control. "I gotta tell you, the life of the mind, there's no roadmap for that territory, and exploring it can be painful". -Barton Fink, Barton Fink. About ten to fifteen years ago, the best-selling AAA games contained more tightly scripted setpiece moments: sequences which all players encountered at the same point in the games, and which...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for COLDLINE . The game is "name your own price" on itch.io and only lasts about ten minutes, so consider working through it and coming back. Ten. The moment that COLDLINE's gameplay starts so does the countdown. You have six hundred seconds to defuse a metaphorical bomb without knowing anything about the environment you're entering or the mec...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Atomic Heart, The Catcher in the Rye, Fight Club, and Goodfellas. If you want to criticise Atomic Heart, there's no shortage of unprotected flanks for you to stab at. There's an open world that is hemmed in and devoid of side tasks, there's its history of bugs so severe that you wonder how it ever launched in its initial state, and there's...

Lo-Fi Plays is a series in which I look at a grab bag of ultra-low-budget independent titles you probably haven't played before. With any luck, we can find some new games and new ideas among them. Here are five wee, weird, and wonderful finds. Baba Files Taxes In its difficulty, Arvi Teikari's Baba is You holds no punches. It's only thematically consistent that its sequel, Baba Files Taxes, put...

Note: The following article contains minor spoilers for Silicon Dreams. Left: Jamie Patton, Right: Danny Adams UK-born Jamie Patton and US expat Danny Adams are Austrian studio, Clockwork Bird. The developer's 2019 cyberpunk management sim, Spinnortality, challenges you to secure wealth and power on a global scale through unscrupulous strategies like propagandising and clandestine corporate dea...

As someone who plays between 24 and 25 hours of Halo Infinite a day, I know a thing or two about getting your ass kicked in the multiplayer. I've also had time to observe how players like to approach problems and which approaches do and do not work. One of the most common mistakes I see is people charging in to melee an opponent like they're Conan the Barbarian and getting knocked on their back...

When we left Halo Infinite in the cold twilight of January, the game was in cryo sleep. As a boxed product, it had yet to be fully assembled, its slow load times and ugly glitches giving it the feeling of a beta rather than a final build. As a live service game, it left UNSC recruits pounding at a low progression ceiling and parched of new cosmetics and play experiences. When Infinite launched...

A classically-trained cellist, Greg Heffernan graduated from New York University in 2005 with a degree in music composition. Adopting the moniker Cosmo D, he became a passionate contributor to the Brooklyn music scene, playing in bands such as Bing & Ruth and Archie Pelago. Nine years after graduation, Cosmo would reenroll at his alma mater, but this time, to study game design. With his 2014 re...

I want to talk about this year's Summer Game Fest, and inevitably, every discussion of Summer Game Fest becomes a eulogy and postmortem of E3. So, let's not beat around the bush. The current crop of mid-year games events are trying to fill the pleasure hole left behind by the old expo up and vanishing, and there's the question of whether any replacement to E3 can survive in the same habitat. Pr...

Lo-Fi Plays is a series in which I look at short indie games made by single people or tiny teams. The releases I review don't receive a lot of fanfare, but almost every video game is doing something that merits attention. Usually, I feature six different titles here, but this week, most of the games are longer than the items I typically showcase, and I have more to say on each. So, this will be...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for The Norwood Suite and minor spoilers for Off-Peak. I think of The Norwood Suite very differently now than when I first played it. A 2017 narrative adventure game by Cosmo D, The Norwood Suite is an outgrowth of his previous project, Off-Peak. Off-Peak's setting is officially a train station, but in practice , it's a gallery of hallucinogen...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for The Outer Worlds and moderate spoilers for Fallout: New Vegas. Obsidian Entertainment's Fallout: New Vegas is one of the greatest RPGs of all time. It doesn't just challenge you with defeating enemies but also working out who your enemies are. Its faction system is not just a set of spectrums along which to gain and lose points but is syst...

In the legends of New Zealand's Māori people, Hine-nui-te-pō is the goddess of death. She dwells in Rarohenga, the afterlife, securing the souls of the dead in their eternal resting place. Hine-nui-te-pō's is also known as the Dawn Maid, and her home is shaded in the warm colours of the sunset sky above it. [1][2] The Māori word for "red sky" is " umurangi ". Umurangi Generation is a 2020 shutt...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Manifold Garden. After the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 A.D., Islam's political and religious leadership fell to a succession of men called "caliphs". Each caliph ruled over lands and a community called a "Caliphate". Historically, there have been five major caliphates, each effectively comprising a Muslim empire. [1][2] In the wes...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Pok é mon Red, Blue, and Yellow versions, Pok é mon: Let's Go, Pikachu, and Pok é mon: Let's Go, Eevee. Nintendo has a knack for publishing games that are such classics that even twenty or forty years out from release, their design can echo on with minimal modifications. There are not a lot of series you could say that for. Pokémon: Let's...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Unpacking. We don't realise the absurd volume of possessions we own until we move, when we have to pull every shirt from its hanger and kitchen utensil from its drawer and ship them off somewhere new. On the other side of that move, we're faced with a daunting forest of boxes, one that seems so much larger than our storage space. But then...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Off-Peak. Video games are full of painstakingly painted and sculpted visual art that we never truly look at. There are so many instances where we get these gorgeous, detailed sprites or 3D models served to us that we can't zoom in on, that artists shove into the background, or that we blow right past. Cosmo D's Off-Peak is a game that give...

Note: The following article contains significant spoilers for Bioshock, Virginia, and Paratopic. The games community has had ahold of the phrase "environmental storytelling" for a good decade and a half. It was thrust into our lexicon in the late 00s and early 10s with launch pads like Bioshock and Gone Home: thrillers that immaculately married place and history. "Environmental storytelling" is...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for R.U.R., Blade Runner, and Silicon Dreams. Most science fiction about A.I. externalises one of two anxieties: Either that synthetic intelligences will oppress us or that we'll oppress them. Both concerns go right back to the creation of the term "robot". Czech writer Karel Čapek invented the word for R.U.R., his 1921 play. In his story, a f...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for A Plague Tale: Innocence and mild spoilers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Do you know what game realises its world brilliantly? The first half of A Plague Tale: Innocence. As its title suggests, Asobo Studio's action-adventure tells the story of its protagonists losing their childhood naivety to a cruel and blighted adulthood. T...

When I gave an update on Halo Infinite back in August, I described a youthful and energising FPS sandbox but a neglected wreck of a live-service game. At the time, I predicted that it would be a while before the shooter's condition improved. What I didn't guess was that it might get worse. One of Infinite's most hotly awaited features was Campaign Co-op. Those who've tagged along for the rocky...

2022 was a tough year for plenty of businesses, and the video game industry was no exception . Workers continue to contend with stifling conditions, and some releases we had high hopes for hobble on broken and disappointing. But we can still sink our teeth into titles old and new that affirm, delight, and empower. Every year , I select the top ten games that I played for the first time and put...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for ChipWizard Professional. You may have heard that the transistor was one of the most important inventions of the 20th century or one of the most transformative technologies period. And you might wonder why it enjoys that esteemed podium in the history of electronics. In my 20th Century Food Court article , I stressed the significance of log...

Note: The following article contains moderate spoilers for 20th Century Food Court and SHENZHEN I/O. Computers took over the world because they are the polymorphic machine. Other appliances are built to carry out a limited number of functions, usually one. They separate cotton from its seeds, they wash and dry clothes, they ventilate a building, etc. A computer is a calculator and a typewriter...

Note: The following article makes brief mentions of sexual assault. It also contains moderate spoilers for Neo Cab. For a long time, the automated car has felt so close to becoming a reality, yet so far . On the one hand, we're flush with personal AI assistants and image recognition algorithms. Our factories have been automated for decades, and our phones can use adaptive computer code to erase...

Phasmophobia is a ghost-hunting horror that became a cult hit following its launch in late 2020. For this Halloween season, I spoke to one of its most loyal followers and former Giant Bomb mod, Trace Evans. ___ Gamer_152: What's your name? Who are you? What do you want? PeaceEgg: I'm Trace, Peace Egg on the Internet. I'm a streamer and speedrunner who's best known for being part of the team tha...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Telling Lies and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and minor spoilers for Her Story. This article briefly references suicide. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, contact a suicide prevention organisation near you. For those in the US, you can reach the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or find them online at suicideprev...

Note: This article contains major spoilers for Her Story and Telling Lies and minor spoilers for Rashomon. As a rule, surveillance is invasive. It doesn't feel like it should be because surveillance is observation, and what could be more passive than sitting and watching? Yet, the activity typically involves inserting yourself into a social context you were not invited into. For example, using...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Spiritfarer. Video games are no strangers to death. In fact, death might rear its morbid head here more than in any other medium. Because games are for people, agents in gameplay systems get anthropomorphised. When those agents are removed from the play space, it's intuitive to narratively contextualise it as them dying because death is wh...

Wherever you think the blame lies, Halo Infinite has had a rough time of it. After a much-publicised delay , this living shooter burst onto the scene in late 2021 with original, balanced, and energising action at its core . Yet, it also attracted vocal criticism for its technical instability , copious network latency , and impoverishment of features and unlockables . A particular weak spot was...

Lo-Fi Plays is a series of blogs that aims to highlight the smaller, minimal-budget titles that often fall under the radar. It's me finding the positives in the most obscure class of indies out there. Keeping with the theme of my last couple of articles, the picks for this week will be games about physics and space exploration. Enjoy. Gravity Trails Gravity Trails is a 2D platformer that has yo...

Note: This article contains major spoilers for Outer Wilds. Last week, I talked about Mobius Digital's Outer Wilds and how it gets players implementing the scientific method. What I didn't discuss as much were the physical discoveries that the game incorporates into its universe. Scientists get accused of being closed-minded because they exclude the supernatural from their worldview, but this c...

This is the end of the line. With the breadth of Summer Game Fest conferences and demos, I only have so much fuel in me to show you what I think is interesting. For our terminus, I've picked two final showcases: one nice, one nasty, but before we get there, I promised a little surprise. Sonic Frontiers Just when I thought I knew what Sonic was, Sega told us it now includes a Breath of the Wild-...

There is a story about games marketing and reporting that would be very easy for me to tell here. One that would say that with publishers' budgets growing like bamboo and the internet acting as the distribution network for ever-more media, the games industry has outgrown the need for a glut of summer showcases. You no longer have to gather people on the ground in one location to have eyeballs o...

A lot of games get shown at E3 that I don't end up talking about. There's only so many times you can comment, " trailers can be misleading " or "the AAA games industry keeps making the same title", but both those observations apply to this year's Microsoft conference more than most. There was thankfully a little more gameplay in its cocktail of fast-moving sizzle reels, and sure, corporate gian...

It's hard to believe it was just over a year ago I was last writing one of these "times are 'a-changin'" posts , but as Jeff Gerstmann said on a recent Twitch stream , you could argue that a shake-up had been coming down the pipeline for a while. With three of the Giant Bomb old guard discharged, it was conceivable that the fourth might make their exit relatively soon after. After the departure...

Whatever you expected E3 to look like in 2022, you probably didn't bet it would be suspended in its current limbo. The ESA says that this year's E3 is a no-op due to COVID restrictions but that the expo will return with all bells and whistles next year. Some gamers regard the association's "Brb" response as PR fluff or wishful thinking, and it's possible that after so many false prophecies, thi...

Here's a deceptively difficult question to answer: What should the Xbox LIVE rules look like in the year 2022? For that matter, how has Microsoft answered that question? The Classic Era of Video Game Chat When Xbox LIVE launched back in November 2002, people thought of online communication very differently. They'd continue to do so for years after. Microsoft's online multiplayer service became...

If you're reading this, chances are you've spent a lot of time talking about video games on the internet. I'm not judging. But if you have spent a lot of time talking about video games on the internet, you've probably seen Nintendo compared to Disney more than a few times. Like old Walt's entertainment juggernaut, Nintendo assembles high gloss media to charm the whole family. Both Nintendo's an...

The activities games have us perform are powerful determinants of their identities, but the treatment and presentation of those activities counts for a lot as well. Josh Wardle's Wordle is a hodgepodge of features from other code-cracking puzzle games, including Hangman, Mastermind, Lingo, and Jotto. Yet, its unique interpretation and implementation of its peers' ideas mean it stands out from t...

Most games that come out receive little to no coverage because they are obscure, low production titles that go unmarketed. This blog series is an attempt to open the curtains on that underserved corner of the medium. Each time, I'll look at six different pint-sized indie games and report on what they are and where they excel. So let's get into it. Friday Night Funkin' First off, perfect name. S...

Video games work like magic in their ability to let us move and feel objects that don't physically exist. We can turn a ball over in our hands, experience the thrust of a jetpack, or get the sensation of riding on horseback, all through a mass of circuits and resistant materials. It's obvious how controllers representative of real-world items achieve this effect. Nintendo Labo simulates stompin...

When I last talked about Halo Infinite's multiplayer, I said that its core play has the potential to endure even as the industry marches into the future. Its longevity isn't down to it simply having countless assignments to turn in or a multitude of trophies to place in a case. It will survive because it could take years to master all of the game's weapons and exhaust all possible combat encoun...

Last week , I used this blog to digest Halo Infinite's Campaign mode. It stands tall on the jigsaw-perfect interlocking of Halo's gunplay and enemy design, and is bolstered by a liberating new grapple. It's also less than the sum of its parts, with the core combat unmoored from and undercut by a generic open-world shell. The packaging of the multiplayer might be even more of a trainwreck. Yet,...

If there's one thing that 343 Industries does better than any other developer, it's reinventing itself. Between 2011 and 2015, Microsoft's powerhouse released four different Halos, but compare any two of them, and you'd think they were the fruit of different studios. Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary was a loyal, by-the-book remake of the original game. On the other hand, The Master Chief Collec...

A little over a month ago, Jeff posted what was ostensibly a review of Halo Infinite to the site. More resolutely, it was an article about the obsolescence of professional reviews in a world where games like Halo Infinite are effectively free. Or at least, part of them is free, and part of them is the cherry on top of an affordable subscription service that critics would already recommend. Jeff...

This is a blog about the ten best games I played for the first time in 2021. As I did last December , I could contextualise this list with a high-minded introduction that would attempt to discuss how these games were an escape from the depressing current events in the wider world. But fuck it, I don't want to talk about upsetting news; I want to talk about engrossing video games. So, in purely...

When thinking about games, we tend to sort them into two big piles, piles that we didn't really have twenty years ago. There are AAA games which we broadly describe as being high-budget and polished. And then there are indie games which we understand to have lower production values but more room for experimentation. Independent releases are able to satisfy niche interests and may not necessaril...

Many video games live double lives. In one, they are a series of systems and levels that aim to provide the most fulfilling and fascinating interactions. In the other, they attempt to present objects and characters that adhere to real-world principles. One of the most common conflicts you see in video games is that they can't rectify that identity crisis. By attempting to pursue one of those pe...

Games aren't just competing with each other for eyeballs and revenue. They're competing with every other activity and product that people could spend their time or money on. And the competition is fierce. I can pay several dollars a month and get access to a few thousand films. I can put down £10 and unlock a library of tens of millions of songs. So, games companies have had to concoct some cre...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Little Nightmares, Little Inferno, and the films The Platform (2019) and Snowpiercer. It also makes multiple references to child abuse and suicide. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, contact a suicide prevention organisation near you. For those in the US, you can reach the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or find th...

