KEYNOTES

Survival Of The Fittest

Chris Dahlen — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:55:23 +0000

So I’ll confess: watching Planet Earth turns me into a nervous wreck. I know a lot of people like to get buzzed and watch the ducks cruise the mountains in high-def, but when I watch the show, all I see is the killing. The fox with the gosling in its jaws. The harlequin shrimp dragging a starfish into their lair to feed on it for days. Yes, I knew that nature's a little Darwinian, but when you watch it hour after hour you realise what it means when the fittest and the luckiest survive.

Jacks Of Both Trades

Steven Poole — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:12:58 +0000

Watching the latest season of 24 with increasing apathy, punctuated by bitter, incredulous chuckling, I realised that a lot of TV execs still don’t get it. They think that, since they are competing with videogames for viewers’ time, they have to make something that is just as hyperactive and contemptuous of the audience’s intelligence as they imagine videogames to be. The truth is that 24, in its long downward spiral into crayon-scrawled decadence, is now far stupider than many videogames.

The Mecca Of Videogames

Chris Dahlen — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:02:53 +0000

John Teti thought I was nuts. He didn’t say it, but I could tell: here I was, a game journo who lived just an hour away from Funspot, and I’d never been there once.

There’s No I In Indie

Hello Games — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:15:25 +0000

Sean Murray I just said that Mario Galaxy was my game of the year. Why does it feel like I said my favourite book is The Da Vinci Code?

The Most Boring Game of the Year

Chris Dahlen — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:54:26 +0000

Playing Demon’s Souls makes me a boring person.

I've been playing the game. A lot. And I love it. A lot. The other night I spent hours with it, and in those hours, all I did was farm the same sections again and again, futz around with my gear, gain a few soul levels, and kill one Vanguard demon - and I killed him by shooting about fifty arrows into his forehead while he just stood there scratching himself.

Don’t Know Much About History

NGai Croal — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:47:04 +0000

One of my favourite things about Out Of The Game, the biweekly podcast that I record with three other former journalists and one current journo, is when a seemingly ordinary discussion of a recently released game veers into topics that are more provocative. Take the September releases of The Beatles: Rock Band and Guitar Hero 5 along with the August release of the movie Inglorious Basterds, for instance.

Brütal Legend: A Love Story

Chris Dahlen — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:58:26 +0000

Brütal Legend slagged my heart. I was ready for solos that shred, men that shriek, and monsters with teeth where they should have had faces. I was ready to dig the jokes and hate the gameplay. But nobody told me that Brütal Legend’s a love story. (Oh and hey: spoilers follow. So go play the game. It’s epic.)

TV Go Home

Edge Staff — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:36:43 +0000

"This building is what we call a ‘church’,” Aled Jones explains at the beginning of Songs Of Praise every week. “It’s a meeting place for public worship, within which the socio-religious group called ‘Christians’ frequently manifests elaborate vocalisations we call ‘songs’.”

Delia Smith is making jam rolypoly: “In order to stay alive, we convert ‘food’ into a substance suitable for use by the body.”

Public Relations

Hello Games — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:37:43 +0000

Sean Murray I’m 17, waiting for my computer arts degree interview and I peek at the portfolio of the guy sat beside me. I’m 13 and Maeve meets me after school, but all she wants is for me to ask Jon out for her. I’m 28 on the way down to Future Publishing’s offices and I’m not interesting.

Sonic the Comic Book

Chris Dahlen — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:29:13 +0100

It took just one drawing to turn my child into a raving Sonic The Hedgehog fan. We were at Jetpack Comics when he saw the cover of Sonic X #37, and somehow the character just hooked him: the spiky hair, the bright blue body and the eyes that screamed, “I am a wiseass”. So I bought him an issue. And then another, and another.

Making Stuff Up

Randy Smith — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:09:42 +0100

If you don’t know the editors of this magazine, I can tell you that they are a cabal of frightening tyrants*. Do they care that I have visions of Caribbean beaches gleaming behind my eyes? No, they only care that I hand in my column before the magazine goes to print. Do they enjoy my favourite game to play with them, that of cramming as much unprintable profanity and obscure American slang into my writing as possible to see how they’ll choose to replace it?

Let’s Burn Down D.C.

Chris Dahlen — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:02:35 +0100

The new Modern Warfare 2 trailer promises to take the fight not just to modern times, but to the streets of the American capital, where war breaks out in sight of the White House. But here’s what’s funny about that: this summer, small clutches of angry Americans fantasized about shooting up the city for real.

Playtesting

Hello Games — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:33:54 +0100

Sean Murray The counter says “Attempt 67”. Grant is biting his fist and I’m miming at him to just keep quiet. This could be the one and we can all go home. Rob jumps, bashes his head again at exactly the same spot and we all let out a groan. “Attempt 68”...

The Interface Wars

NGai Croal — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:12:57 +0100

When 31st century archeologists dig through the fossilised remains of the typical 21st century home, what will they find as evidence of how we once amused ourselves? Will 2005-2009 be seen as an explosion in interface diversity, from gestural remotes to plastic guitars, drums, wheels, microphones and balance boards? Or will this too be seen as prelude to the Age of the Camera – complete with a built-in microphone – and our glorious future of controller-free gaming?

Power Fantasies

Chris Dahlen — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:31:51 +0100

Ask anyone who doesn’t read comic books what other people like about comic books, and you’ll often hear: “They’re a power fantasy.” Take a cliché: the class runt comes home from a day of getting beaten by the bullies, reads a superhero comic, and dreams about putting on tights and throwing buses at everyone he despises. Complex problems turn into concrete objects, and then you smash ‘em. And so the bigger the wham-bam, the better.

Little Big Scribble

Edge Staff — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:36:52 +0100

As our preview in E205 noted, and our review reiterates, it’s hard to press Scribblenauts’ start button. The game opens in a sandbox in which you can spawn objects ad infinitum, with no rules or conditions to get in the way, and it’s an awfully long time before you’re willing to translate your experimentation into the game proper’s more confined walls. That’s hardly a fault: how could you criticise a central mechanic for being so fun that all the normal apparatus of playing seems unnecessary?

The Rise Of Ugh-Meck

Chris Dahlen — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:27:07 +0100

The best thing about Scribblenauts is not that I can type the word “BURRITO”, click a button, and watch an actual burrito pop onto the screen. The best thing is that I didn’t have to draw it. Plenty of games give us ways to bring a real-life object into their worlds.

City Of Wanderers

Steven Poole — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:04:14 +0100

Wandering the streets of an unfamiliar city, I catch myself thinking, ‘Hey, this is a pretty open-world experience’ – one of those uncanny moments when you see life in videogaming terms, like scouting out ideal sniper positions on actual rooftops or visualising yourself performing a nifty bit of close-quarter combat on an antisocial fellow commuter.

Hello World

Hello Games — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:04:44 +0100

This is the first of a new series of columns about setting up a new independent game studio by Hello Games, creator of forthcoming race-platformer Joe Danger. In these articles, to be published every fortnight, the team will relate the trials and triumphs of developing a game with just four staff and an enduring love for Micro Machines and Super Monkey Ball.

Tell Us A Story

Chris Dahlen — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:05:51 +0100

It’s rare to find a game that lets the players make up their own story. Even in a tabletop role-playing situation, where a group could make up anything, players find themselves arguing about the rules and sticking close to the simulations they’re handed. Corvus Elrod lost interest in that years ago. As he puts it, “The point is not to spend the afternoon massaging the vector radiuses of exploding arrows.”