The top 100 most-influential videogames (2014 edition).
Back in 2014, I contributed a list of the 100 most influential video games for a book called 10,000 Things You Need to Know: The Big Book of Lists in the UK. I’ve reproduced the list here.
writing
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Why don’t we just… use games for good? – Big Issue North
“With the advent of massive virtual worlds, games and simulations could be the dominant entertainment form of the 21st century. If they are to be so, we have to recognise and encourage their educational and moral components – to make them games for good.”
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Ostrava: In the Shadow of History – Geographical
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
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The Witness, Five Years On; A Retrospective | SMTG
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
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Far Cry Primal preview: a familiar game with a Tomb Raider twist | TechRadar
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
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Motorbikes and teamwork in Homefront's Resistance mode – PC Gamer
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
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My 2015
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
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Generation Proc – Maximum PC
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
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Writing Pandora
As we know, I was lucky enough to get to write a game, Pandora: First Contact. It launched last week and is doing relatively well, as I understand it. It’s unlikely this is its full audience either, given the parallel console nonsense. And, as I don’t want to steal Slitherine’s thunder I won’t go into
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On Pandora, Mars and making games.
There are these things we call games journalists – they’re funny creatures, all angst and acid, and they call themselves journalists, which these days has the connotation of news-discovery, which they rarely do, and truth-telling, which they mostly attempt, despite often having access to highly misleading sources. They also think of themselves as writers, because…