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Chrono Trigger – DS Review
The chance to play with time is gaming’s greatest gift to the world. It’s something no other entertainment medium offers and yet, when we rewind the last ten seconds of Prince of Persia, un-jumping a mistimed leap, it’s can seem like the most natural thing in the world. In Race Driver GRID, a 150mph collision ...
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Chrono Trigger: The Purchase
CEX Retro was an Aladdin’s cave of gaming obscurities. Long and tall glass cabinets housed rows of exotic titles you’d never heard of, neat lines punctuated every now and again by a piece of strange Japanese hardware that relentlessly winked and bleeped back at its viewers. It was a store that existed for less than ...
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They Clean Up the Planet. You Clean Up On Profits.
While browsing Flash games today I stumbled across Eco Battler, a horizontal shoot ‘em up with an ecological message. Straight away I recognised the character portraits in the introductory movie as being from an old arcade game that I’d played a few times on MAME. A bit more digging and it turns out that Eco ...
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The Difficulty with Call of Duty 5
I’ve reached the final level of Call of Duty: World at War, my troops within spitting distance of the Reichstag, the last icon of Nazi dominion that must be toppled before we Russians can enjoy a quadruple vodka while watching the end credits roll. In what’s become something of an annual sadism ritual, I’m playing ...
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Nominations Please
Yesterday Chewing Pixels was voted one of Wired’s Top 5 Favorite Interesting Gaming Blogs, which is quite the thing. I’m a fan of all the other recommendations that the Game|Life team makes, from Leigh’s Sexy Videogameland through to the watchdog-like Magical Wasteland, so it is an honour to be in such company. At some point ...
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Second Hand Memories
“Um, hi. Do you think you could tell me anything about this game? I, er, found it on the bottom shelf back there.” “Gunstar Heroes? Hmm. I’ve not heard of that one. Let me take a look.” This is Mad Andy. We’re not friends and that’s certainly not a nickname of my invention. Rather, it’s ...
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One Life Left Presents: Music to Play Games By
A few years ago my friends at thetriforce.com launched a get-rich-quick scheme offering £10 shares to 100 of their forum members. The idea was that the money generated by the forum would be invested in some sort of project – either for fun or profit but ideally a bit of both – the nature of ...
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The Rhythm-Action Timeline
Following the news that music games have overtaken sports titles as the second-most-played type of game in videogames I took the time to create this timeline detailing the history of the genre. It’s basically definitive, save for those games neither I nor google could remember. There are rules. Rhythm-action games, perhaps more than any other ...
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Best Thing I Saw Today #36: 360° Video
3D games have been doing this in replays for a while now and I’m not sure what ueful applications it would have in entertainment beyond the initial OMG-look-at-that moment, (after all, much of what makes film interesting is the restriction it places on a viewer’s point of view. How many of us ever used mutliple ...
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Animal Crossing – Wii review
Eurogamer’s editor de-Edge’d the first few paragraphs but I prefer my original (I am SUPER biased) so here it is sans sub-edit. [/precious] Animal Crossing is a world without death but that doesn’t mean it’s a world without loss. In this virtual life sim, bereavement comes not in life’s passing but in the passing of ...
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On Broken Toys
There’s something mesmerizing about old, battered toys. Their scuffs and tears inspire a kind of third-person nostalgia, the warmth of seeing beloved things loved by another. They are far more interesting than pristine collectibles, whose perfect paintwork and untested mechanisms bespeak little more than calculated shrink-wrapped investment. Broken toys tell stories: of the rough love ...
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Flickbook Streetfighter
This clever online generator from Bob Books turns your personal video clips into pocket-sized flip books. The ‘de-mix’ – a ghastly term I just made up for taking supposedly evolved media and regressing it to a simpler format or style – is all the rage right now, but this Flickbook generator is by far my ...