Steven_Poole's Recent Blog Entries

• Beyond the Pad

  Idiotic peripherals of the very-near future.

  Gamers have long had it too easy. I for one applaud Quantic Dream’s approach to cybernetics, as revealed in Edge’s preview of Heavy Rain. If you want to hide, the system dictates that you keep a random, awkward combination of buttons held down. The discomfort you feel in your fingers mirrors the discomfort of your character, folded up into an airing cupboard. And so you relate to your character because you share her pain.
  

  November 11, 2008
• Echochrome's Haunting Beauty

  "The overall effect of Echochrome is one of surprisingly powerful melancholy, and one can only wonder at Sony’s crassness in packaging the game, in the west, with lurid happy colours and a photograph of a woman spurting think bubbles."

  
  There is something haunting about the posable wooden human figures designed for artists. The head a smooth blank mask; expressionless and sexless, the human body reduced to its geometric essence. Echochrome’s protagonist is one of these mannequins, hinting perhaps at an allegory of the relationship between player and game. The wooden doll in the artist’s shop is a mere tool, a puppet to be manipulated in the service of a project about which it knows nothing.
  

  October 7, 2008
• What MGS4 Taught Me About War

  Trigger Happy author Steven Poole ponders the revoltingly beautiful nature of violent conflicts in media.

  I am tired of war. The relentless crump and shudder of explosions, and the whineskip- puff of bullets that miss me by inches; my aching lower back; the cynical global machinations of the military-industrial complex. Sometimes I have to find a quiet place to sit and rest just to calm my shaken mind. War is hell.
  
  September 12, 2008