As I stab him with a hidden screwdriver for the umpteenth time, dump his body in a convenient chest freezer, and saunter away dressed as a makeup artist, I absentmindedly think that perhaps he would have appreciated this – to go out on a high, his career at a peak in both professions. To die
On the edge of Ostrava there’s a sharp-sided hill. If you stood on it, you’d have a view over the old city, and you’d marvel at the number of smokestacks you saw. They’re all shapes and sizes and surround the old town centre like widely-spaced fence posts. If it was wintertime, you’d also marvel at
Five years after I first played it, Blow has let go and The Witness is out. There are now got 600+ puzzles and the world has been remodelled inch by inch. And this is the first time I’ve seen it since then. So how does the game live up to the goals of 2011’s Blow? And was it worth
Far Cry Primal isn’t, on this showing, a smart or an innovative game. It’s definitely more of the same with a new skin, much like Blood Dragon was, but without that expandalone’s cheesy humour. What it does have is a new old world to explore, a visceral proximity to its killings and an unusual, simple story
Fun! I’m doing a wheelie down a ruined high street at high speed, totally unable to tell where I’m going, while heavily armed North Koreans spray machine gun fire at me. This is the best motorcycle game I’ve ever played and it’s not a motorcycle game. I drop my iron steed out of the wheelie just
You don’t know Sergey Galyonkin. His childhood in the Ukraine, his Olympic success, his life in Cyprus, his work behind the scenes at Wargaming. All this is of no interest to you – and why would it be? But what Sergey does in his spare time – a persona called Steam Spy – has developers
When people I’ve not seen for a while ask me ‘what are you working on right now?’, I give them this kind of glassy look that says ‘how long do you have?’ It’s this kind of look: //giphy.com/embed/13aSSyJaI5NkTm?html5=true This has been a hard, good year. Apart from coping with a new baby, I’ve probably worked for
A piece I did for Maximum Piece about how games have learned from art, music, and math—and how the world might learn from games. “And on the third day, God made the world. And He saw that it was quite crummy. And He then looked at the other worlds that He’d made, and thought, “They suck
Last year I did a Frankengames of 2014, picking the best bits of many games to make a Game of the Year, mainly because nothing individually took my fancy. But this year has been ridiculous, with every week bringing out amazing new games. Here’s a stupid statistic; there are 282 pages of games on Steam.
The scene, to the average mind, is incongruous. The Supreme Court of America striking down a law backed by onetime action movie thug and then governor of California, Arnold Schwarznegger. Arnold’s people claimed that video games increase aggression, cause neurological damage and more, and were seeking to pass a bill restricting access to them for…