Latest Articles (Page 2154)

It makes sense to start a retrospective of God Hand with the E3 trailer, since that was half the fun.

Three pads. The collective price of Rare's Blast Corps among my circle of school-friends. Three pads, their triple prongs shattered, their analogue sticks hanging floppy, detached from their housings by countless forceful smashings. Three pads, added to the exorbitant price of an N64 early-era release. Three entire pads, ruined, all for this game. Was it worth the expense and the disapproving parents? Worth it for Blast Corps? Totally.

Not many people played this one, so here's the cheat sheet. Steambot Chronicles, aka Bumpy Trot, aka That Weird PS2 Mech Game Set In The Twenties Where You Play A Harmonica Or Something, is the story of an amnesiac boy who finds a big robot, but don't hold that against it. By now no-one's more allergic to this particular brand of immorally predictable Japanese storytelling than me. Steambot's different. For starters, your robot is not just used for fighting. It's also lorry, a taxi, a stage, whatever you need. And if I was going to compare Steambot to anything in order to make people sorry they didn't buy this, it'd be Harvest Moon.

Let me attempt to walk you through the order in which the Jedi Knight games appeared. It began with Star Wars: Dark Forces featuring Kyle Katarn's adventures, working in parallel with the original Star Wars films.

For those who realised what was going on, the 1997 release of Bushido Blade was a scary time. This was a fork in the road for fighting games. This title was taking a stand against everything we knew, and with luck it could have torn a rift in the entire genre. We watched Bushido Blade leap forward, beginning its attack. A bird took flight from a tree. The breeze stilled as we held our breath. All was silence.

Trade secret: for the last 10 years, reviewing PC flight games has been a piece of cake. Step one - rabbit on about the fun-quotient, physics, visuals, missions and multiplayer for a bit. Step two - slip on the knuckledusters and deliver the kidney punch: "Of course, if you're after superlative sky thrills, you're still far better off with Crimson Skies."

When you think Halloween you might not immediately think Police Quest III. In fact, when asked to name a classic adventure game there's a fairly good chance this would appear far down most people's lists. Further, I wonder how many people now even know that the long-running Vivendi SWAT series began as four point-and-click adventures?

Call of Duty was an underdog. It is very hard to get your head into that space with Modern Warfare 2 looming over us all in full SAS gear, blowing cigar smoke in our ears, receiving more pre-orders than any other game in history and scaring all the other shooters into spring 2010, but it's true. The series that dared to lock horns with Medal of Honor was once a plucky young thing with aging Quake 3 Arena tech and publishing difficulties involving a split with EA and last-minute rescue by Activision.

Sit old people down and ask them to tell the same story and you're generally in for a confusing time. Over the years what he said, what she said, times and places have become confused or expanded for entertainment value. The only rock solid facts that remain are the tale's foundations - whether that's to do with the number of bananas imported during the war years, or which of their neighbours put it around with the American Airmen.

They say money makes the world go round, but this is somewhat inaccurate. Leftover momentum from the solar nebula makes the world go round. Money, in fact, is not responsible for rotation, gravity, nor indeed any number of other phenomena in the galaxy. It does, however, occasionally make games less interesting.

I got it all wrong at the time, but quite a lot of other people did too. Almost everyone who saw Sony's PSP prior to release assumed that it spelled the end for Nintendo's long domination of the handheld market.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. Or, as I like to call it, Tony Hawk's Pro Fever Dream.

There are definitely too many corny names for heroes in videogames. Pick up a random shooter and you're bound to find yourself in control of someone called something like Dirk Death, or Rick Giantballs. Even Half-Life's Gordon only keeps the nerd up for his first name, the surname sinking into the cliché of Freeman. Which is why we should celebrate the hero at the centre of Opposing Force. It's Corporal Adrian Shephard. Has there ever been a central character for a game who sounds more like a geography supply teacher?

Those poor old elevators. In case you haven't heard, one of Mass Effect's weirdest features has been officially shelved in favour of more load screens. Yes, the lifts were incredibly slow. For example, Mass Effect is a science-fiction RPG where male characters can fall in love with one of two female crewmates, and I chose Liara because the alternative, Ashley, hangs out in the Mako garage, and thanks to the lift sequence separating the garage from the rest of your spaceship this constituted an unworkable long-distance relationship. That slow. But at least they weren't load screens.

Videogames have always had the capacity to spark anger, fear and joy in me, and although I've never been so enraged as to damage a controller by hurling it, I have felt the exhilaration of an epic Street Fighter win and the agony of a crushing boss defeat. But one thing games have never made me do is cry. Aeris' death made me feel a slither of remorse, but nothing game-related has ever persuaded me to secrete anything from my lacrimal gland. With one notable exception.

