All sport is a metaphor for combat. The team games – football, rugby and so on – are sprawling battles; attackers and defenders ebb and flow up and down the field in a clash of will and power, led by steel-eyed captains. American Football is a series of frantic First World War-style scrambles for territory measured in 20-metre increments. Tennis is a pistol duel, squinting shots lined up in the glare of a high-noon sun; foot races are breakneck chases between predator and prey.

But while there’s always risk, sometimes injury and occasionally death, sport largely remains metaphor. This is how some have argued that boxing falls outside sport’s definition. There is, detractors say, no metaphor: it is deadly, brain-injuring combat, killer blows softened only by the padding on each fighter’s fist, a concession to civility perhaps only introduced so the participants live long enough for promoters to make extra cash from intermission snack sales.

If you baulk at the lack of metaphor in boxing, then the unflinching brutality of mixed martial arts will scramble your mind. While the UFC – both in reality and in this game – assumes the glitzy presentation of the WWE, underneath the hot lights, pomp and swagger, stand two men entirely uninterested in providing entertainment. There is no metaphor: each eyes the other weighing in the mind how their own rock, paper, scissor combination of martial arts proficiencies might bring the other to a state of unconsciousness as quickly as possible.

Perhaps for that reason, the UFC delivers mixed entertainment for the viewer. For every scintillating match that rotates between show-boating roundhouse kicks, rapid-fire pummels up against the arena wall and chess-like wrestling transitions on the mat, there’s an unshowy first round tap-out from a vicious arm lock or ankle twist hold.

And therein lies a great deal of UFC’s appeal as a videogame. Each match has the scope for the kind of upsets that boxing rarely offers, where wearing your opponent down blow by blow into a hazy submission can often become a repetitive chore.

In MMA, by contrast, you might go multiple rounds on your feet, zoning your opponent with high kicks and Muay Thai-style knees to the torso. Or you might spend four minutes on the floor, trading positions in a celebration of Greco-Roman wrestling while attempting to get the upper, strategic hold. Or you might score a Flash KO three punches in with a well-timed sway and counter-combo that strikes your opponent in just the right way to send them reeling down the tournament ladder. These kind of unpredictable outcomes define the game, and help keep it interesting (and occasionally frustrating) long after developer Yuke’s bread-and-butter wrestling titles may have dulled in appeal.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.

A few hours after disembarking the dusty train that winds into Red Dead Redemption, reformed bandit John Marston meets a smart young journalist from Manhattan. His assignment? To observe life on America’s final frontier and dramatise his findings in an article for the well-to-do ladies of New York. His pressed clothes and clean-shaven jawline contrast with protagonist Marston’s facial scrawl of stubble and scarring, but beneath appearances, the men share a common purpose: to find gold in the sun-baked Wild West.

The meeting mirrors the wider context of Red Dead Redemption’s release. Liberty City with its buffed taxis, resolute skyscrapers and air of affluence may appear a world away from this arid, adverse wilderness, but peel back the skin and the framework is identical. Red Dead Redemption is GTA: Wild West, a sandbox most familiar, albeit one that, for once, is filled with sand.

Set 50 years after the events of the more light-hearted Red Dead Revolver, Redemption’s frontier has become a cat’s cradle of political interests, stretched taut by moneyed men in bed with federalised government. The Wild West has grown mild in its old age, and grizzled gunmen with their brutish ways are growing obsolete.

In setting the game in the twilight days of a cliché, Rockstar provides an overarching tension beyond the immediate lives of its inhabitants. Where Grand Theft Auto IV’s Nico Bellic was desperate to escape his heritage, Red Dead Redemption’s John Marston clings to it, a man in search of purpose and redemption in a world slipping from relevance.

