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Xbox Live Arcade Roundup
Colour-matching puzzle games have always been a regular feature on the videogame release schedules but, in recent times, with the advent of Xbox Live Arcade and the success of the DS, Puzzle Quest and Bejeweled, a perennial trickle’s become a torrent. Cheap to make and easy to execute, they require just a couple of tweaks ...
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Museum of the Interactive Image
Occasional Chewing Pixels commentater and EA producer Jim Preston has written an excellent article over at Gamaustra on the games-as-art question. Before you roll eyes back into your head for the nth time, please take a look – it’s well-worth reading not least because it principally asks the more nuanced question: ‘How might games be ...
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Sucks to be Koei
I’m pretty sure that one of the saddest/ hardest/ most infuriating jobs in videogames is to be an American/ European PR for Koei’s sprawling battlefield epics. These genre-dodging games are continually panned by Western critics, despite being gigantically-popular-in-Japan (at one time the series was Japan’s biggest selling), with reviewers often glossing over the changes that ...
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The Redesign
Welcome to the all new Chewing Pixels. There’s not really any kind of anniversary being celebrated here (unless you count the fact we’ve been going for, um, two years, three months and thirty days) but a spruce up was well-overdue. Let’s take a moment to write you through what’s what. These things are self-explanatory but ...
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Gordon Brown’s Crackdown and the Hypocrisy of Gamers
Earlier this afternoon, games industry newspaper MCV reported that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is likely to use the results of a forthcoming study to “introduce an aggressive ‘crackdown’ on the games industry“. The report in question is being carried out by Dr Tanya Byron, known in the UK for her QA columns in The ...
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I Am A Stabbing Robot
“ROBART III is a prototype platform designed in-house at SPAWAR. If it weren’t for the chain gun and missiles, he would be pretty cute. Once he’s ready for battle he’ll almost certainly don an evil-looking suit of armor. ROBART’s sensor array consists of a multitude of cameras, SICK LIDAR (like radar, but with lasers), ultrasonic ...
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Alan Moore on Celebrity
‘I tend to think that what fame has done is to replace the sea as the element of choice of adventure for young people. If you were a dashing young man in the 19th century you would probably have wanted to run away to sea, just as in the 20th century you might decide that ...
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Legs: When CGI Works
Ever since Chewing Pixels began we’ve bemoaned the use of CGI in film-making. Sure, it might be cheaper to fake magic with Maya but there’s something about actually filming something extraordinary that infuses the results with a timeless, untouchable ring of truth; a resonance of wonder that that so many Peter Jackson and Harry Potter ...
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Pong – Gaming in Smell-o-Vision?
While Microsoft and Sony continue to compete with one another for graphical power in the endless and mostly pointless pursuit of realism, Nintendo has stepped out of the polygon-pushing race and is instead making innovations and piles of cash by appealing to other senses and areas of the players’ brain. In the touch interface of ...