Hexic HD is one of the hardest puzzle games I've ever played, at least, when I'm playing to win. I realise that sounds silly because match three games are known for handling their players with the softest of grips. Their rules are so simple that even a child can learn them in seconds, and most of these games don't have a lose condition. You play against a clock or until you've filled up the scr...

The appeal of punishing skill-based games like Dead Cells and Hollow Knight, and the accessibility of mainstream titles like Golf with Your Friends or Spider-Man (2018) look to be irreconcilable. We think the profound sense of triumph that we derive from those former games wouldn't come unless they punched us in the stomach time and again. If they didn't set the bar so high, we'd never see our...

For many players, developing their skill at a game is infinitely more rewarding than a game just telling them they're skilful. It's why titles like Dark Souls, Cuphead, and even Crypt of the Necrodancer attained cult status: they were wellsprings of intrinsic reward. We can label all rewards, both inside and outside of video games, either intrinsic or extrinsic. Intrinsic reward has to do with...

A few years ago, there was something about EA's yearly product presentations that felt perfunctory. The agony of them was that the publisher had games that would make your mouth water and your eyes dilate, but then they also had entries in their yearly series and less polished casual games, both of which acted as extra-strength sedatives. You couldn't ignore an EA showcase because you'd regret...

I think I've been hearing people say that we've reached the end of the line for the last six E3s; that the expo can't continue because of a clash between the current state of media marketing and the communication channels E3 uses. But I think the idea of this rigid, immutable E3 that will blow away like a sandcastle in the wind ignores the historical polymorphism of the event. E3 used to be an...

2019 was a golden year for Nintendo. At E3, they were a tennis ball machine of announcements, pitching news on thirty-three games in just forty minutes. And they weren't just nailing it on quantity; they had quality too, with oodles of gameplay and landmark entries in their classic series to grab attention. There was Luigi's Mansion 3, the Link's Awakening Remake, Cadence of Hyrule, Animal Cros...

It was always unusual that Bethesda held an annual conference for their upcoming games. They don't have the small country of third-party developers that console manufacturers do, and their two most popular first-party series can go epochs without a core entry. It's been six years since the last mainline Fallout and ten since the last Elder Scrolls. So, for multiple years, Bethesda was lifting t...

In writing, there's a standard practice for creating a comedy character. You come up with a goal they tirelessly strive for but make their circumstances such that pursuing that prize lands them in the opposite situation to the one they're seeking. So, David Brent in The Office wants to be a respected leader, but he's a tool in a workplace of down-to-Earth colleagues meaning that he only ends up...

For the past few years, I've been writing articles at the end of every E3 that lash back through the humbler keynotes. That's your PC Gaming Show, your Devolver Digital, etc. That there's enough in Geoff Keighley's Summer Game Fest Kickoff to give it its own blog is a product of the sheer volume of games on display here. There was some padding in the mix and a fair number of underwhelming annou...

There's no mistaking that Giant Bomb has meant a lot to a lot of people. Over the past several days, I've heard community members say that the site helped them overcome depression, survive the isolation of the pandemic, and come out as trans. Even plenty of us who weren't carried through some personal struggle by this goofy-ass publication feel deeply attached to the antics here and the people...

There has long been a fight between Nintendo and their fans over one particular character and whether he can be lent his own vehicle. No personality in video games has more disciples arguing that they deserve a game, and not getting their wish, than Waluigi. He's this total anomaly: he's appeared in 62 titles and yet hasn't become as much as a sidekick in a mainline Mario entry. He didn't even...

Note: The following article contains moderate spoilers for Luigi's Mansion 3. Luigi's Mansion 3 is a parade of lively animation, gorgeous art deco interiors, and models you feel like you could reach out and touch. But today, I don't want to talk about any of that. I want to talk about what it feels like to interact with Luigi's Mansion 3. The game is a unique beast. Mechanically, it doesn't hav...

Super Mario Maker is the democratisation of Mario level design: a complete reimagining of the relationship between the developer and the audience. Rather than a studio authoring the platformer's levels, the studio is the author of a set of tools, and the audience alternately plays the role of designer and player. Because a whole community is creating the play experiences rather than just one co...

If you've played your fair share of multiplayer RPGs, you'll know what it's like to carry more types of currency than a bank. World of Warcraft has over thirty of them, Destiny 2 had upwards of twenty, and this multitude of money gets on a lot of adventurers' nerves. As they try to sort their Justice Points from their Emblems of Valor and their Phaseglass Needles from their Seraphites, some pla...

Video game mechanics often have double identities, understood through one lens by the player but in an entirely different way by the designer. Currency mechanics are like that; we can spend hours selling loot and buying tools without understanding the economics the developers do. But if we want to know more about reward systems, especially those in vast multiplayer worlds, we need to understand...

2020 was not a kind year to most of us, which renewed the importance of media in many of our lives. It was a lifeline to escape from the doldrums or gain perspective on the world, and now is a perfect time to reflect on it. At the end of each year, I hand-select the finest titles I played for the first time, so in purely alphabetical order, here are my favourites from 2020: Animal Crossing: New...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Ape Out. "The tiger, He destroyed his cage, Yes, YES, The tiger is out." -Nael (Age 6), They're Singing a Song in Their Rocket If films are something witnessed, then games are something performed; we can define the play in any one game by the nature of our performance on its stage. Most popular performance relies on an entertainer reciting...

When we discuss games, we almost always talk about them as assemblages of experiences that anyone who plays them will undergo. And why not? We're used to media that consists of set series of events; it's what we see in books, films, and television programmes. Like with movies or TV shows, we boot games by placing a disc into an electro-box or by clicking a tile in a media library. Multiple peop...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Hypnospace Outlaw. This is a graphical version of this article. If you would prefer a text-only version, click here . Sources Title Banner made with PICASION Glitter Text Maker . Space Background from Untitled Spiritualist Site . Raindrops, Pot Leaf, and Fairy Backgrounds from mommy9876 . Rainbow Banner from BLAGOSAH . Under Construction B...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Hypnospace Outlaw. The technicolour mirage of Hypnospace Outlaw is familiar and yet distant. Online empires can rise and fall in the space of a year, and social trends can be forgotten a fortnight after they started. The exhausting pace of internet culture means that the turn-of-the-century web is now comparatively prehistoric. But that ve...

For many gamers, the original Dead Space was their introduction to diegetic UI: a form of user interface design where typically abstract elements like meters and menus exist within the narrative of the game. With a single release in 2009, Visceral brought diegetic UI forward by leaps and bounds, but few studios afterwards rushed to create the next Dead Space. Complications ranging from aestheti...

Note: The following article contains mild spoilers for Dead Space 1-3. For a video game, a communicative graphical interface is essential, yet when a developer implements one, it often goes unnoticed. If the UI is doing its job, you frequently won't be conscious of it any more than you're conscious of the movement of your legs when peddling a bike or the motions of your pen when writing a lette...

Julian Glander is a New York-based modeller and animator famous for his cool colours and big blobs. His work has appeared everywhere from the New York Times to Adult Swim, and last year he released his creative sandbox, ART SQOOL to the world. We talk about ART SQOOL and a few things which aren't ART SQOOL here. ____ Gamer_152: I understand that ART SQOOL grew out of a feature film you were wri...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for ART SQOOL. I am a blue, genderless student with a bowl cut and circular glasses, and on my trusty notepad, I've made a shaky, out-of-proportion sketch of a sun. The sun is wearing a pair of jeans and peeing into an open toilet. The caption reads "Beliefing is the essense of life". I jump off of a pink continent into a void of sprinkle stat...

Last time on video game industry, Microsoft put on a "gameplay reveal" for the Xbox Series X which contained neither any long-form gameplay nor that many Series X games. This lapse in marketing meant their arch-rivals Sony were now looking to be top dog. The purveyors of the PlayStation boasted floor-shaking announcements and a more extensive diversity of titles. But as hoped, Microsoft's earli...

Note: The links and blocked-out text in this article contain descriptions of physical and sexual harassment. These acts are deliberately not described in the plaintext. If the climate were different, I'd use a surrogate E3 article like this to jot down my thoughts on the games Ubisoft will be pushing into stores over the next year. Given the recent news from within the company, I think a more h...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Observer. Stories set in fictional worlds provide a type of exploration that those positioned in the real-world never can. A different universe means different cultures, technologies, and histories. While the societies and timelines of sci-fi and fantasy fiction are never as storied as the real thing, there's enough of them out there that...

I don't usually go in for debates about who "won" a console generation or "won" E3. If two good games consoles come out, then it seems pointlessly pessimistic to say that one has failed just because another has succeeded a little more. But we can find insight in comparison. Game companies don't make decisions in a vacuum; they react to each other. And when a technology or experience falls down,...

When we talk about media, we throw the term "aesthetic" around like confetti. We might praise the "aesthetics" of a film, say something matches our "aesthetic", or even use "aesthetic" as an adjective. In video game discussion, in particular, we're no strangers to the word, and we have a deeply ingrained idea of what aesthetics mean to games. In mainstream discussion of the medium, "aesthetics"...

I love the discussion of games that happens around the holiday season as it's an opportunity to wax lyrical about the titles we're most passionate for and overflow with positivity about what we've played. Every year , I produce a GotY list that I select not from the games that came out in the previous twelve months, but from the games that I played for the first time in the year. In purely alph...

JRPGs are typically adventures that pit us against evil forces trying to obliterate or ruin whole realms. Yet, the way these games have often had us interact with those realms is by culling their wildlife and looting their natural resources. It's been par for the course that even when cast as heroes, we carry out behaviour similar to that of the villains: we degrade the health of the world to m...

With all the tacky, semi-functional Sonic games that Sega has put out over the last couple of decades , it feels like a given that the Sonic cart racers would be second-rate cash-ins. In comparison to other genres, cart racers are less creative spaces and more ready-made wireframes for studios to paper mache over. What distinguishes them is less often the play and tone, and more often the brand...

We're used to staring long and hard at serious issues in the games industry. Issues like workplace harassment, far-right political rhetoric on forums, and bullying in the community. However, a major video game publisher supporting an authoritarian government is a new one. Discussion spaces are alight with fury over the recent conduct of Activision-Blizzard, and I have a lot of thoughts on those...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Titanfall 2. Titanfall 2 is the best shooter I've played in years. Respawn Entertainment's military sci-fi binds together threads of silky movement, and intense, ever-changing combat to create a fabric of uninterrupted flow. A rich buffet of player actions means that wherever you are on the map, whichever items you have at your disposal, t...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Goodfellas, The Little Mermaid, Paratopic, and Whiplash, and a minor spoiler for Deadly Premonition. In life, it's the destination, not the journey, right? If you have a fulfilling job, you shouldn't focus on the day it will end; you should be happy for the time in which you can still do it. If you go on a hike, the point isn't reaching th...

Few games studios have established an in-house style as immediately identifiable as Zachtronics's. Systemic, dry, and often fiendishly complex, Zachtronics puzzle games such as SpaceChem and SHENZHEN I/O became cult hits for not just allowing players to find solutions but to build them. I was able to talk briefly to Zach Barth, the man behind the games, about the mindset that goes into developi...

It's a sign of the times that a blockbuster like Fortnite can become a worldwide sensation while its contents still remain a mystery to most of the medium's old guard. Fortnite has pride of place in the cultural arena of kids 8-16, and there is a limitless supply of YouTube videos with animated young men shotgunning a path through Dusty Divot. However, if you're the kind of person who reads a l...

Peter and Robert Curry are a sibling duo of game creators who once worked for Sidhe Interactive, New Zealand's largest game developer, but quit in 2006. Seven years later, the brothers founded Dinosaur Polo Club, and in 2015, released their first piece of software: public transport strategy game Mini Metro . Recently, Peter Curry was kind enough to talk to me about his and Robert's journey deve...

Note: This article briefly discusses a fictional mass shooting. I've attempted to write about it in as sympathetic a way as I can, but if that's a sensitive subject for you right now, you might want to sit this one out. This piece also contains mild spoilers for the rebooted Tomb Raider games and Modern Warfare 2. Traditionally, video games have been lax at humanising their subjects and engende...

It became obvious about halfway through the run of press conferences this year that if the publishers were banishing gameplay demos from their briefings, then audiences were going to have to do more of their own spelunking to know what the games would look like in action. What I hadn't realised at the time was how much digging the average user would have to do to find the videos of those games...

Nintendo is the originator for the technique of spreading your announcements throughout the year and lubricating their distribution to the audience through live but accessible video streams. For the fans, it's meant no more arduous year-long waits for Nintendo news, and if there was a game they weren't hot on, it was easier to avoid it. A built-in flaw of the press conference format is you have...

It used to be that Ubisoft was seen as an also-ran that spent too long on awkward humour and cheap motion controls games, but then, in 2017, they hit a stride, and have spent the past couple of years putting out a surprisingly joyous showcase of games. Low expectations were a factor in our positive reception of its press conferences, but they managed to keep up a better momentum in them than in...

The controversy surrounding Bethesda and the tactics which the conference used to respond it were immeasurably more interesting than the games on show. After putting out a clunker like Fallout 76, there's nothing you can say or not say that will make things alright. You can't be seen ignoring that mess or your audience won't think you're listening but acknowledging it only draws attention to th...

Note: The following article contains spoilers for The LEGO Movie, Halo: Combat Evolved, and Halo 3. There was something mildly irritating lurking in the back of my head as I came away from Microsoft last year . It's not that their conference was in any way a disaster; in fact, it had a lot of high points, but I didn't feel that buzz that most people seemed to on the back of their presser. For m...

I'm still not convinced by the notion that E3 is dying, at least, not in the immediate. It makes perfect sense that when modern social media allows you to beam trailers and gameplay directly to customers all year round, that you're no longer reliant on a one-off expo where you woo the established press to do it for you. However, there are some things you can't do with games over the internet, t...

While E3 is always a time for excitement and speculation, it's also a time for more scepticism and questioning than we usually do. The expo might look like video game Christmas to those of us with a passion for the medium. From the perspective of the people who fund the conferences and booths, it's an advertising platform. We wouldn't take commercials for dishwasher tablets or home insurance at...

Debates about the quality of the Sonic series always follow a script: Someone makes the observation that the 2D Sonic games were fun, but the 3D ones are some combination of boring and obnoxious. Responses then typically come in the form of a large crowd agreeing, some people saying that the early 3D Sonics were decent, and some others saying that Sonic was never fun. There is also a community...

A common perception about gameplay systems is that their complexity is a product of how many moving parts they have. Even if you feel that a simple game can be engaging and that there are plenty of boring complex games, you may also describe mechanically minimalist games as simple and games packed with mechanical levers and pulleys as complex. But there is another way to look at it. In Katie Sa...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Donut County. Video games don't just provide us with the opportunity to interact with fictional worlds; they also ingrain in us mindsets through which we process those worlds. Often, how we receive a game environment is a product of not just its contents but also the tools we have to interact with it. In the realm of shooters, we perceive...

If you've been following this series of articles from the start, you'll know that Harmonix laboured for a decade and a half to release a game that was both significantly profitable and critically well-received. You'll also remember that their breakout success, Guitar Hero, was snatched from their clutches in an Activision buyout, but that they managed to avert disaster through developing Rock B...

