Edge Staff's Recent Blog Entries

• TV Go Home

  Videogames on UK TV offer small consolation, and the BBC's recent Gameswipe special sadly did little to prove otherwise.

  "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.”

  October 27, 2009
• Little Big Scribble

  Or, should we just be thankful for what we have?

  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?

  October 6, 2009
• Ich Bin Ein Bad Dude

  Wolfenstein's Nazis are hardly nuanced characterisations - could games do more to explore the moral ambiguity of being the baddie?

  Nazis: not the most sympathetic of villains. In some ways they’ve become the perfect videogame bad guys – an impersonal horde, enacting designs of unspeakable evil, ready and waiting to be blown from their polished boots by all-American heroes wielding Thompsons, bazookas and, in Wolfenstein’s case, Tesla guns.

  September 7, 2009