OK, the Steam Summer Sale is starting. Lewis B doesn’t believe me, but it’s happening. How do we know? Valve have just fired the first shots. Valve Collection 82% off? Rockstar Collection 71% off? It begins. I’m delirious with excitement. This is obviously my first Steam sale as a fully fledged member of the PC community, and I can’t wait to fill my library with games I can’t possibly find the time to play for …
On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina left a trail of destruction and flood waters across New Orleans and the surrounding area, causing just short of 2,000 deaths, billions of dollars of damage and a clean up operation that continues to this day. Six years later and many parts of New Orleans remain in disrepair, standing as reminders of a tragedy which threatened to wipe an entire area of the United States off the map. One …
Over the last couple of months I’ve been researching the new computer I’ve been wanting for years and years, partly explaining my absence around here lately. You hear that Mat C? Research. Y’know, legwork, toil, hardship. None of your blatant lifting nonsense. Anyway, the other week after finalising my build, ordering the parts and receiving them, I set about building the thing. Several hours and a couple of hiccups later I was the proud owner …
Bloomin ‘eck, who turned up the thermostat? Britain is currently basking in the glory of a bit of a heat wave, with temperatures reaching as high as 30 degrees in some parts of the country. We’ve had nothing but blue skies and sweaty foreheads for two full days now and according to those fine weathermen who pop up at the end of the news, with their funky ties and “just be glad it’s not pissing …
I’ve not posted anything about Star Wars The Old Republic in a while. There is a reason for that and it’s mostly because it still doesn’t look any better. For a game that has reportedly had several hundred million spent on it, I would have thought Bioware would have been able to hire an animator of reasonable skill. As for the combat, well that still looks incredibly un-star-warsy. The coolest thing about the trailer …
Demonstrating that while they oppose women and most of the Bill of Rights, the Justices of the Supreme Court retain some margin of respect for the First Amendment, the highest court in the United States has upheld the Ninth District ruling in Schwarzenegger Brown vs. Entertainment Merchants Association. It is officially Not Constitutional to penalize retailers for erroneously selling age-inappropriate games to minors in the United States. Says the usually-evil Justice Scalia: This country has …
No one knows exactly when the United States Supreme Court will issue a ruling on Schwarzenegger vs. Entertainment Merchants Association, the first case on game censorship to reach the highest court in the U.S., but everyone is talking, and the talk is… Monday. A favorable ruling on this case will indicate – nationally – that punishing retailers for selling age-inappropriate games to minors is illegal. In English, a favorable ruling will mean that Best Buy is …
It has been a busy few hours over on the ArenaNet blog, as the first details of Guild Wars 2’s underwater combat have begun to surface (sorry), as well as some details of the game’s dungeons. Unlike other MMOGs, it seems ArenaNet want the underwater elements of Guild Wars 2 be as prominent as that above, so have introduced specific weapons that can only be used underwater, such as spears, tridents and harpoon guns, with …
Mario Marathon has become a delightful yearly event, and the fourth installment is running as I type! A team of generous friends will play Mario games all nonstop, all weekend, to raise donations for Child’s Play Charity, which collects cash and toy donations for children’s hospitals around the world. It’s most fun at, like, 3:20 a.m., when the guys are half-dead and completely lacking in the motor skills required to play Mario games, but you …
It may seem odd to some that there are still any multiplatform games that don’t play better on PC as we sit here in 2011, but this is a reality that beleaguered football fans have had to endure since the dawn of the current generation. Having provided PC gamers with a sub standard experience for years and delivering an only slightly modified PlayStation 2 engine right up until FIFA 11, it looks like EA are …
Is it fair to be doing first impressions of a game I’ve already finished? Should I not be reviewing it instead? Maybe. And shouldn’t I be pretty hard, even in first impressions, on a game I bought for $49.99 on Friday night and finished Saturday afternoon? Finished in probably… three hours, if I’m counting generously?
You’d think so. Under normal circumstances, almost certainly. But Child of Eden is not normal. It’s scarcely a game, and in it, “finish” does not necessarily equal “end.” While it will hold far from universal appeal, Child of Eden envelops the senses in ways few games can: not merely luminous but numinous, a dance of magical light and sound so precious and so sensually immortal it defies description.
Poor Alice. Years pass and the pain of tragedy diminishes with time, but neither shame nor guilt nor madness ever leave us. And for Alice Liddell, once-bold Wonderland explorer, madness has returned with a vengeance.
American McGee’s Alice was under-appreciated; I appreciated it – at length, and reprise that appreciation with an expanded version of the same article for the upcoming Well Played 3.0 – but most people didn’t get it. Too many jumping puzzles, too difficult, too long, too packed with disturbing imagery deemed unsuitable for the world of Wonderland. The game sold okay but didn’t do well critically, and it took eleven years for EA to allow a sequel. Still led by American McGee, that Terry Gilliam of video games, Alice: Madness Returns is upon us.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll have been relatively disappointed with this year’s E3 trade show in Los Angeles. With the Wii U delivering more questions than answers and precious few exciting new announcements elsewhere, the biggest stage in the gaming calendar desperately needed a star to shine through. There’s a case to suggest one never materialised, but if anyone came closest to a show stopping unveiling, it might perhaps have been Sony. Tooled to …
I’ve heard too many gamers misunderstand Trackmania. It’s a racing game, sure, but with more Hot Wheels blood than Road and Track. Many kids, including myself, carefully constructed a die-cast car track starting from the bed, going down to the floor for a loop-de-loop, and thereafter flinging the car into the unknown. That picture describes Trackmania far better than any other real world example. A good video game analogy might be that Trackmania is to racing games …
Our friend Harbour Master over at Alliance of Awesome fellow Electron Dance has been publishing a series of fascinating, heartfelt vignettes on game designers. The latest tells the story of Bill Williams, one of the greatest visionaries of the early home computer period, one his colleagues have called “The Stanley Kubrick of Game Design.” Tragically the world lost him to cystic fibrosis, and we were denied his genius far too early. Check out HM’s thoughts. …