The original Rock Band was breathtaking as a game that found a balance between creating distinct activities for its players to engage in and uniting those activities through recurring motifs in the play and intervals of direct co-operation. However, the most iconic elements of Rock Band remain the instruments. Rhythm game peripherals give designers a degree of control over the tactile and manua...

"We had this high-level directive that the founders, Alex and Eran, had concocted to which we’ve remained true to this day, and that was to use technology to allow non-musicians to experience music. We believe music is this incredible human joy which is denied to most people because they don’t have a decade or more to put into mastering a conventional instrument. So we wanted to use technology...

My whole life, I've loved zoos; they're places that let you bask in the seemingly limitless colour and variety of the animal kingdom. There are almost no environments on Earth which are inhospitable, and evolution has ingenious means for adapting organisms to both extreme and forgiving biomes. Zoos not only let us peek in on those organisms but also break down the barriers between those environ...

Note: The following article contains mild spoilers for all games mentioned. Every year I publish a GotY piece which looks not at the best games that came out in the last twelve months, but at my favourite games that I played for the first time. The rationale? New games are expensive and older games deserve more love. Here are my top ten plays from 2018: Agents of Mayhem This entry is as much a...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Portal. Few video games have an antagonist as memorable as Portal's GLaDOS. Instantly recognisable by her robotic, passionless voice, GLaDOS's indifference to human suffering is as funny as it is chilling. For a video game, Portal gives its antagonist a shocking amount of power over the player character. This villain is not a warlord on a...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for The Novelist and moderate spoilers for Fahrenheit (2005) and Late Shift. When games implement narrative choices, each choice is typically exclusive with no middle ground between them. For example, in the 2005 adventure game Fahrenheit, there is a moment when the girlfriend of one protagonist tells him she'll be moving from New York to Flor...

Every medium has works that aren't for everyone and genres which are the curiosity of a select minority, but one thing that happens in video games that doesn't happen in other media is that entire genres considered essential to the medium are left inaccessible to a lot of its audience. In film, producing horror and sci-fi won't make your movies the most popular or line your shelf with awards, b...

Note: This article contains some spoilers for Saint's Row The Third and major spoilers for Saint's Row IV. When you've spent your career making games with over-the-top plots and one day you manage to release a game with the most over-the-top plot possible, where do you go from there? It's a question that Volition Entertainment had to ask themselves after they released Saint's Row IV in 2013. Sa...

As indie games chart ever-more experimental territory, we've found much of the conventional wisdom about what a game is and what a game can be falling by the wayside. It is the nature of any advancing medium that the number of inherent attributes to it is continually proven to be smaller than we believed previously and that creators are capable of taking more choices in their work that we ever...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Watch_Dogs. Hacking is an activity that has long captivated writers and the public because the aesthetics of the pursuit match the ends to which it's often used. Hacking is about breaking the limitations of software, often while remaining undetected by computer security, and it's used in fiction by counterculturalists working from the shad...

Note: This article contains major spoilers for Watch_Dogs and Watch_Dogs 2 and minor spoilers for Grand Theft Auto V. Throughout the 2010s, Ubisoft made a name for themselves as a dev house that loved to bring up political subject matter in their games and suggest that they were making political statements, but which couldn't be swerving much harder to avoid them. It happened with Far Cry 3 as...

For as often as the video game community is starkly divided on issues, just now and then there will be an annoyance that unites everyone under the banner of a single position. When Valve announced in June 2018 that they would no longer curate the Steam store, the verdict from critics and consumers alike was that this was an act of cowardice on the part of Valve and a neglect of their duty as a...

The mechanical fabric of Halo 5 rewards consciousness of the combat above all else, and as a shooter package, it's stuffed to the gills with modes and features to please all species of players. I think this is a shining beacon of action game design and art direction, but I find it hard to reconcile that view with my many memories of coming away from the game feeling cheated and frustrated. Some...

We often don't think about online multiplayer games as having difficulty in the same way that single-player games do and don't typically hold them to the same standard when it comes to tuning that difficulty. However, I'd argue that we should. An online match where we don't have the skill to compete can feel just as frustrating as a level of a single-player campaign that's too punishing. The di...

In 2012, 343 Industries released their first entry in the Halo series built from the ground up. Hot on the footsteps of Bungie's nine-year run with the fiery sci-fi FPS, 343 made the multiplayer for Halo 4 a hybrid of the series's existing play and the progression and customisation mechanics popularised by Call of Duty. No one could say Halo 4 wasn't as professionally-produced as any of Bungie'...

Note: This article contains major spoilers for Mad Max (2015) as well as moderate spoilers for every film in the series. The conventional wisdom is that the only way to create an adequate video game adaptation of a property is by lifting its existing elements and then expressing those elements through the aesthetics, narrative, and play of a game. But I disagree; I think there's as much or mayb...

Note: This article contains mild spoilers for The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit. When we solve a smartly-designed puzzle, we get a little dose of dopamine not just because games explicitly frame this as a success but also because there's a part of our brain which responds to us clicking together seemingly disparate pieces in a way that makes logical sense. It's that same feeling of accom...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Life is Strange, and Life is Strange: Before the Storm, as well as brief discussion of sexual assault. I don't know about you, but for me, the confused and hurried ending of the original Life is Strange made me forget the pioneering accomplishments in its first four chapters. A frequently tender and tranquil game, Life is Strange was an es...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action. As VA-11 HALL-A had me mixing ingredients for discerning customers at the counter of a bar, there was one and only one other game I found myself comparing it to: Cook, Serve, Delicious. There are a smattering of games set in drinking and dining establishments, but unlike so many others, both VA-11...

Note: This article contains major spoilers for Pony Island, Spec Ops: The Line, and Undertale and mild spoilers for Doki Doki Literature Club and Frog Fractions. You can only see and play so much horror before you become desensitised to it. For devotees of the macabre medium, what was once nail-biting becomes predictable and what was once terrifying becomes tame. Bait-and-switch horror is one r...

Despite its evocative title, the Assassin's Creed series may be more about movement and platforming than it is about elegantly planting blades into jugulars. While these games have a prominent combat system, the acts of getting to and from the combat, and all diversions from it, have you hot-footing it across rooftops and dashing through the open streets. Even the fights themselves are often a...

Note: This article contains major spoilers for Halo Legends and Halo 3. In the prehistoric era of early 2010, Bungie, the creator of one of the most influential shooters and sci-fi series to exist in games, were about to give one last hurrah to their absurdly popular property before jettisoning it for good. But 343 Industries, the inheritor of Halo, were just revving up. They were to be the Hum...

So, I wanted to do something a little different this week. There's a slew of video games forever being disseminated onto the internet via student projects, game jams, and low budget ventures, the majority of which won't see even a few characters devoted to them, and they could do with a little sunlight. Here, I'm giving micro-reviews of six different free and shamelessly raw indie games. It's a...

Every year at E3, there are shorter conferences and a lot of little previews of games that can't add up to a full article but are still worth mentioning so let's talk about the briefer briefings and lower-key show floor games of E3 2018. Devolver Digital You could probably write the number of people who were impressed with Devolver's 2017 conference on one hand, but I'd be on that list. Last ye...

Nintendo's press conference this year looked a lot like Bethesda's for the last few years . Instead of having a whole platter of games to set down in front of us, they had a few snacks and then one big course. The company filling up the majority of their briefing with Super Smash Bros. Ultimate this year is comparable to the way Bethesda have wallpapered over their pressers with plenty of Fallo...

Ubisoft's conference on Monday night was all the richer for not rushing through their upcoming catalogue and letting us linger on the footage and news of their games. It sat in stark contrast to the Microsoft presentation in which Phil Spencer boasted about squeezing fifty video games in a single ninety-minute slot like someone trying to stuff their whole wardrobe into a tiny suitcase. You migh...

There was no one presentation during the Ubisoft conference that blew me away like the Sea of Solitude speech in EA's briefing or the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer in Microsoft's presser , but Ubisoft may have put on my favourite show so far. When the publisher had a game they wanted to talk about, they mostly made sure we saw footage of that game or had gotten to play a version of it elsewhere. They...

I was so annoyed that the opening and closing speeches of Microsoft's conference made all these pretentious declarations about the games on display which were not accurate to the trailers and demos we saw, but Bethesda provides an example of how to use such moments to give your audience something more concrete to grab on to. They didn't bookend their press conference with abstract and unrealist...

I didn't enjoy Microsoft's conference last year as much as the majority of the community seemed to. They leaned into the hardware porn of the Xbox One X specs and spent too much time rallying consumer support based on brand names and recognisable characters. By attempting to hype up announcements to unreasonable levels, the publisher made their claims seem overblown, and they put too much empha...

Navigating art and entertainment means being critical of it and being critical of E3 means not just reviewing the press conferences as they are streamed but also looking at how accurately the press conferences of the past portrayed the products and services they were selling. If we don't stay diligent about this, it allows these companies to sell us a bill of goods every E3. I thought EA's pres...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for SUPERHOT. When I started playing SUPERHOT, the last thing I expected was that I'd get sucked into the story, but that's what happened. The game features play which you want to return to again and again, and as it turns out, that's not just for the sake of entertainment. This piece of media needs to be compelling because its story is about...

SUPERHOT is the most innovative shooter I've played in years. The goal of action games (that is "action" used in the cinematic sense, not "action" meaning "hand-eye coordination") is to make us feel like the heroes of action films and novels. However, the protagonists of Hollywood blockbusters display superhuman reflexes and ingenuity that most us playing games could only dream of. For game des...

Online, fans of Prey have lent the game a nickname; it's " Bioshock in space ", and if you squint, you can see it. Prey and Bioshock are both atmospheric first-person action games which include a mostly abandoned environment full of art deco visual design but also reminders of the rigorous engineering done to keep them safe from the hostile nothing beyond their bulkheads. Their settings are bot...

As a series, The Sims has been a proud ambassador of expansion packs as a content format to the extent that its the first series a lot of gamers think of when you ask them about expansions. Many even argue that when it came to building out the aesthetics and mechanics of the series, EA and Maxis went overboard, drowning us under a torrent of optional extras, and there may be a fair argument the...

When we last looked at The Sims, I talked about the stats that make up a character, how different spheres of characters' lives interact, and how sims communicate with each other. However, the game's systemic interactions don't just happen within and between sims, but also between sims and their homes. To understand The Sims in its entirely, we need to plumb the depths of the Buy and Build Modes...

The Sims is nothing, if not proof of video games' unique potential to make any story interesting. One of the purposes of media is to mirror our lives back at us, giving us something we can see ourselves in, but most media has only been able to mirror the peaks and valleys of lives: the new partners, the family deaths, the births of children, and so on. We live most of life in the in-between: it...

There's this opinion about Nintendo which I've seen swimming around forums ever since the release of the DS in 2004. It's usually expressed in an exasperated voice and asked as a question: "When is Nintendo going to drop their handheld consoles and switch to mobile?". The implication being that that is something the company could and should do. The DS, 3DS, and mobile devices all trade in techn...

Note: The article contains major spoilers for Late Shift. There is something simultaneously starkly real and hilariously false about classic FMV games. Live-action games came across as tacky not just because of their low production values and hiccups in video playback but also because of the way they integrated footage into the flow of play. Video games are reliant on dynamic reaction to player...

Note: This article contains major spoilers for ISLANDS: Non-Places. ISLANDS has one of the best opening hooks I've seen in a video game. A bus creaks to a halt, opens up its doors, and a dozen eggs float majestically out of it, chirping as they go. A lift smoothly lowers the bus into the ground, the vehicle drives off, and then the bus stop turns into an incubator for the eggs. That's the whole...

Note: This article contains major spoilers for Scanner Sombre. A little way into Scanner Sombre, I swam out into a chest-high pool, and my splashing caused something in the cave to respond with a banshee-like wail. I found the source of the noise in the corner of the chamber: it was some coloured mist in the shape of a human. Once I got within seeing-distance of it, it came hurtling towards me...

Every year, I publish a GotY article which is a bit different from most of the others online. Rather than announcing my favourites of the games that came out in the year, I look at the best games I played for the first time since my previous list . I do this partly because I don't have the time or money to buy and play every high profile game released in a year, but I also do it in an attempt t...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for the Fallout 4 DLC Nuka World. In my article on Fallout 4's main storyline, I mentioned that Fallout mingles hyper-commercial imagery with its post-apocalypse to draw a link between rampant consumerism and the downfall of its America. When you kill some poor waster and find the "Fancy Lad Snack Cakes" in their pockets or when you see a bill...

Choices are cheap. A constant torrent of trailers, press releases, and demos for games boast about the hundreds of items we can equip in them and the thousands of different ways we can configure our characters. Some games are so pleased with the sheer volume of activities they offer us, they don't even think to stop and explain why we'd want to participate in those activities. While we're all e...

David O'Reilly is the award-winning animator behind such work as the video game sequences in Spike Jonze's "Her" and the Adventure Time episode "A Glitch Is a Glitch". Earlier this year, O'Reilly released " Everything ", a mechanically minimalist philosophy game narrated by British intellectual Alan Watts. Here, he discusses the forces that shaped Everything and the role that games can play in...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Inside and minor spoilers for Hotline Miami and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. The difficulty of video games reduces their accessibility relative to other forms of media. This keeps coming up, and sometimes we act like it comes up because of the way a single game handles difficulty or because of the comments of an individual developer, but ther...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Everything. Within modern indie entertainment, there is a Petri dish of progressive philosophy games. The Talos Principle, The Turing Test, SOMA, and similar titles raise and even answer high-stakes questions about reality and our experience of it. Commendably, they're rooting around in intellectual territory most media won't touch, but fe...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. It's been almost ten years since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare turned the shooter space upside down. At the time, it was praised not just for its big action set-pieces, the rushing pace of its campaign, and its introduction of RPG-like progression and unlocks to its multiplayer, it was also regarded as adva...

E3 has traditionally been a parade of the loudest, most highly engineered games and presentations possible because the only companies who could present at E3 were the few who were sitting on top of Everests of money. You couldn't compete unless you were the kind of industry lynchpin which manufactured the consoles themselves or controlled an empire of high-yield franchises. For many of the comp...

When talking about Ubisoft, I mentioned that their conference provided the uplifting message that any publisher can turn their press briefings from sleep-inducing to invigorating overnight. Sony reminded us that if that's the case, then the opposite must also be true. I kept looking back over the show, wondering what I'd missed. There had to be more announcements and details that slipped my att...

The Ubisoft press conferences have felt a lack of confidence in their products. The company has had a similar problem to E3's other publishing giant, EA, in that they've had a checklist of casual games and annual franchises that they need to market and inform investors of that don't make for compelling viewing. In hopes of making the medicine go down a little smoother, Ubisoft has distracted us...

Microsoft is a console manufacturer defined by a vested interest in technologies peripheral to the games themselves. Sometimes this interest has led to them to success, and sometimes it's left them in shambles. Xbox LIVE was a service that immediately changed how games were played, and the Kinect was a lucrative pillar in the house of Microsoft for some time. On the other hand, the company laun...

Here is a sequence of words you won't want to hear: 2017 may be E3's Year of the Influencer. The use of e-celebs to promote wares will be less pronounced in the Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft presentations, but the EA conference's habitual return to bouncy YouTube and Twitch characters is to some degree just Electronic Arts moving with the current. It's happening for the same reasons that the pu...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for That Dragon, Cancer. Autobiographical games aren't anything new. Games like Mattie Brice's Mainichi, Anna Anthropy's Dys4ia, and a number of Nina Freeman's titles have received well-deserved recognition for being ultra-indie experiences that have us walking a mile in the author's shoes. That Dragon, Cancer, however, is an autobiographical...