I'd like to be able to tell you that I'm not that into Star Trek. Really, I'm not. Which makes it my eternal frustration that I appear to know frightening amounts about it. This is probably in no small part due to my having seen every episode of The Next Generation, primarily because it could be used to distract our A-level Chemistry teacher, Mr Williamson, coaxing him into discussing the events of the previous night's episode rather than banging on tediously about benzene rings and titration.

I tell myself that I pretty much hate Achievements. Sure, a few games have used them beautifully - to guide the eye of the player, to offer a gentle shove towards hidden fun - but so many more seem to delight in getting it all wrong.

DS, we have to talk. I'm sorry that I'm doing this in a letter rather than face to face, but I need to express all my thoughts and feelings carefully. I need to make sure you understand. I need you to know that I still love you, I've always loved you, but something is wrong.

Way back in late 2000 when I was feverishly beside myself with the imminent prospect of Tekken Tag Tournament, I remember stumbling into my local games shop looking for something to take my mind off the PlayStation 2. Browsing across the shelves my thought pattern went along the lines of "tactical espionage action, done that... another game with that stupid bandicoot... when are they going to release the ninth one... a strawberry-flavoured condom wielding a pair of Uzis..." Followed by a brief pause then WTF?!?

So I've got myself in something of a situation. I find that I'm spending an increasing amount of time in the company of another who is not a gamer. In a world where everyone's something of a gamer, even if it's just a game of Farmville at lunchtime, or some Bejeweled on the mobile phone, this new friend plays none at all. We do not have this in common.

I love Another Code: Two Memories for what it sets out to do, rather than for what it necessarily achieves. It's a tremendously imaginative game, and contains at least two spellbinding puzzles. It's also peculiarly flawed, not just by an extremely short playing time, but also the madness of including English comprehension tests at various intervals.

David Cage is a man of extraordinary vision. Whether you believe his games match his ambition is a very personal thing. I will argue with you that Fahrenheit is one of the most exciting games I've ever played, even though it's broken in about 657 ways. Perhaps this is what's most exciting about Quantic Dream's output. However, I cannot find a similar love for Omikron: The Nomad Soul. And that's not because I can't run it on my PC.

I wonder if I'm getting stupider. Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders came out in 1988, when I was 11 years old. It seems impossible to believe that at the age of 32 I can have become worse at games. And yet while my memories of playing Zak Mak when it first came out are extremely hazy, I certainly don't remember getting stuck quite as often. What I do remember is that I really enjoyed it. I've since been told by those who should know that this cannot possibly have been true. So I've gone back to find out.

For a few months after its release, he kept a close eye on his creation. Perhaps he would wander around Chicago on those serene, silver-skied early evenings they have there, checking in at the chattering, buzzing arcades, the smoky dives, the pizza places where locals - kids and adults back then - would gather around the tall black machines in the corner, while a polite line of quarters stretched across the cabinet tops.

When I was recently thinking about the current state of the DS, one game I kept returning to was Kirby: Canvas Curse. Or Kirby: Power Paintbrush. Or Touch! Kirby. Or whichever of its many names it may be going by. Released a few months after the DS, it was a game that came with no expectations, and was absolutely stunning.

It's an all-time top five game for me. A thing that exists in my memory as a moment of sheer wonder. As I recently learned with Zak McKracken, it's not always safe to revisit such places. How can something live up to decades of emboldened memories? Well, by being as good as Day of the Tentacle.

Playing it these days, my first question is always the same: How did I get in? Impossible Mission kicks off with the game's lithe secret agent already safely inside the underground complex, standing in an elevator with no apparent roof access, and surrounded by thick walls of rock on either side. (Dennis Caswell, the game's enigmatic designer, was apparently fairly proud of his rock-scrambling algorithm.)

So I have this thing. I love it when cartoons and humans interact. I mean, love it. It makes me feel a depth of happiness I can't explain. To understand the extent to which this reaches, I need say only this: I enjoyed watching Space Jam. No matter how bad the script, the jokes, the direction, I still enjoyed seeing Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan playing basketball together. And I won't apologise for it. From Bedknobs And Broomsticks to Loony Toons: Back In Action, if cartoon and human worlds cross over, I'm sold. Which brings us to Toonstruck.

When developers at Valve make a game, from the moment a single room has been crafted in their Hammer editor, they playtest it. Outsiders come in once a week, with no previous experience of the game, and play with whatever's been created. The developers must watch without comment, and observe how the player encounters the game.

Games reveal a lot about humans. Action games? They exist because we can't get enough of violence. Experience points and achievements? Our brains are so hard-coded with the idea of incentives that we get a quiet, bottomless thrill from watching numbers increase. God games? Best not think about that one. But we must face up to the truth: as a species, we are fruity and doomed.