Nevertheless, it’s a world that Rockstar San Diego paints with flair and an abundant appreciation for the Western in cinema. Parched canyons give way to tousled plains across which steam trains puff their way, heading off into purplish horizons. A hangman’s noose swings in the breeze from a giant rock. Carts teeter along thin cliff paths, while drunks are spat from saloon swing doors into the arms of waiting hookers squeezed tight by corsets and puffy knickers. Campfires flicker, coyotes howl and droves of wild horses gallop to a melancholy whistled melody or the splang of a banjo. A buzzard squawks, a shadow in the noon sky. Videogames can offer windows on forgotten vistas; Red Dead Redemption is a vivid rebuilding of a world lost to time and technology.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here

OMG. Robyn’s been plagiarizing.

Creepy Robots. ‘It’s only a matter of time before one of these kills somebody.’

E. Honda is amazing.

Impressive, Snake.

How to design a magazine cover.

“A script will not sell because:… it is intelligent or otherwise hindered by nuance.” Grim times for scriptwriters.

“The Observer understand that the solidity of the matter dictates procedure.” Oh wow…

Super sweet Spectrum-style music video for Richy Pitch’s forthcoming single ‘Blackstar’

The best of the Nintendo DS cases.

Mobigame’s wonderful iPhone game, Edge, is finally available again on iTunes.

Forget Shenmue 3, I want a sequel to Dragon Wang.

Never thought I’d be eager to read a book about clams.

8-bit-esque videogame played by screaming. Stick with it till the boss battle…

Oh gosh. The bees won’t stop dying. Now the prospect of explaining the birds and the bees to my offspring seems all the more harrowing.

I joined formspring so, if you want hysterical baseless answers to bee questions, you’re home.

Link of the Week

Trailer for Pixel Kombat, a ‘hadokumentary’: Lovely music and motion graphics work. Neat.

It is, perhaps, the most expensive videogame ever made. Not in the financial sense: Treasure, Japan’s small yet consistently brilliant boutique developer has nothing like the resources of its high-profile Western counterparts, as the often-rudimentary graphical assets in this Space Harrier-style shoot-’em-up testify. But in creative terms Sin and Punishment: Successor of the Skies is a high-speed conveyor belt of valuable, distinct ideas, scenes and flourishes that dizzy the mind with their density and inventiveness.

An on-rails shooter, you move into the screen at a steady pace, the camera wheeling and diving as patterns of enemies streak across your fixed path. So nothing in the game is procedural or ad-hoc. There are no freeform battles to intersperse the set-pieces, as in a Halo or Modern Warfare, no moments where the developers can let the AI pad out the experience. Rather, every swoop of an enemy and pivot of a camera has been meticulously orchestrated, an assault of precision-laid creativity. This is a four-hour long rollercoaster ride far more expensive in ideas than any 60-hour RPG epic.

………………….

As with so much of Treasure’s output, high scores are where the longevity lies. Die and it’s an immediate Game Over, the choice to continue returning you to the most recent checkpoint but resetting your score in the process. Online leaderboards exist for each stage across each difficulty level and are grouped by region, country and continent, so there’s plenty of challenge for those who want to squeeze every last point from the experience. If there’s any criticism to be made, it’s in the length of each level, as it will take practice to make it through each 20 minute-long segment without using a continue on even the easiest difficulty level.

But that is also the game’s strength. It is the antithesis to current fashions, where anyone can plough through a game without much need to learn or improve, where external reward systems take the pressure off creative level design, where games are broken into commercial break sized chunks, and slipped down with spoonful-of-sugar achievement points or trophies.

Here the rewards are rich, satisfying and threaded in the design. The compulsion to play through the game has not been found in manipulative shortcuts, but in graft and execution and a plethora of ideas. It is expensive game-making, for sure, but it is game-making at its absolute best. So Sin and Punishment 2 is videogame distilled, a fearsome concentrate to confound and delight, a suckerpunch reminder of what is possible in the medium if you choose not settle upon one brilliant idea, but instead embrace ten thousand.

You can read the full text of this review over at Eurogamer here.