Note: For the sake of simplicity, this article refers to only the Xbox controls for the game. Thumper is what you'd expect to happen if you shut an indie music festival organiser and the bass guitarist of an avant-garde metal band in a room together, and that's almost exactly how the "rhythm violence" title was forged. Development studio Drool comprises of ex-Harmonix programmer and general mus...

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for ABZÛ. ABZÛ is an underwater exploration game devoted to celebrating the most diverse and extraordinary examples of life in Earth's oceans. Directed by former thatgamecompany art director Matt Nava, ABZÛ feels like the most natural step forwards for Nava's career. As he had already shaped Flower, a game in tune with a lush environment on Ea...

Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Inside and the short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, as well as mild spoilers for Limbo. Between the development of Limbo and its spiritual successor, Inside, Playdead Studios made relatively few changes to their formula. However, one of the biggest leaps forwards was in how the studio worked vagueness into their narrative. Both Limbo a...

If you have anything close to a serious interest in video game art direction then Inside is probably a game that crossed your radar. At first sight, it's easy wave it off as just a 2.5D Limbo, but it's more than that, with Playdead Studios drawing particular influence from Valve's work. In form, it has Team Fortress 2's use of blocky objects and flat expanses of solid colour. In tone, it has Ha...

A quick note about the format of this article: I'm not someone who plays every new game that comes out in a year, and I believe in highlighting the worth of easily-forgotten older games. For this reason, my GoTY lists don't focus on the top five games released in a twelve month period; I base them on the best five games I played for the first time in the year. Here are 2016's games in purely al...

Note: The following blog has moderate spoilers for Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days. Kane & Lynch 2's concrete infinity of chest-high walls represents all the default sliders for video games in the late 00s-early 10s. The title is at best a delivery mechanism for a steady sense of overcoming challenge and at worst an ugly trudge of a game. As a shooter, its most interesting quirk is its shotguns. They...

Note: The following blog contains major spoilers for Firewatch. Firewatch is a game that eludes easy classification. Some reviews call it a "First-Person Adventure Game" but in its goals and structure, it bears little resemblance to most other adventure games. A phrase people more often brand it with is "Walking Simulator", but that's a couple of words with a lot of baggage. Especially popular...

Note: This blog has major spoilers for all Telltale Walking Dead games up to 2016. One of The Walking Dead's many strengths was how many themes the games managed to cover in so few episodes. The Walking Dead in 2012 and then The Walking Dead: Season Two in 2013 both explored issues of uncertainty, fear, sacrifice, survival, the loss of innocence, in-group fighting, order, ethics, and many other...

Facing a dimly-lit sea of diehard gamers, two men press "play" on a Macbook. The speakers pulse to Sonic music with a bassy drum beat tacked onto it, but it's not the classic Green Hill or Industrial Zone tracks I know, it's generic sugar pop that I can only guess comes from the more recent Sonic games or at the very least sounds like it does. Sometimes there's no sound at all, as the audio kee...

Big Surf Island is one of the most fondly-remembered DLCs of the late 00s, but you rarely hear anyone telling the story of its winding and unlikely path to market, so let’s talk about it. After the launch of Burnout Paradise , Criterion Games cooked up a host of ideas for where the title was going to be taken next. Among other whiteboard fantasies, they considered having a network of tunnels ru...

I know it’s not going to be remotely shocking if I say I’m very sad to see Austin step down from his editor position here, but for the record I believe that has less to do with Austin Walker being a fixture of the Giant Bomb staff and more to do with the fact that he is Austin Walker. I love that Giant Bomb feels like it belongs to itself, but at the same time the site has been nudged in many o...

While every company this year was eager to keep off the topics detached from AAA gaming, it was Sony and Bethesda who were most dedicated to zeroing in on software. Ubisoft started off with a song and dance number and made an aside to talk about the Assassin’s Creed film, Microsoft did plenty of informing about consoles and Xbox Live, and EA were a little more concerned with celebrity appearanc...

One encouraging trend of the 2016 conferences has been the move away from novelty comedy and the reduction of time lost to items with little connection to gaming. Even Ubisoft, who are particularly famous for their “How do you do, fellow kids?” antics felt like they were more serious about being seen as a video game company this year. They got their silliness out up front with a big song and da...

Sometimes the discussions we have about software platforms and business strategies can seem like the cold and dry half of games criticism, while the games themselves feel like the true sources of interest, but after Microsoft’s briefing I’m more enthused talking about where they’re taking their console and compatibility than I am talking about the games. It’s not that there’s anything wrong wit...

For me, the big question last year was whether Bethesda could adequately fill an hour long time slot when there were only so many new games they’d be able to yank out from behind the curtains. To no one’s particular shock, they stretched, but they did okay. Still, their greatest challenge seemed ahead of them. Sure, they’d been able to provide a mean sixty minutes of new titles last year, but s...

While E3 may generate oodles of press for anyone looking to get potential consumers thinking and talking about their prospective products, one of the biggest problems companies at the expo face is that it’s easy to get drowned out in the sheer noise of the show, even when you’re an industry giant. However, last year Bethesda Softworks found a simple solution to the problem. They may be a relati...

It was Burnout Paradise’s destiny to go big on DLC. The game thrives on this feeling that you’re in an expansive world of limitless activities to perform, but without its side tasks feeling like the arbitrary padding of so many other open-world games. Paradise’s downloadable extras try to continue this trend by providing an exceptional volume of new content to dive into. Although Big Surf Islan...

A bad new Mighty No. 9 trailer exists and you may well have seen it. The adjective that keeps coming back around is “cringy” and sure enough that “friggin’ cool” voiceover is enough to make you squirm in your seat, but equally as confusing to me is the way the trailer chooses to present the game’s mechanics. It’s worth looking into just as an example of how not to communicate information about...

This is the kind of thing that some readers are going to find a bit basic, but I think is worth talking about: I see at lot of people, especially recently, discussing media critics and media creators as though they’re in some kind of adversarial competition with each other. Some common forms of this: When critics express a negative opinion about a piece of media and that piece of media then goe...

Of all of Goichi Suda’s games, Lollipop Chainsaw has to have been the one with the strongest marketing push behind it, with Warner Bros. rolling out a surprising amount of promotional firepower to convey the supposedly defining characteristics of the title: Off-the-wall humour and a high school cheerleader ferociously decapitating her way through zombie hordes. If you played it however, you may...

I see a certain number of people referring to PAX as a trade show these days, implicitly countering the idea that it’s an enthusiast event. It’s a sentiment I agree with, but only about halfway, and I think it’s reductionist to keep talking about the convention in these terms. To be clear, even if PAX was a trade show that wouldn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s important that we frame insta...

There are few pure driving games from the last several years that have earned as much admiration in the wider gaming community as Burnout Paradise. It’s a game that’s remembered fondly for its radically unrestrained driving mechanics and its pioneering sense of openness and freedom. With these elements in tow Paradise deliberately reached beyond dedicated fans of the racing genre and appealed t...

A pose calling attention to a female character’s butt got removed from a video game and the exact group of people you’d expect to be angry are angry. People crave their booty. They are thirsty for rear. Ostensibly though, that’s not the real reason for the outrage: These anti-progressive communities are angry at “censorship” and a violation of “free speech”, even if in practise what constitutes...

As I’m writing this I’m just coming off the back of a stream of games for the Oculus Rift that ran for more than eleven hours. We burned through the better part of the launch lineup for the device and at this point it’s easy to feel underwhelmed. So many of the titles felt like little more than tech demos or that they couldn’t quite get their hands around virtual reality as a medium. As we meet...

Having a lot of weird games coming out is not just interesting, it’s important for the medium. If you’re not consistently seeing a lot of odd titles released, you’re probably not looking at a healthy industry. “Weird” is of course a very broad descriptor, it doesn’t refer to a single aesthetic or emotional experience. The weird of Katamari Damacy is different from the weird of Jazzpunk and they...

Note: The following contains mild spoilers for D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die. It’s a little surprising to me that D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die wasn’t more popular around these parts. Like community favourite Deadly Premonition , it was developed by gaming auteur Hidetaka “Swery65” Suehiro and the team at Access Games, and shares a lot of similarities with the aforementioned. You might not peg it for a...

Often, when we think of third-party peripherals we think of controllers with niche appeal like flight sticks and fighting game pads, but equally as big a part of third-party hardware are rhythm game controllers like microphones, DDR mats, or the plastic instruments behind games like Rock Band. The smart thing about hardware like this is not just that it makes us feel like we’re playing guitar o...

Note: This blog series is written in a way that those who haven’t played the game can still follow along, but I’d strongly recommend you experience it for yourself before reading. This entry also talks about themes of sexual assault. Previous Parts: Episode One | Episode Two | Episode Three | Episode Four It’s ironically appropriate that this final episode of the series is entitled “Polarized”...

Nina Freeman is an independent game writer, designer, and programmer who you may have seen on Giant Bomb or just out there in the indie space for a while. She’s created a series of vignette games, smaller Twine and Flash-based experiences that you can find over at ninasays.so/games , and was recently the project lead and designer on the Star Maid Games title Cibele . Based around real events in...

Before I start listing off titles I want to talk about the slightly unconventional nature of this Game of the Year list. As much as I love the positivity, genuine enthusiasm, and community effort that comes with this time of year, I think it’s possible for GoTY to place an overemphasis on new titles as opposed to old ones, and I often don’t have the means to buy every big new game that comes ou...

The short version is that Star Wars: Battlefront comes across as a great Star Wars game, but only an okay shooter. Full disclosure: I’m not familiar with the Battlefront series, nor am I really a Star Wars fan, but the excitement in DICE’s inspired take on this classic sci-fi universe is infectious. It’s shown off a little better on the Hoth map than on the Sullust map, due to the more open nat...

Note: As before, what I write here is not meant to cover every event in this episode, nor is it meant to be a full review of the game, this is just a look at the parts of the episode I think are most thought-provoking. This blog is written in a way that those who haven’t played the game can still follow along, but I’d strongly recommend you experience it for yourself before reading. Of all the...

Note: As before, what I write here is not meant to cover every event in this episode, nor is it meant to be a full review of the game, this is just a look at the parts of the episode I think are most thought-provoking. This blog is written in a way that those who haven’t played the game can still follow along, but I’d strongly recommend you experience it for yourself before reading. Thanks. Lif...

As before, what I write here is not meant to cover every event in this episode, nor is it meant to be a full review of the game, this is just a look at the parts of the episode I think are most thought-provoking. This blog is written in a way that those who haven’t played the game can still follow along, but I’d strongly recommend you experience it for yourself before reading. I also want to wa...

Recently I cracked the lid on Life is Strange and I’m having an amazing time with the game inside. It’s a title that doesn’t just provoke a wide range of emotions, but also thoughts and ideas, and I want to put some of those to text. Keep in mind that what I write over the next five issues of this retrospective is not meant to cover every event in every episode, nor is it meant to be a full rev...

It means a lot to say that the President of one of the biggest games companies on the planet has passed, and yet it means something entirely more to say that Satoru Iwata specifically has passed. It’s not simply that Iwata was a man who kept the wheels of Nintendo turning for the creatives under him, as important a job as that in itself was, but rather Iwata was also a key part of the company’s...

Nintendo’s E3 presentations have perhaps the most distinct sense of company culture of any of the briefings. Just like their games, their E3 shows provide a refreshing break from the flash and violence of the rest of the expo (not that there’s anything wrong with flash and violence) to display something more humble, charming, and steeped in the heritage of the medium. Where Microsoft and Sony m...

For the last couple of years Sony have shown that they mean business at E3. The old way was that they and Microsoft rolled out segment after segment of living room families and plans for media streaming services and we had to suffer through it to get to the good bits. Then all that went away and now they fiercely compete to show us the kind of conference we want to see. It’s hard to swallow Sha...

So here’s the thing: I can’t decide how much I like Aisha Tyler as a presenter any more. On the plus side it’s Lana Kane on stage telling you about video games she’s seems genuinely excited for, and not that I would ever besmirch the good name of Mr. Caffeine but Tyler felt like a breath of fresh air after some of the disasters of Ubisoft in previous years. On the down side that genuine enthusi...

In some parts of the internet a debate has broken out over whether EA or Ubisoft had the worst press conference, but it's apples and oranges. While Ubisoft would go on to have a presentation that was actively awkward in all sorts of places, EA’s was merely boring. You can feel a distance between the quality of much of what EA publishes and the level of interest they drum up during their press c...

The four player squad lands the character list closer to ODST or Reach. If there’s one thing I think we can all agree on about Microsoft’s conference it’s that there was no scarcity of new announcements and presentations. It feels like the company learned from previous years and wanted to avoid those languishing lulls that occurred in conferences gone by. They worked hard on creating a show tha...

Something, something, only limit is your imagination. I had expected that preparing to see the Bethesda press conference unfold this year, the thing that would be going through my head was a question over whether or not they could adequately fill their allotted time, I hadn’t expected to instead still find myself reeling from the final game at Nintendo’s World Championship before. When Super Ma...

As someone with only so much time, only so much money, and a lot of different media I’m interested in, it’s rare for me to play all the big new releases in a year so I like to do GoTY a bit differently than most. Game of the Year lists are a very personal thing and consequently I think it’s appropriate that instead of a list of my favourite games released in 2014, I instead produce a list of wh...

Up until Sony’s conference there had been some reasonably fun presentations for day zero, but I wouldn’t call any one of the conferences phenomenal. With that being the case I was relying on Sony to present something amazing, and they didn’t disappoint. There was a small part of me that thought that I was being too harsh on Microsoft and some of the other companies for not showcasing many origi...

As the two third-party developers of the conference lineup EA and Ubisoft frequently end up retreading much of the same territory from first-party conferences by showing the same games both there and in their own briefings. To their credit, this year they managed to ensure their big titles had a presence in their own conferences and the console manufacturer conferences without too much needless...

The question of “Who won E3?” can be unproductive and fuel some of the worst ideas about how games criticism should work, but during E3 2013 it became impossible to ignore that Sony garnered huge favour from fans and commentators alike for what was essentially kicking Microsoft’s ass, and things haven’t been much better for MS in the console market with the PS4 significantly outselling the Xbox...

A familiar sight. FTL is nothing if not a unique beast. When trying to classify it under any existing category “strategy” or “roguelike” are the best fits, but the game is far from characteristic of these genres. Perhaps more than being defined by any traditional gameplay template, FTL is defined by the common sci-fi themes it attempts to translate into video game form, the sense of being the c...

As news stories in the gaming world go, one of the world’s wealthiest tech companies laying down $2 billion to buy up the most popular crowdfunded piece of gaming tech in existence is a pretty big deal. It’s an event which exists at the intersection of worries about big business, the nature of crowdfunding, and not just virtual reality as it relates to video games but the place VR is going to t...

On March 1st, after 16 days and almost 8 hours of continuous play, Twitch finally beat Pokémon. At least, Pokémon Red Version. At the time of writing players are making their way through Pokémon Crystal, and I’d be a little surprised if the channel didn’t just take things all the way and play through every generation of the games eventually. It’s been a bizarre, exciting ride, not least of whic...

