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Papo & Yo – Review
All video games give life to childhood fantasy. They send us soaring into space; they mine us deep underground. They propel us far into the future; they return us to the distant past. They take us...
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Final Fantasy 7 – Review
Time has been cruel to Final Fantasy 7 – but perhaps not in the ways you expect. Sure, its 330 locations, pre-rendered in the finest CGI that yen could buy in 1997, now appear jagged and antiquated: a...
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Vagrant Story – Retrospective
When Sydney Losstarot summons the devil, the devil comes a-sprinting – or, at the very least, sends his most senior fiends without delay. We players are used to occultish showmanship: the sweep of the...
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Death by gaming: investigating the Taiwan café fatalities
When the paramedics lifted Chen Rong-Yu from his chair his hands remained frozen in place, one clawed as if holding an invisible computer mouse, the other poised to tap out a shortcut on a vanished...
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LittleBigPlanet Vita – Review
There should be a terrible disconnect. What place does a game in which a chew toy jumps through shoebox dioramas filled with peeling wallpaper, worn rugs and off-cuts from grandma’s fabric drawer have...
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Resident Evil 6 – Review
“I can’t believe this is happening again. It’s just like Raccoon.” Leon S. Kennedy’s reference to the first town overrun by zombies in Capcom’s long-running survival horror series is pregnant with...
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Dishonored – Review
“The boldest measures are the safest.” It makes sense for this maxim to be stamped in tall lettering above the entrance to Dishonored’s plague-ridden capital city, Dunwall. Here is a society that runs...
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Fable: The Journey – Review
Motion control cannot be recalled. It cannot be uninvented. But, like the fake plastic guitars of the past, the stereoscopic 3D of the future and all those other tech gimmicks that sizzle in and...
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A League of their own
Twice a month Riot Games, creator of League of Legends, hires an actor to visit its Santa Monica studio. While the developer adds a couple of playable characters to the online PC game each month, this...
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Halo 4 – Review
It’s the end of Halo 3 and the world has ended with a bang, not a whimper. More specifically, it’s ended with our protagonist Master Chief riding a jeep off a flaming planet into the bay of a derelict...
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Karateka – Review
Mariko, just like every winsome princess trapped against her will in a castle, longs to be rescued. But being rescued isn’t her only longing. There is, of course, the delicate matter of the rescuer....
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Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified – Review
Black Ops Declassified is a Call of Duty game minus the spectacle. And for a series that has placed almost all of its energy into developing spectacle over the past few years – the snowmobile leaps...
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PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale – Review
The thought of a fighting game featuring a cast of characters plucked from Nintendo’s heritage was so unthinkable that for a while its thinker, Mashahiro Sakurai, kept it entirely to himself. Knowing...
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Borderlands 2: Mr Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage – Review
It’s the revenge fantasy of every developer wounded by a ruthless critic: a side-quest in which you send your player off to murder an unsympathetic game journalist. It escalates, of course, as all...
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Who spilled Hot Coffee?
Not for the first time that month, Patrick Wildenborg was disoriented. With a one year-old baby in the house he was familiar with the fug of a deep sleep cut short by noise. But this awakening was...
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Lego The Lord of the Rings
The Lego games, which seek to rebuild colossi of contemporary family cinema franchises in miniature bricks, have rather less to do with the plastic stuff from which they take their name than...
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Persona 4: Golden – Review
Ostensibly, Persona 4 is a game about a group of teenagers living in extraordinary circumstances. Not that the rural Japanese town of Inaba – the community into which your character disembarks at the...
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Games of 2012: Tokyo Jungle
It’s a dog-eat-dog kind of world out there. Not literally, in the case of Tokyo Jungle: cannibalism is one of the game’s few taboos. But the fiery Pomeranian will happily bite his kin to death, even...
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Final Fantasy Live in Paris
In 1913 the audience of Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées flirted with full-scale riot during the lusty premiere of Rite of Spring. That flirting no doubt felt like uninhibited manhandling for the...
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Shooters: How Video Games Fund Arms Manufacturers
The American confectionery company Victoria Sweets claims to have invented the candy cigarette. A thin stick of chocolate, wrapped in edible paper and designed to impersonate a roll-up, the sweet...
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