Now we’ve all had some time to digest Titanfall post-beta I think it’s fair to say that it’s a game that’s got a lot going for it and has made a big impression. The question has been raised here and there whether Titanfall could be the next Call of Duty, but I think this kind of thinking shows a misunderstanding about what Titanfall is trying to be, that is unless you want a definition of “The...

Summer. You know what’s kind of cool? The 2013 game Proteus. For those who have never journeyed through the bizarre world that is Proteus, the game falls mechanically within that “first-person experiencer” niche. It gives you nothing more than the ability to walk around and control a first-person camera, and is really just about soaking in the environment you’re presented with. The whole game l...

Over the past few years an increase in the number of developers experimenting with what games can be and what they can include has lead to us seeing more and more interactive experiences that don’t fit into the traditional box for what we consider games. Recent attention given to titles like Gone Home and The Stanley Parable has prompted a certain portion of the gaming community to try and take...

Note: The following post contains spoilers for all games listed. I’m a broke-ass man and consequently I never have the opportunity to play all the big new releases in any given year, so I’m not going to pretend to be able to weigh up all the great games released in 2013, instead as GoTY is always a personal event, I’m going to do something a bit more personal with this list. So in no particular...

If you’ve had your eyes on the internet over the past few weeks, you’ve probably noticed that not all is well in the kingdom of YouTube. The site has a thriving community of people who post and earn money from video reviews, let’s plays, and other content which combines video game footage with their own personal commentary, but these people are now having their videos hit with copyright claims...

2013 is winding down and with the release of the Xbox One and Playstation 4, the seventh generation of video game consoles has come to a close. Given that, now seems an opportune time to reflect on the best games from the last eight years. The following list consists of my favourite titles released between late 2005 and late 2013, grouped by franchise, and listed alphabetically, so without furt...

Warning: The following post contains some spoilers for Bioshock and major spoilers for Bioshock Infinite. Rapture Somewhere beyond the sea. I’ve said it before, but I think there’s a common misconception that a sequel staying true to its roots means it just replicating the same locations, characters, story, etc. of the original, and I think the path of the Bioshock series demonstrates perfectly...

Whenever new information about the relative advantages or disadvantages of a games console come to light, two things inevitably happen: 1. Fanboys and fangirls adopt this information as ammunition for the ongoing mud-slinging matches over who supports the best consumer product, and 2. Some people assume that the general discussion or all discussion of that new information is only relevant to th...

Recently, we received the latest chapter of Sega’s high speed rodent-based platforming series in the form of Sonic Lost World, and the reception has been less than favourable. A relative few say they’re enjoying the game, while many see it as yet another failed Sonic title, and some others are just finding it below expectations. It’s been said plenty of times before, but I think it bears repeat...

Note: The following blog post contains spoilers for a good portion of Grand Theft Auto V. Among GTA V’s colourful cast of characters Trevor seems to have become a bit of a fan favourite, and it’s easy to see why. It’s fascinating to watch his psychotic and unhinged behaviour and interactions, but it’s his ability to at times think rationally and take control of situations that make him especial...

Nobody is exactly a stranger to The Sims. We’re all familiar with the concept behind the series and many of us have played the games before, yet I don’t think The Sims has ever quite gotten the recognition it deserves from “core gamers”. Games are entering a time where they’re being more closely scrutinised as a medium than ever before, and a lot of the people, me included, are lamenting that g...

Ideally I’d be writing this after I’d already written a fair few other blogs about how the gaming community treat people and the excuses people make for acting abysmally on the internet, etc. but I guess things are going to happen when they’re going to happen and there’s not much you can do about it. We’ve reached the latest in a series of controversial issues involving Penny Arcade and on a la...

I think it’s fair to say at this point that the Ouya isn’t doing fantastically. Since its retail release a month ago, it’s received a justifiably cold reception from both critics and the gaming community, and achieved less than spectacular software sales. I want to address that here, although before we talk about the relevant criticisms of the system, I think it’s worth noting that not every ar...

For a long time I’ve felt that Super Mario Bros. 2 is a little underappreciated. I don’t often hear people say that they actively dislike the game, and it was very popular at its release, but many don’t count it as a real Mario game, or just see it as much less notable than other classic Mario titles. If you’re reading this, you probably know about the nature of Mario 2’s development, and how i...

Despite the sheer popularity of MMORPGs, there seems to be a certain degree of backlash against the kind of repetitive and often passive gameplay that they employ. It’s not uncommon to hear people talk about quests that require players to kill X number of enemies or collect X number of things as bad game design, and the act of killing large numbers of enemies in very similar fashions is often s...

Phil Fish doing something controversial just seems to be one of those things that naturally and periodically happens. Every month we get a full moon, every year we get Christmas, and every now and then people get mad at Phil Fish being mad at something. In case you haven’t heard the story in full (if you have, feel free to skip ahead to the next section) this time round Fish has officially canc...

Back in 2008 Microsoft announced a rather original and unusual idea, a service they were calling Xbox LIVE PrimeTime. PrimeTime was planned to present a new line of Xbox LIVE Arcade games based around real-world gameshows, that players could compete in online and earn real prizes through. It was a very exciting concept, but sadly it never really got off of the ground. The first and only title f...

It's time to reflect. I feel unsatisfied with myself because a lot of the things I want to write here are the worn and obvious clichés about death; nothing we can say can make this okay, it’s all very sudden, it doesn’t seem real, I keep waiting to see the guy pop up alive and well tomorrow, etc., etc. They’re clichés for a reason though. I think there’s been a voice in many of our heads tellin...

I'm still not sure how I felt about Nintendo forgoing an E3 press conference this year, in favour of a special Nintendo Direct broadcast, but in many ways it seemed reflective of company’s position in relation to the other console manufacturers. You still occasionally see people criticising Nintendo’s console for its inferior hardware or lack of online support, but we’ve known for a long time t...

The Community's Voice It has to be admitted that the recent clashing of horns between Microsoft and Sony has really brought out the emotion and passion in a lot of gamers. People were ready to be vocal and stand up to what they perceived as an injustice against loyal customers, and for a lot of this I was on board, but it once again became an occasion for the gaming community to prove there’s n...

While the E3 press conferences are consistently entertaining, every year there’s a plethora of interesting games outside of them that via written pieces, livestreams, and a huge host of other content from the hard-working people at sites like Giant Bomb and Gamespot, we get a glimpse of. Here are some of the E3 2013 games outside the press conferences that were most noteworthy to me. The Crew I...

Ubisoft It’s something I’ll say to anyone who will listen, but I miss Mr. Caffeine . The Ubisoft press conferences have fallen into this odd pattern of almost deliberately being filtered through a series of bad jokes followed by deafening silence, but no one has ever leaned into it with as much commitment and tragedy as he did. Still, Aisha Tyler continues to feel like an adequate replacement....

In all honesty, I didn’t have the highest expectations for E3 this year. I suspected that we’d see some real gems on show, but with ever-rising budgets for AAA games urging companies to play it in safe in what they create (a problem that’s likely to be made worse by more advanced sets of hardware), I was worried that we’d see too many games that looked like they were scared to do something new....

Don Mattrick presents: Logos. When it comes to video game press conferences I think people have the tendency to get overly-cynical. The bars get set incredibly high, people want the core gamer to be catered to at all times, it’s easy to be myopic about these things, and there is a certain satisfaction in complaining, and so every year I think we see a fair bit of melodrama surrounding the big t...

I don’t like always-on DRM. I know that’s not a particularly original opinion, but as much as this point gets made, always-on DRM has remained a significant element of the games industry, and people both inside the industry, and more surprisingly, outside of it are still defending the practise with some very poor reasoning. The most common argument for always-on DRM is that everyone has all the...

When we discuss game genres, most of the arguments seem to involve working out how to properly sort certain games into the right boxes; arguments like “What is an RPG?” or “Is this game Survival Horror?” seem to be some pervasive versions of this, but I think we have far bigger problems on our hands when it comes to looking at genres. Defining genres and properly sorting works into them is an i...

Last time , I talked about the hardware and services that the PS4 promises to provide us. My feelings were mixed, but I liked a lot of what they showed. However, the features of the console itself were not the subject of the majority of the briefing, the games were. Again, I don’t wish to seem needlessly cynical here, but this is where most of my issues with the event are. In the moment, a fair...

Around these parts there seems to be a good deal of positivity surrounding the Playstation 4 reveal, and that’s great to see. When the gaming community can be so unnecessarily pessimistic and focus too much on the negative, it’s promising that people can still stand up and say “This is something we can really be happy about”. I wish I could feel the same way, I want to, but I find my feelings o...

Thirty Flights of Loving is certainly an unusual beast. Under other circumstances I’d tell you that if you haven’t played a game like this, you should stop reading right now and go experience it for yourself, but I’m not sure you can just go and tell anyone interested in video games that it will be worth it for them to spend £3.99 on something that can be easily completed in under 15 minutes. I...

With the games industry evolving so rapidly and the World Wide Web at our finger tips, it seems that it’s increasingly not just the video games themselves that have relevance to the gaming community and those covering the medium. The discussions and events surrounding the games industry are becoming ever-more relevant and important. We’re used to trade shows, award shows, and game releases, but...

For a long while I was thinking that I couldn’t do one of these Game of the Year dealies for 2012. Being a Broke-Ass Student™ I usually end up playing most AAA games a year or so after they are originally released, meaning that I haven’t actually played many of the biggest games of 2012. Then I remembered this is a masturbatory exercise entirely based around my personal experiences of games ove...

Note: The following post contains spoilers for the entirety of the Halo series, including the ending of Halo 4. You have been warned. So, the Halo 4 story has a lot of problems. The Chief still isn’t the deepest or most expressive character, the story doesn’t always do a great job of explaining itself, the plot-dump midway through from the Librarian feels a little inelegant and like a lot to ta...

Often, when I feel that an issue has been covered before by someone much smarter and more articulate than me, and when I’ve already said just about everything I want to say about something in online discussion areas, I refrain from blogging about that thing. However, given the subject matter in this case, I think it’s important to get the word out about this in any way possible. PETA's Black an...

It’s my 21st birthday today and I’ve decided to do something a little different. I have 9 games and 1 game bundle to give away. For each of these games I have a question to be answered or a task to be performed. The first person to do so and post their Steam name will get the prize, although in the case of the bundle no Steam name is required, I’ll PM you what you need. It’s one game per person...

It's awesome to see Ellen McLain get behind this, but not everyone has been as supportive. So, you may or may not be aware that a Kickstarter page recently went up for “GaymerCon”, an LGBT-focused gaming convention that needed $25,000 to become a reality and already has the support of the likes of Ellen McLain of Half-Life, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 fame, TF2’s John Lowry , the folks behind o...

A seemingly unlikely source for references to Dante's poem. I’m sure many of you remember the 2010 action-adventure game Dante’s Inferno, based on the famous 14th century poem by Dante Alighieri, the Divine Comedy. The game generally received fairly good reviews, but a recurring criticism from fans of the original poem seemed to be that not only did Dante’s Inferno stray a fair bit from the ori...

The backlash against the Mass Effect 3 ending may have been the biggest fan outcry against a story in a video game to date. In some ways the bar was set impossibly high for the game, and even for a developer like Bioware closing out the series was never going to be an easy job. While in some cases the reaction did seem a little over-the-top, and many people were ignoring the genuinely amazing w...

Nintendo It’s a shame about Nintendo really. With the path they’re going down there’s only ever so much they’re going to be able to do to appeal the “core” gamer, but their continued discussion of features and games that didn’t seem all that interesting only hurt more from being preceded by the promise that they were going to be “All about the games”. They also insisted more than once that any...

Ubisoft I must admit, I was a little disappointed by the lack of Mr. Caffeine this year, but I was rather happy to see the appearance of Tobuscus. He had that vague sense of comedy terribleness that Mr. Caffeine brought and continued Ubisoft’s fantastically baffling tradition of injecting slightly-off comedy performances into their press conferences every year. In fact considering this was an U...

So it’s day 2 of E3 and we’re already more than halfway through. With all the excitement that I get from this time of the year I’m going to be genuinely sad to see it go, but it’s been excellent while it’s lasted. The list of games I’m excited for is so long it’s ridiculous and I know plenty of other people have enjoyed the show, so in that spirit I thought I’d take a customary look back at the...

So we’re less than a day away from E3, and while every year I know there are people who feel a little jaded about the whole experience, I can’t help but be excited. At the best we’ll get some great game demos and announcements from the show, and at the worst we’ll still have an event that acts as a platform for some of Giant Bomb’s best podcasts of the year. That being said there are a few thin...

So if you’ve been perusing the forums over the past few days you no doubt know about Ryan’s recent blog post apologising for his use of homophobic language, and you may also be familiar with the slew of homophobic and racist slurs that have hit that comments section, as well as the discussion about whether such language is appropriate to use in general. In case you’re still wondering, it is not...

Warning: The following post makes references to the nature of Mass Effect 3's endings, but does not go into any specifics. The comments on the other hand are basically free reign for spoilers. So the blogs have been posted, many discussions have been had, and while a few people out there are still expressing their opinions for the first time, the dust is now mostly settled on the issue of the M...

Companies may be greedy, but I don't think day one DLC is necessarily part of that greed. When it comes to the list of things that game publishers and developers get attacked for, day one DLC, early DLC, and on-disc DLC seem to be right up the top, often garnering the hate of game enthusiasts the internet over. I’m not usually one to side with the controversial moves huge corporations often mak...

On Wednesday 15 February Ubisoft announced Assassin’s Creed III, which will be the forth Assassin’s Creed game released for home consoles in four years, or the ninth game in four years if you want to count everything they’ve put out in-browser and on handheld devices. The Assassin’s Creed brand name is still going strong, with a reported seven million copies of Revelations being shipped, but I’...

Perhaps this seems like a bit of a trivial subject, but the way I see it, this is by far the largest and most notable video hosting service there is, putting themselves out on one of the major pieces of video game hardware currently on the market, and yet this app is rather terrible. Now I’m happy that I can watch YouTube videos on my Xbox, and in some ways I’m genuinely appreciative of what Mi...

The final instalment in the Mass Effect trilogy. I didn’t want to post this directly to the forums because I think the boards have enough Mass Effect 3 discussion as it is, but I wanted to say something about this situation in particular that wasn’t just another post in a thread somewhere. For some time now the internet has been positively crawling with speculation over the idea that Mass Effec...

I’m not going to lie, there’s still quite a lot of 2011 games that I haven’t played through, but from what I have got my hands on I can say 2011 was a great year for video games, and hopefully 2012 can prove itself as a fine year too. I know this may be a little way into the year to post this but come on, it was January, what have I missed? So, for those who have not already clicked away in hor...

Gently he brings us to the corner of confection, Hoping that we might partake of the fruits from beyond the blackened windows. Spam? Speed? Fuck you. Moving photographs placed within, slotted lovingly into ourselves. Questions without answers. Headwear floats above the station of space. One hand is for stake, the other for gleaming white wand. He dreams, Wii twist the images of him. He writes,...

When the Spike TV VGAs rolled around last year I hadn’t seen the show before and was eager to see what they had to present, little did I know about an hour and a half later I’d be sitting with my head in my hands begging that for the love of all that is good Neil Patrick Harris would stop telling dick jokes. Needless to say my expectations for this year’s awards were low and yet somehow Spike s...

So, this is something that has been coming for a while. My university work has been piling up, a good deal of my time on the site is now spent just moderating content, and in the sometimes small periods of time I have left I’d like to take at least some time to myself to keep me from going crazy. To be honest I’m a little surprised I’ve managed to keep delivering new blog posts almost every wee...

Note: This blog is a continuation of Sexism in Video Games- Part 1 , although at this point I believe “Depiction of Women in Video Games” would have been a more appropriate title. Still, there’s nothing that can be done about that now. In Defence This doesn't have to be the extent to which games explore sexuality. There are a considerable number of people who seem to find certain depictions of...

This is a blog that I’ve been holding off on for a while because it’s on a topic that seems to incite a lot of... Well, let’s call it “heated discussion”. None the less, this is something I think deserves to be addressed and I believe we are capable of having a civil discussion about. Sexism in video games is something that’s been observed for a long time, but recently we seem to have seen the...

Note: This blog is a continuation of What We Know About Halo 4- Part 1 The Forerunner Looking at the narrative of Halo 4, perhaps one of the most important details to note is that 343 already have their overall story-arc planned out for the entirety of the upcoming Halo trilogy, which they’ve dubbed the “Reclaimer Trilogy”. A reclaimer in the Halo fiction seems to be someone who reactivates or...

If like me, you’re a fan of Halo then you may have found yourself in a bit of a drought of content from this particular series of sci-fi shooters recently. It’s now over a year since Halo: Reach was released and while Combat Evolved Anniversary is only about a month away, we have up to Q4 2012 to wait for the next entirely new entry in the series. I thought now seemed like an appropriate time f...

When adverts in video games are done poorly it’s at best mildly irksome, but at its worst it’s downright offensive. In fact with the fuss that has been kicked up over issues like DRM, online passes and over-priced DLC I’m surprised that in-game advertising hasn’t received at least a little more flack from gamers. Granted, it doesn’t have anywhere near the effect on the experience bad DRM or onl...

Note: This blog is a continuation of Video Games vs. Other Entertainment Mediums- Part 1 . The Real Effect of the Debate Obviously, for some, clear reasoning over whether games are art wasn’t ever going to happen, because while there have been people contributing to the “are games art?” debate with intellectual and thought-provoking points, there have also been many who wanted games to be accep...

For countless years now it seems that people have had an obsession with comparing video games to other entertainment mediums. How well video games hold up in comparison to other forms of entertainment has often been taken to be a measurement of how well video games are doing as a medium, but these kind of comparisons often come about with a myriad of problems behind them. So let’s take a look a...

When it comes to the presence of games development studios on the web, they generally throw up a flashy website and that’s the end of it. Communication between the people in the studios and the fans is often very limited and it’s usually considered professional and beneficial to keep a fairly large divide between the two. When studios do try to talk to fans directly, it’s usually in a way that’...

This week I’m here to talk about realism in games and games as simulations. As was the case with a couple of my previous blogs some of the points here may be a little on the obvious side, but I think it’s always good to reaffirm this stuff and believe me there is an eventual point to all of this. Before we get into the meat of this particular post though, I’d like to thank Sweep for making this...

This is a continuation of Tales of an MMO: Tibia- Part 1 and is about my experience with my first MMO. Reading part 1 is not essential for understanding this blog but may help add some context. NPCs, Spells and Houses Interacting with the NPCs in Tibia was a rather unique experience. In a style that was archaic even considering when Tibia was created, you’d actually have to type out series of c...

These days I usually dedicate my blog to writing about general issues in games, like games development, trends in game mechanics, or at very least commenting on what people are saying about games. In the past I’ve created sizeable blogs about what games I’ve been playing at the time, but one thing I don’t think I’ve ever done is look back on a game that was important to me when I was younger, a...

So, last week we took a quick reminder of why the industry enjoys rehashing ideas, how resources limit game developers and why “corporate greed” is a redundant term. This week it’s time for a slightly shorter collection of things everyone should be keeping in mind when talking about the games industry. Accountability People aren't any more or less accountable for their actions because they're p...

I’m about to say something which is incredibly obvious but always seems to need repeating: “The video games industry is a business”. I think most of us are very good at taking this into account when it comes to the discussion of video games, but even in some of the better informed corners of the internet, it seems that the facts about what exactly it means for games to be a business and how tha...

This blog is a continuation of Choices, Story, and Where It All Goes Wrong- Part 1 . Alternate Choice Systems Mass Effect managed to avoid a lot of problems by changing two simple words. Two simple improvements to existing choice systems would be to give the player more rewards for taking a neutral stance in moral choices or hiding the results of choices so that players feel less compelled to a...

Given the unique level of interaction video games provide as a medium, it’s not surprising that many of them have allowed us to try and manipulate their stories by providing players with interesting ways to shape their narrative, but doing this without creating conflicts between the gameplay and story is much harder than it would at first seem. We’re only too familiar with moral choices, dialog...

In my time endlessly perusing the internet and hanging around with people who are generally very interested in video games, I've heard a lot of people say they want to work in the video game industry. They'll come out with the phrase “I Want to Be a Game Developer” or some variation on this, such as “I Want to Make Video Games”, or “I Want to Work in the Games Industry”. Some also have a more d...

One observation about the Wii which seems to have been consistently made by Nintendo fans is that their decision to suddenly begin catering to the “casual” crowd with a daring new control scheme came out of the blue. I don’t believe that this is the case and to cut to the chase I want to prove that this choice wasn’t as nonsensical as it might have seemed. The Gamecube in the Sixth Generation N...

Number of Inputs The iconic Wiimote. With any video game you must immediately know which inputs do what. In more traditional video games we have a large number of inputs; an Xbox 360 or Playstation controller has 10 buttons, a D-Pad and two control sticks, and even without motion controls the Wii remote has 6 buttons and a D-Pad. Even if we take the slightly reductionist view that control stick...

With another E3 come and gone it’s clear that motion controls are still big business, and why wouldn’t they be? The Wii, the Kinect and the top motion control games have been pushing millions of units. Motion control games allow us whole new experiences and put a kind of technology at our finger tips we’ve never witnessed before, but us more traditional games fanatics seem to be some combinatio...

It’s no secret that the jury has been out on Duke Nukem Forever for a long while; most of the critics and most of the fans are markedly unimpressed by Duke’s return to gaming. Of course after about thirteen long years of waiting the game was never going to justify the hype of the king’s most excited enthusiasts, but even discounting those with a slight lack of understanding of the games industr...

Nintendo The Legend of Zelda I’m not that interested in Skyward Sword but the orchestra certainly provided a strong opening for the conference and there’s something rather heart-warming about seeing Miyamoto presenting his games. The Ocarina of Time 3D remake is looking good and it’s really cool that they’re giving out a free soundtrack to people who register the game and that they’re putting o...

Ubisoft He's not afraid of a few dick jokes folks. This briefing was hugely entertaining for all the wrong reasons. If you’ve been following E3 there’s no way you don’t know about Mr. Caffeine, but fuck, I keep having to stop and remind myself that the Ubisoft press conference in my head was actually what happened. I mean he was pretty much pulling up pictures that looked like they’d come out o...

Over the past week we’ve seen some great announcements, demos and trailer. We’ve had the privilege of watching in on the industry’s biggest press conferences of the year, seeing what the console manufacturers, producers, and developers have had to flaunt on the show floor and have gotten endless hours of coverage from those lucky enough to experience the video games and sleep deprivation from t...

I don’t know about you folks but I find it hard to believe that we’re now so close to E3 2011. For me it’s an event where for a small handful of days I go all-out nuts and spend the large majority of my free time immersed in the hours of coverage, the flashy press conferences, and the reams of news which pour forth from the internet. While the industry seems to be getting better at spacing out...

Schizophrenia Sometimes it's not easy being Doug Rattmann. I love all of Portals characters and that includes Doug Rattmann, the mentally tortured but self-sacrificing schizophrenic, leaving cryptic messages and influencing the events of the games from behind the scenes. Throughout Portal 2 you will have noticed at very least one of the areas of Aperture that Rattmann has beautified with his di...

Thanks to all those who left kind words on my post last week, this week I have a slightly shorter but hopefully no less interesting amalgamation of Portal 2 trivia and interpretations for your consumption, so let’s get right to it. The Promethean Legend This one's different. One particular turret in the game has earned a name for itself among fans. Known as the ‘Prometheus Turret’, ‘Oracle Turr...

If, like me, you’ve spent great lengths of time over the past few weeks playing and replaying Portal 2, you’ve no doubt recognised the level of detail that the game has been blessed with; from the narrative to the visuals, the game is abundant with charming quirks and amusing nuances, and if there’s one thing the previous two ARGs have revealed about Portal 2 fans it’s that they excel at analys...

Hello fellow Giant Bombers, I hope you’re well. I should probably warn you that the following blog has some Portal 2 spoilers within. Most of what I’m about to say isn’t anything that concrete and there are a lot of vague statements about the nature of the game, but if you’re determined to experience Portal 2 as untainted as possible and haven’t yet reach the games conclusion, this may be a blo...

So as you may have already guessed by the length of this blog I’m not able to produce a proper full-length piece of writing this week. Honestly, this feels like a bit of a cop-out on my part considering it was only about a month ago I had to do the same thing due to a mix of work and the internet declaring war on my poor laptop. This time round I’m thankfully not experiencing some gruelling vir...

I guess we finally have Giant Bomb back up and running again. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and I think that’s certainly applied for the lack of Giant Bomb over the last few days, but Amazon’s technical difficulties did indicate how one little thing going wrong in the large web of technology we use can really mess a lot of things up. Slightly surprisingly for me, I was more distracted fro...

You know one thing I’ve had repeated trouble with when writing blogs is writing introductions. Back in my Gamespot days, when I was still working out how to create blog content that might be considered vaguely enjoyable to anyone, it was often a struggle for me, but even now I find giving my writing a suitable opening without sounding like a complete jackass quite a feat. If it’s a blog about a...

Last week’s technical hiccup now thankfully behind me I’m ready for blogging again and while I haven’t gotten my hands on any new games in the recent past, there’s still a couple of titles I played a few months ago that are more than worth mentioning. Vanquish When it comes to designing giant battle robots Platinum know their stuff. I think it’s fair to say that most cover-based shooters are so...

I don't know if you know this but computer viruses aren't very fun, especially not when you have a lot of work to do. There was a small possibility I was going to be able to write a new blog post this weekend but alas, it was not to be so, as I spent an unhealthy portion of the last three days dealing with the virtual parasites plaguing my laptop's hard-drive. Just when I'd think I had rid my c...

Recently my university course has started heading into crunch time and so it’s not going to be possible for me to produce the kinds of blogs of previous weeks for some time, thus for this edition and the next edition of my blog (at the very least) I’m putting out something a little shorter than usual, a little more personal, and unfortunately perhaps a little more rushed. So now, watch me gush...

A little while back I blogged about the unification of gameplay and narrative in games and gave a couple of examples of it working well and a couple of examples of it working not so well. I know that some found those pieces a little heavily influenced by Jonathan Blow, but to show that it’s not just his games and examples that reflect how narrative can work via game mechanics I’ve come up with...

Note: The following post is liable to make very little sense without some prior knowledge or experience of the Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood multiplayer. So, admittedly I’m a little late to the party on a lot of the big games from 2010 and so it’s only over the past few weeks that I’ve jumped into the Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood multiplayer. Looking at the multiplayer experience as a whole it...

So, last week I talked about the large gap between the game design and writing that often exists in modern video games. This week I’m going to look at some examples of how gameplay and narrative can interrelate in games, and look at what games can do to overcome the conflict between these two components Making the Connection One way of looking at the gameplay-narrative problem is that if gamepl...

For the past few decades video games have been an ever-evolving entertainment medium and part of that evolution has been the progression of video game narrative. Most of us can think of a number of occasions where we were genuinely engaged by the characters, backstory or plot of a video game, but something I see repeatedly is even the most widely praised video game narratives being branded as b...

Reading Materials While I’d like the budding game designers out there to consider the advice I’ve laid out in these blogs, don’t by any means take these posts to be a comprehensive guide for game design. I wrote these posts to be but the tip of the iceberg; the jumping-off point for those who wanted some guidance on how and where to develop game design skills. On the road to becoming a good gam...

The Red Herrings Do tell me if my visual metaphors are too complex. Firstly, don’t believe everything you hear about how to get a job in game design. One of the first things we confirmed in this series of blogs is that there are a lot of myths about game design floating around the internet, and even when something comes from a source slightly more reputable than just a random message board don’...

What Next? As with any skill, if you want design games and retain the ability to design games, you need to constantly be practising at the same time as researching and seeking inspiration. If really you want to be a game designer then you need to start designing immediately. Of course it’s also easiest if you start off designing as on as small a scale as possible and as simply as possible. Your...

Hey everyone, seeing as I had a few random thoughts from this week bouncing around my noggin I thought I might as well air them now since my main blog posts are still occupied by my pieces on becoming a game designer. I understand the following blog is very sizeable so feel free to skip whatever you’re not interested in. Bulletstorm (Demo) Hey, I didn't know Wolverine was in this game. This wee...

What Does A Game Designer Need To Know? Jesse Schell, game design expert. Well, now that we’ve made it clear what game design isn’t about, let’s look at what it is about. The bad news is that there’s no single established method for teaching someone everything about designing games, however there is one man who in my opinion seems to have risen above all others in teaching game designers what t...

The Ad Campaigns So today I want to talk about an issue that I might get a little flack for, that issue being the ad campaigns behind Bulletstorm and Dead Space 2, both of which are being conducted by EA. In case you haven’t yet seen these campaigns you can find the Bulletstorm trailers here , here , here and here , and the Dead Space 2 viral site here . It seems that almost all people who’ve s...

Getting the Information You Need It’s no secret that a lot of people out there want to be game designers, in fact many people consider game designer their dream job. It’s probable a number of you reading this right now wish to achieve the same goal, or perhaps you’re just interested in knowing more about what makes a game designer. However, whether you’re trying to be the next Sid Meier, or you...

Greetings Giant Bombers, I hope you’re all enjoying your 2011 so far, I know I am. I’ve got a lot more blog content “in the pipeline” but it’s going to be a while before that’s out of the oven so I figure now is good time to talk about what I’ve been playing recently. Initiate blog! Forza Motorsport 3 The extent of my knowledge about cars is pretty much limited to "Shiny box go zoom". I’m very...

Having started a handful of new games over the past month or so, a trend that seems to persist in a lot of modern video games was once again brought to my attention, or should I say the lack of a trend. You see despite it being years since the feature was first introduced to the games industry, there still seems to be a significant lack of games with ample achievement tracking. Uh, sorry, wrong...

2010 was an amazing year for video games and in recent times the games industry has produced a larger quantity of high quality games than ever, however 2011 looks to bring even more great games. In no particular order here at the top three games I’m most looking forward to in the coming year. Batman: Arkham City The hero we need, not the hero we deserve. This is probably the game on this list I...

Greetings friends and welcome to part two of my run-down of the notable games I’ve indulged in over the past year. I mentioned some great games in part one but I think most of the really fantastic titles reside here, in part two. So, without further interruption... Bioshock 2 Look, it's Mr. Bubbles. My enthusiasm for Bioshock 2 was somewhat quelled by talk of the game falling far short of its p...

Each year that goes by I feel like I’m learning more about video games and growing an even greater appreciation for interactive entertainment. 2011 looks to be another great year of games, but before marvelling at what the year ahead has to offer I thought it would be fitting to look back at what I played in 2010. I still haven’t yet had the opportunity to play a lot of 2010’s big hitters, but...

It's that time of year again people. Season’s greetings Giant Bombers, I hope you’re all enjoying Christmas Day. Seeing as this is a time of good will and celebration I thought I’d take this opportunity to celebrate the community of Giant Bomb. We’re by no means perfect but there are reasons why we use Giant Bomb as our place to discuss video games, and reasons why I’ve spent far too much time...

I am now officially on Christmas holidays and England is officially meeting its end at the hands of an apocalyptic snowstorm, leaving plenty of time for video games. In the past few days I’ve had the opportunity to dive into one or two games released earlier this year so now seemed as good a time as any to blog about them. Go blog, go! Rock Band 3 Hell to the yes. I’ve loved the past Rock Band...

Last Wednesday I posted part one of a blog where I explored a few of the random games I’d discovered on the Xbox LIVE Indie service, and this week I bring you a summary of the last four of those games. Prepare yourself for we are about to enter a world of scarily sub-standard games. THE ZOMBIE SHOTGUN MASSACRE 2 Well, I guess it does what it says on the tin. So right off of the bat the title di...

Today is Monday 13th December and I am here to rant, rave, and generally talk about video games. Initiate angry drive! The VGAs This man used the phrase "Halo Reach around" without a hint of irony. So, Saturday night the 2010 Spike TV Video Game Awards were presented, and I’m going to be blunt, I did not like what I saw. I was expecting all flash and little substance, but the problem wasn’t jus...

So, this week I decided to spend a little of my spare time trialling a few Xbox LIVE Indie Games and noting down my impressions of them. I’ve never wished to discredit the work of aspiring, young developers out there, especially not as I’m currently studying video games programming myself, but I’ve felt like on the whole the quality of the stuff on Xbox LIVE Indie hasn’t been all that... Well,...

The Problem I think we all know that Xbox LIVE has an undeniable problem, or to be more accurate the Xbox LIVE community does. In my time on XBL my most played multiplayer games by far have been the Halo games, however, the Halo community has got a very bad reputation, especially on the Xbox 360, and this is something I’ve found somewhat irksome. I feel like the Halo situation is a scenario whe...

It is Sunday 28th November, and as the rest of you converse about your GT5s and your turkey over-consumption, it’s once again time for me to set my word processor to stun and produce another “thrilling” weekly blog. Last Week’s Blog A glimpse into last week's writing process. So as some of you reading this may know, last week I posted a blog on the stigma surrounding video games and what action...

It’s Sunday 21st November, this is my blog, and today we’re all going to learn a very special lesson. E-Sports So, last weekend the finals of the 2nd GOMTV Global Starcraft II League went down in Seoul, South Korea, and the GSL 3 has already started. Recently I’ve been reminded just how inconceivably popular e-sports and specifically Starcraft are in Korea. Okay, playing video games professiona...

Hello and welcome to another fashionably late edition of Gamer_152’s blog, the only video game blog better than momma’s chocolate pie. Call of Duty: The Hypening Even in the current sea of releases every upcoming game out there rather predictably got their release slots well clear of this week so as to avoid being completely trounced by Call of Duty: Black Ops. I’m going to say now that the onl...

It is Monday 8th of November and I’m here with a blog entry a little later than I originally hoped to be. For the past two or three weeks there have been some big releases, but with the US release of the Kinect came a whole slew of new games and a whole lot of coverage on them. It didn’t feel right posting without soaking up the maximum amount of juicy Kinect journalism possible, and only I con...

This is the SI, his Halloween costume is being pissed at you. It’s Sunday 31st October and this week may have been an even bigger week than last for game releases. Due to my financial situation I still can’t acquire any of these shiny new toys, no; they float just outside of my grasp, enticing me with their promises of quality gaming experiences, however I’ve still been playing all the great ga...

Today is Sunday 24th October and I’m still getting my fix of Halo: Reach and World of Warcraft. In fact after a lot of thought about it I finally got around to writing a Halo: Reach review this week. I also finally listened to the Reach OST from start to finish and even separate from the game it’s a great listen; Tip of the Spear , along with the last four tracks of the game are my current favo...

Salutations comrades, it is Saturday 16 October and once again it’s time for some bloggin’. As has been the case for the past few weeks one of my major go-to games this week has been Halo: Reach and it seems I’m not the only one still enjoying it as Bungie have reported that over 16,445 man years have been spent playing the game (apologies for the formatting glitch here) That map is looking mig...

The date is 10/10/2010 and just in case you couldn’t tell I’m Gamer_152. This week I’ve spent time gunning down Spartans in Halo: Reach and getting my strategy on in Starcraft II but the highlight by far has been Jon St. John, voice of Duke Nukem, answering my question and telling me he’s got balls of steel to a live audience of 1,900 people (skip to 1:09:45 in this video for the good stuff). B...

Ya rly, Ryan Davis. It’s hard to believe it’s only been a week since my last blog but it’s time for me to once again put finger-to-key and produce something vaguely resembling a coherent string of sentences. Since last week I’ve moved into my new house and am happy to be blessed with two housemates who are way into video games, one of which is one of the UKs top Forza 3 players. Unfortunately b...

It’s Saturday 25th September and tomorrow I move half way across the UK to my new house to start university again but before I get to packing I have time to type out a quick blog. For me this has been a week dedicated almost solely to the Halo: Reach multiplayer which is still unbelievably fun. My enjoyment of the experience continues to be fuelled by the brilliant way the gameplay of Halo flow...

It is currently September 19th and this week I’ve pretty much been solidly playing Halo: Reach. I picked up the limited edition of the game and while I’m still waiting to dive into the extra curios bundled with it I’ve finished Reach itself and spent some time in the multiplayer. I’ve been a massive fan of the Halo games since sometime between Halo 2 and 3 and to actually have the final game in...

I'm not quite sure what happened Thursday but it was awesome. It’s Sunday 12th September and while last week brought Giant Bomb and the gaming world in general plenty of news and previews in the form of PAX 2010, for most Giant Bomb users this week has been an even crazier affair. I know I’m going to have very fond memories of the mind-blowing 11 hour madness that was the Big Live Live Show Liv...

It’s Sunday 5 September and this week, in addition to shaking my fist into the air, cursing those who get to be at PAX 2010, I’ve also been playing plenty of video games. Perhaps one particular game I wish I hadn’t been playing was Peter Jackson’s King Kong. I went into the game with low expectations but had been told that the game wasn’t that bad really, however I find myself strongly disagree...

Beautiful Bright Fal- I mean Wales. I’m going to start my blog this week with a bit of an amendment to last week’s blog. When I wrote my last blog I was in somewhat of a rush and didn’t credit the friendly people who commented on my August 15 blog, especially c1337us , Axxol and Claude who wished me an early happy birthday so thank you to all of them. I also have to admit that I haven’t done as...

This week my nineteenth birthday came and went, I finished Alan Wake and I started Starcraft II. I’m posting my blog a little earlier than usual this week as tomorrow I leave with some family members to spend a short holiday in Wales and for the first time in a long while I won’t have access to the internet. Among other things that means no Giant Bomb and no online gaming which even by themselv...

It is only three days until my birthday and I’ve already received the large majority of my presents, all of which are awesome. For the Xbox 360 I’ve got Alan Wake and Red Dead Redemption and contrary to what I said last week I can run Starcraft II on the PC and am installing it as I write this. It turns out that the technical limitation that was holding me back from running Starcraft II was act...

So for the first time in a while I ended up not posting a blog last week, not because of any lack of desire to but because I feel I just didn’t have enough to say, however now I’m back and better than ever... Well, I’m back at least. I don't remember Kleiner being so hostile in Half-Life. This week I’ve been playing more of Gears of War 2 where I completed the co-op campaign on hardcore difficu...

It’s Saturday 24th July and as the summer rushes by I find myself at the end of yet another week with so much gaming behind me. My recent obsession with World of Warcraft has continued but I find Team Fortress 2 taking a back seat to other games I’ve been playing. Apparently this is what I could be playing. A big part of this week for me has been Steam and the awesome free content they’ve been...

Buildin' A Sentry. It’s Monday 19th July and it’s once again time for me to remind both myself and the internet that I’m still alive and still playing games. Once again I’ve had a week of World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2 and I’ve had great fun with both of them. Sadly I couldn’t get into the Team Fortress 2 TNT on Thursday but I’ve still been spending a fair amount of time on the Giant Bom...

It’s Monday 12th July and I’ve discovered I’m not the only Gamer_152 on the internet. I always thought my name was one that would be subject to at least some replication but in all the time I’ve spent on the internet I didn’t see anyone else using the same on-screen moniker as me until yesterday. It turns out that at both YouTube and Flickr there is now a ‘gamer152’. It didn’t seem like it woul...

For the past few weeks I’ve held off on blogging due to the slew of E3 and post-E3 content I’ve posted but now I’m back with a vengeance or at least with some opinions on video games. One of the games I’ve enjoyed since last posting has been Lego Batman. At first I wasn’t having much fun playing through the hero campaign of the game but as soon as I hit the villain campaign my interest in the g...

After Nintendo’s emphasis on 3D gaming without the glasses it was somewhat unfortunate to see Sony start off their press conference with such a 3D-heavy stance, running through a list of their upcoming 3D titles and asking the audience to don 3D glasses for a gameplay demo of Killzone 3, although it must be said that at very least graphically Killzone 3 was looking very polished indeed. A littl...

After E3 2009, where Ubisoft presented less of a press conference and more of a cruel and sadistic form of torture, my expectations were set low for 2010 but Ubisoft managed to deliver something of a higher quality than I had expected. One of the most entertaining things about the Ubisoft press conference for me was it once again being presented by Joel McHale; not because McHale did a particul...

The Electronic Entertainment Expo has concluded for yet another year and we’ve seen everything from great announcements to great hardware to great games. In many ways 2010 was the year of motion control and 3D gaming but what really interests me is the games themselves and while not every game at the show looked like a winner there have certainly been some amazing titles shown at E3. In an effo...

E3 2010 officially ended at 5:00 p.m. PST/1:00 a.m. GMT and I have to admit right now I’m feeling a little caught up in the moment. As cheesy as it sounds it was originally at the time of E3 one year that I found Gamespot, the first video game website I was really attached to and seeing a mass of articles, video games, screenshots and videos about video games really hooked me on the site. From...

So day two (or three if you’re counting the press conference days) of E3 came to a firm close and while press conferences are over, today gave the video game press a chance to catch up with everything on the show floor. I wish I could give an overall summary of everything from every booth but E3 is just such a large event it seems impossible to catch up on it all in one day so apologies in adva...

The second day of E3 is over and I have to say after some disappointments yesterday I thought today went very well indeed. Yesterday’s stuff like Gears of War 3 and Halo: Reach still look awesome and there were some bits of today’s conferences which were more interesting than others but overall I really liked what I saw. While most of yesterday’s press conferences seemed to be a matter of throw...

E3 day one is over and it has been a long day for me. It seems like I’ve spent every waking moment watching live streams of press conferences, visiting forums and scouring the internet for sweet, sweet video game news. I had been half-hoping that I’d have a full analysis of the first three press conferences written up the end of today but the last press conference ended at roughly 2:30 a.m. GMT...

There’s only two days left until E3 begins and right now I am stoked. There’s always a great sense of excitement around the time of E3 and I think there’s a lot to look forward to this year, way too much to list here. There’s also been plenty of pre-exposition news to keep us well-occupied right up until the start of E3 proper. The only thing I’m somewhat disappointed about is Portal 2 being pu...

I don’t usually post a blog in the middle of the week, in fact I’m not sure I’ve ever done it before, I’ve usually considered subjecting people to one my blogs per week enough but I found myself with a strange urge to talk about everything to do with the upcoming rhythm games recently. I can understand the people behind Power Gig holding their event one week before E3, trying to get the news ou...

The big game I’ve been playing this week has been X-Men Origins: Wolverine (thanks to NinjaDuckie for lending it to me) and I had almost given up on the idea that it was possible for a good movie tie-in game to be made but here is a genuinely good hack and slash game. I couldn’t find any real sales figures for the game but I really hope it sold well, it would be excellent to see a situation whe...

You know I can’t decide if the last week has gone quickly or slowly for me but either way one thing I have done in the past week is play plenty of video games. I tried to make a start on Mass Effect 2 again on insanity difficulty but it quickly became obvious it was just going to be far too challenging for me so I’ll probably just finish up a few achievements and leave the game. It’s not that M...

Today is Sunday 23rd May and I can honestly say I have had a great time gaming this week. I finished up Mass Effect 2 fairly early on this week and although my play time "Shepard" seemed to come up in quite a way above the average I always knew it would because I wanted to be so thorough in experiencing the game. By the end of the game I was even more in awe of it than I was this time last week...

It’s Monday Monday Monday, I’m only too happy to finally be on summer holidays and what better way to celebrate than with some video games? Meet the new ship, same as the old ship. I thought this would be a week of obsessing over the Fallout 3 DLC but for days I found myself engrossed in Mass Effect 2. It’s been a long wait to play this game but it’s definitely been worth it. One of the things...

I have now finished my first university year of computer games programming and my last week has been a mad rush to write code, finish documentation and hand everything in. For three days I didn’t even have the time to sleep but everything got done in the end. I think most people would be surprised by how hard a computers games programming course can be, the course leader definitely seems to thi...

I’m now almost into the last week of my first year of university and with five assignment deadlines next week the amount of free time I have for video games is becoming less and less. I’ve managed to get some time in on Team Fortress 2 and Pokémon HeartGold among other games however in HeartGold I’m still really only stuck around the same city I was this time last week. The dark lord of video g...

It’s about two and a half weeks until I finish the first year of my university computer games programming course and just as if I was working at a games studio there would be a crunch time at the end of the project, in my last few weeks I have to finish up multiple assignments and exams before deadlines hit. Okay, so maybe it’s not as much work as finishing up a video game but I still don’t hav...

The Easter holiday is over for me and today marks my first day back at university for this term. I’ve got three weeks of designing games, coding programs and preparing for my exams ahead of me, although as I’m writing this I do have the slight problem that my internet is offline leaving me effectively incapable of accessing any of the resources I need. Unfortunately my university has had a powe...

It’s been more than two whole months since I last blogged, for a long time I was swept up in my university work but now I’m back home for the Easter holidays I’ve just been kicking back and relaxing before the flood of work which hits when I return the week after next. My last semester of video games programming was very enjoyable, if a little challenging in places. For the majority of the seme...

It seems so much longer than a week since I last blogged but through some strange trick of time it appears it is. A fair amount of my time this week has been taken up by one of my assignments in my computer games programming course which involves programming a pool video game from scratch in a week. I must admit it’s not been an easy task and pretty much teaching myself to program Windows and X...

It has been a very long week for me (in a good way) and I can’t believe that just eight days ago I was still at my family’s home playing Modern Warfare 2. I spent a good portion of this week participating with two other programmers in a seventy-two hour video game development competition and although we didn’t win, a huge amount of effort was put into creating the game we did make and we were a...

Right now I’m happily currently participating in a 72 hour video game designing and programming competition for my university and even though I’m only in the first 24 hours things already seem hectic, however I thought I could at least take a short amount of time out to write my blog for this week because the last week for me has been packed with a ridiculous amount of gaming. After being absol...

So we’ve reached the end of the second week of January and unfortunately something happened this week which I’ve been expecting for a while; my Xbox 360 finally stopped working. It’s an old pre-owned 360 Pro well beyond its warranty and it looks like it’s just become worn out and died. As I’m still owed a late birthday present from my dad though it looks like I’ll be getting a new 360 this week...

It’s now the year 2010 and the Christmas break has been awesome for me. Tomorrow I return to my university dorm for a week of exams and that means that far from the ridiculous number of hours I’ve put into games over the past week, there’ll have to be a lot more time spent revising. I’ll be back down with my family from Friday onwards though and so that means plenty more opportunity to make som...

With the new year just around the corner so many of us are taking the opportunity to look back over 2009 and decide our favourite games of the year, however I don’t think a game of the year list is quite right for me. There are many games of 2009 that look brilliant but I have not yet had the chance to play properly, while I’ve still sunk plenty of play time into games released pre-2009 and so...

Happy 26th December everyone, I hope you all had a great Christmas. I’m having a good time back down in the south of England spending my two weeks break from university with my family and I’ve received some great presents. From my best friend I got a really nice CD and from my family (well, mainly my mum) I’ve got a black 16GB iPod Nano, a bunch of chocolate, Dragon Age: Origins for the Xbox 36...

Greetings one and all, long time no blog. In fact I haven't blogged in over a month now, it just seems that there have been oh so many distractions. For one thing it seems like I have stumbled back into the addictive realms of World of Warcraft again. I originally just returned to the game to enjoy the thanksgiving event, but after experiencing the instant gratification of my few days on there...

It is currently Monday 9th November and I’d hoped to have this blog up over the weekend but things were a bit... Busy. Tomorrow is the big release of Modern Warfare 2 and I must say with all the hype surrounding the game I occasionally feel a little bit like a stranger in the world of gaming. Not only is the internet abuzz with talk of Infinity Ward’s next great game but even people around my u...

It is currently Saturday October 31st, All Hallow’s Eve and I’m in pretty high spirits on this cool autumn evening. Unfortunately I have been suffering a little from the flu this week and while it’s not been as bad as it could have been it has cut down my gaming time. I’ve been playing more of Brutal Legend this week though and have found all the motor forges, collected all the solos and unlock...

It is currently Sunday 25th October and I did cave this week and get Br ütal Legend. What do I think of it? In one word: Brilliant. Maybe it’s best I back up for a moment. You see last week I was rather unconfident that this game would actually have any solid gameplay and wondered if the whole problem of the game trying to blend RTS and action-adventure elements or the numerous side missions wo...

It is currently Tuesday 20th October and Br ütal Legend has finally hit shelves. It’s a game I’ve been excited about for a long time and I’ve loved everything that I’ve seen of it. The game’s been getting some good reactions from critics, with the lowest review score I’ve seen so far being a 3/5 from Giant Bomb and even that isn’t that low. Although I must admit my expectations for the game hav...

It is currently Tuesday 13 October and my course in computer games programming continues, as does my gaming itself. The programming on my course is pretty much still all stuff I already know but I don’t mind. In my ludology class I’ve been given a 10 hour assignment to create a simple video game using GameMaker and I don’t think I’ve done a bad job; my game involves moving a bullet-firing mouse...

It is currently Monday 5th October and I have now completed my first week of education in computer games programming. It’s been a pretty interesting week and for the most part I’ve enjoyed it. At the moment my timetable consists of five classes: computer environments which deals with how to properly communicate with other people about computers both in a verbal and written manner, software deve...

It is currently Saturday 26th September and I have now been living in my university halls of residence for a whole week. It’s still very strange here and while my computer games programming course doesn’t start until Monday it’s been good to know that I’ll actually be around large groups of people I can have a really intelligent discussion about video games with. So I’m eagerly awaiting 11:00 M...

It is currently Sunday 20th September and this week things have been very different for me. For a while now the plan had been that on September 20th I was gonna be moving half way across the country to finally start university and begin my work towards a bachelors degree in computer games programming. However the past week has been very hectic and I had all sorts of financial problems. Everythi...

It is currently Sunday 13th September and it’s been a bit of a long week for me, rushing around trying to prepare everything before I get off to university. Hopefully once I’m there I can use this blog to give you a little bit of a look at some of the more interesting points of education in video game development. Until then things are continuing pretty much as normal. I must say I haven’t real...

It is currently Saturday 5 June and in case you can’t tell you’re currently reading Gamer_152’s blog. This week I’ve played more of Saint’s Row and the game’s taken a bit of a slow down for me. It’s just really a matter of completing all the stronghold missions now to progress to the last few missions of the game, but this means constantly filling up my respect bar in between missions and with...

We're just on the edge of September and after a few weeks of no blogging I thought I drop a little something onto my profile page. Luckily after my laptop charger broke on the day I wrote my last blog I was able to get it fixed the next day and was only too happy to be reunited with my laptop. However I don't have a whole lot of time left with my Xbox 360 and Wii before I head off to university...

This week it seems I am the victim of a rather tragic happening. For almost a year now I’ve been the proud owner of a Dell Inspiron 1720 and I’ve loved that laptop, whenever I was sitting around the house I always had my laptop close at hand. However there was always one slight problem I had and that was that there was a particularly weak section in the power cable for my laptop’s charger and t...

It's a cool August afternoon and as the sun sets outside I find myself sitting here, very relaxed and ready to blog. I know that for those of you reading my last blog entry things were a little heavy on the Halo front but I promise much less of that this time. Recently I've been playing more Sims 2, Team Fortress 2 and a bit of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Now I've had my issues with Oblivion in...

Earlier this month I ended the blog I posted wishing everyone reading a great summer and I gotta say things have been pretty cool for me. I have actually spent much less time gaming this summer than in previous ones but none the less I've had great fun with what I have played. My main focus has really been on Team Fortress 2 for the PC and The Sims 2, although watching my friend building houses...

Today is a rather special day for mein the history of video game journalism and I thought it was only fitting that I took time out of my "busy" schedule to show my appreciation for my favourite video game website. I still remember the depressing, rainy Friday on which I returned home from college ready to be met by the warm embrace of the internet, only to find that comment sections and forum b...

Another week of gaming has served to reinforce my belief that holidays are awesome and even if it's been getting so hot I've lost the ability to think straight I've still had a pretty good time this week. I've played Team Fortress 2, Rock Band 2, Metroid Prime 3 and another game I'll mention shortly but if you know me you'll probably be able to guess what it is. I have been thnking of going for...

So I have finished the campaign mode on Red Faction: Guerrilla. It wasn't an amazing game but it was most certainly a very good game and was well worth the play through. For anyone who is the slightest bit into action-adventure games I would recommend Red Faction to them because I'm sure they'll enjoy it very much. Right the way through the game I found that the destructible environments and th...

Has it really only been a week since my last blog? Wow... Well, ok I guess it hasn't quite been a week. You see I spent part of Saturday and Sunday round a friends house and I decided that sleep deprivation and blogging weren't a good mix. I've tried writing while barely conscious before and let's just say it wasn't my best ever work. However my exams are over and I am back gaming for real agai...

It seems like an eternity since I wrote my last blog and even longer since E3, but I suppose it hasn't been my normal week with things revolving much more around exams than gaming, through some miracle I haven't been entirely distracted by video games and I think I've actually done okay on my exams so far. I'm still playing Elite Beat Agents in my free time and as with any rhythm game it's grea...

So, straight into the blog this week, no time to talk about what I’ve been playing ‘cause I got a video game expo to talk about. Please don’t be afraid to skip through whatever of this gargantuan wall of text doesn’t interest you or read part of it now and come back later. Microsoft The Microsoft press conference was definitely my favourite press conference of the show this year and the one tha...

Hey y'all, decided to drop a quick blog into your midst as I didn't get this done over the weekend and I decided I gotta do something between now and the E3 Microsoft press conference (at the time I'm writing this there is less than 90 minutes to go). So I am stoked about E3 2009. I'm looking forward to seeing the Wii motion plus and any other intriguing peripherals Nintendo might have lined up...

Hi all, I'm back for another weirdly timed blog. At the moment I'm right at the beginning of my half-term and I have my final college exams coming up soon but that doesn't mean I still can't play the occasional game and pass my exam. I just have to limit my play time to about 5 minutes a day and work out how I can read and play at the same time. At any rate I've still played quite a few games b...

It's now almost a whole month since my last blog and with the 30 day mark looming I decided to stop buy and drop off another blog about my latest exploits. Some notable games I've played since I last blogged include Halo 3, Halo 2, Rock Band 2, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2, Gears of War 2, Age of Booty, Spore, Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Halo Wars and Soul Calibur IV, so I've been keeping m...

Hi everyone, ready for your weekly wall of text? Ok, let's get to it! This week I'vebeen playing Halo Wars, Halo 3 and a little of Half-Life 2,Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2. I was also happy to find last week that upon posting my blog on Giant Bomb, the website didn't just generate a rather embarrassing blank blog post but instead posted the blog exactly as I wanted...

O hai, it can be blog time nao? Okay. So you'll probably wanna know what I've been playing, well not really but I'm gonna tell you anyway. This week has mainly been all about Halo Wars, but I've also played Halo 3, Half-Life 2 and Rock Band 2. In fact Rock Band 2 has got a bit more appealing now that I have a working set of drums to fumble through my favourite songs with. Interestingly although...

Hi everyone, I'm back with a slightly longer blog than usual this week. I hope you've all had a good week, I know I'm feeling pretty good right now. I've dedicated a good portion of this week to just playing Halo 3 and I'm really getting back into that again, although I'm still not exactly the best player ever, none the less I was very pleased yesterday to see that by some amazing twist of fate...

It's January 24th and it now really feels like we're well into 2009. In fact there are some release dates coming up that I'd forgotten about that now seem much sooner than I thought they were. There's Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2, coming out on February 20th, The Sims 3 on the same day and Halo Wars on the 27th. I suppose it's all a month away but I'm hyped for some of this stuff. Still as m...

Wow, almost didn't do my blog this week but the weird and wonderful world of gaming once again drags me back. This week I've been playing Halo 3, Soul Calibur IV, SSBB and Rock Band 2, although I have an exam coming up this week so I'm expecting my gaming time to be considerably reduced. I am however thinking of getting back into Pokemon Diamond or Sapphire again because it's a great RPG series...

Thanks once again for reading. It's really been a week of Rock Band 2 and Fable 2 for me this week, both of which I completed Sunday, one day before I went back to college. Both have been really great games, of course Rock Band 2 will have more longevity, especially now that I've exported all my songs from Rock Band 1 but anybody who hasn't played Fable 2 really needs to play what I found to be...

Hey guys, guess what? I'm doing a blog this week! I know, I'm as surprised as you are. Since Christmas I've been playing all my new games, although I've played more of Rock Band 2 and Fable 2 than anything else and less of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption than my other games. I really have been playing a ridiculous amount, I've hit a record of 55 achievements in 9 days. 55! My only disappointment is...

Hi all and happy holidays to everyone. I'm aware of my lack of blogging in the previous two months (as in there was none) but I'm sure I'll be back and blogging sooner or later. In the last two months I've only purchased two games but I've had a great time with them both. Firstly Mirror's Edge which I am currently on the 6th chapter and I've found it a really immersive and enjoyable game, I wis...

Well looks like I am back this week with another blog, I've basically been gaming as normal this but my time spent on video game websites has been near none. This week I've played Puzzle Pirates, Halo 3 and more Rock Band. All great games but I have a strange urge to go back and replay Bioshock for some reason and that was before I even saw the

Just a short update to all to inform you of the situation this week. To be honest I've played surprisingly few games compared to my usual spree of Halo and such, I've been concentrating on other things such as reading and piano playing. I have been playing my fair share of Rock Band though but still, given my deficit of game time and the fact that apart from some of the TGS things and that one...

Greetings one and all. Straight to business, this week I've been playing Halo 3 and Spore but I eased off on them so I could spend the last few days getting some serious practice time in on Rock Band. Of course TGS, the Tokyo Game Show is currently on and it looks like there's some seriously cool stuff going on,

So what's up with me this week? I've been playing World of Warcraft, Rock Band, Spore and a little bit of Puzzle Pirates and Burnout Paradise. After a little rooting around I've also discovered

As I did a few weeks ago I come to you today in the form of a Sunday blog post; Friday and Saturday I stayed round a mates house and well, I got very little sleep in a very large amount of time and although I felt fine yesterday I didn't want to come to you with a half-witted, brain-dead blog post, so please enjoy todays half-witted regular blog post. Before I start I'd like to make a small but...

Gamer_152 checking in again. Just quickly, on the non-gaming front the highlight of my week was probably yesterdays

You know going back to college hasn't been so bad, most of my classes are pretty good and I have plenty of free time. I've also been playing a bit of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 and a bit of Rock Band, then there's the game that I was inevtably going to bring up this week... I picked up Spore on Monday and my first day with the game was mind-blowing. I worked my way all the way up from the C...

Good morning, afternoon, evening or whenever you're reading this. I am now officially enrolled as an A2 student at my college and although there are some aspects of college it'll be cool to get back to, I don't think anybody really wants to go back. But it's been a long week and a good week, I now have my late birthday present, an awesome laptop that my parents paid for. It's wi-fi ready, has a...

Hi there everyone, sorry this blog is deceivingly late but I spent pretty much all of yesterday at the Tutankhamun exhibition in London. Still here I am and it's hard to believe that it was only last Saturday that I was here, ranting about Fable II Pub Games. But in my time this week I have played plenty of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2, Rock Band and Puzzle Pirates. In fact Puzzle Pirates hav...

Hello one and all and thanks for being here for one of my blogs. Since last week I have managed to curb my Geometry Wars intake but I've also been playing a little Rock Band this week and have also become rather obsessed with Burnout Paradise. The Cagney update was great but the Bikes and Paradise Island updates look even better, I'm really hyped for those. Speaking of updates, the 360 version...

I got back from my Holiday in Dorset yesterday at exactly 7:01 pm and although I don't mind being back I had a good holiday, if any of you are ever in the area visit the Tank Museum, it's awesome. But anyway when I got back yesterday I decided to hold off on blogging so I could put one up today as I'm happy to announce that August 18th marks the anniversary of my birth and I have now reached th...

So we're well into the summer holidays and I hope everybody has been enjoying their games as much as I have. Firstly I am going away on holiday in a few hours so I won't be around to read your blogs for the next week and my next blog will be 1-2 days later than usual, just so you know. Among other things I have spent more of this week on Giant Bomb instead of Gamespot, they just have a lot of s...

Ah, the holidays are good aren't they? It's hard to believe it's only been a week but I'm sure my time off will fly past soon enough. The relationship between me and games over this previous week has been an interesting one, I've had mates round and we've played Dawn of War, Rock Band or whatever else takes our fancy and likewise I've been playing a lot of them alone as well. In fact since Mond...

Well it's time for me to blog on another week of game-related miscellanea and with the absence of E3 or any editorial I may be writing I can fortunately greet you this week without a wall of text three times the size of a normal blog. In fact E3 seems so long ago to me but perhaps this is because I am now in the third day of my Summer holidays and already it's been relaxing. I've played a varie...

Well my blog so far has been situated primarily on Gamespot.com ( http://uk.gamespot.com/users/Gamer_152/ ) and will most likely continue to be. However this site has been built by some of the greatest gaming critiques the industry has to offer and Giant Bomb looks like a project of monumentous proportions. I look forward to testing here and enjoying everything the site has to offer. Hopefully...