There are many different examples of Shadows of the Damned repainting routine game mechanics with its lewd, puerile brand of creativity. There’s the portal positioned over a call-girl’s eager crotch on a billboard that must be climbed into to progress to the next area. Or the sex line you call in order to have your pistol, dubbed the “boner”, upgraded to a “big boner” by having a girl talk dirty to it. Then, of course, there’s the bridge of tits. It’s a bridge that is made out of tits.

But perhaps nothing better exemplifies Shadows of the Damned’s ability to make vulgar absurdity somehow relevant than than the person of William, a one-eyed levitating fish-bat who is so alarmed every time you enter his vicinity that he drops a flaming turd before tearing off down the street. It’s a one-note scatological gag – but it’s one with a higher purpose. The trail of smoking dung serves to show you the areas you’ve already explored, creating a stinking, gleaming light trail behind you.

Flammable excrement is the first of a great many childish, yet somehow endearing jokes that litter this EA-published collaboration between No More Heroes’ Goichi Suda, AKA Suda51, and Resident Evil 4′s Shinji Mikami. The story itself is a dark twist on convention, playing on gaming’s proto-plot: rescue the girl from the kidnapper’s castle. (Called Paula, she almost shares a name with Donkey Kong’s proto-damsel, Pauline.)

But as you might expect from Suda, the mind that brought us Killer7, the girl – a leggy, heroin-chic-thin lady who wears frayed lingerie – is no princess, while the hero, who calls himself Garcia F**king Hotspur, is no squat plumber. Shadows of the Damned’s reddish hell-world shares no likeness with the pea-green hills of the Mushroom Kingdom; for one thing, it’s partially made of tits. But while the details may be different, the structure is familiar: boss fight follows exploration follows boss fight.

Still, the devil is in the detail, and it’s here that Shadows of the Damned strikes originality. The horrors of hell are approached with a gurning smile. There are grotesque cherubim that serve as locks on doors, which must be fed fruit or brains before they’ll open; there are lumbering bipedal monsters that wear crimson red gas masks as headshot protectors, and minotaur demons that pepper their death speeches with poor puns.

Shadow of the Damned doesn’t hold back when it comes to conjuring Dante-esque dioramas of the grotesque, with entrails spilling from doorways and monsters that make their stage appearance by bursting through the translucent skin of a woman. But the dreadfulness is softened in every scene with a clutch of knob gags, or freaks that speak with plum English accents. It’s as if Bayonetta had been produced by Terry Gilliam, the effect being that the horror is robbed of shock and transformed into black comedy.

Much of this humour stems from the protagonist, Hotspur – a character who’s one part No More Heroes’ Travis Touchdown, two parts Speedy Gonzalez – and his side-kick Johnson, a miniature talking skull who can transform into a motorbike, pistol, shotgun, machine gun or flaming torch at the squeeze of a button. The pair jostle their way through hell, wise-cracking to one another with a stream of jokes that miss more often than they hit.

From time to time, the dialogue slips from near-knuckle innuendo to weird unpleasantness (one Johnson soliloquy about how a certain strip club’s girls used to give him the best fellatio until he boned them all in the eye sockets sticks, er, in the mind). But nonetheless, Suda51′s idiosyncratic dialogue still manages to set the journey apart from the flock of third-person shooters that litter the contemporary video game landscape, and as such is always interesting, even when it’s not very good.

Read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.

“The whole time I was working in the industry, hardly a day went by that I didn’t daydream of going off and doing my own thing.”

Matthew Burns had an enviable job in mainstream game development. In the ten years since he joined the video game industry as a tester at Activision, his credits came to include two Call of Duty games and three Halo titles. His rise through the ranks was fast and steady, culminating in a producer position at Bungie where he worked on its killer franchise as well as the so-called “Peter Jackson Halo project.” But despite being settled in a role many within the industry would aspire to, in 2009 he handed in his notice to set up a desk in a house in Seattle and, using his savings, began work on his own idea for a game.

“There’s no smaller, practical game development team than ‘me and some friends’, so that route became more and more appealing as projects grew bigger and bigger around me.”

Rhodri Broadbent had an enviable job in mainstream game development. In the ten years since he joined the video game industry as a tester at Electronic Arts, his credits came to include Fable, StarFox Command, two of the PixelJunk PSN games and Buzz. His rise through the ranks was fast and steady, culminating in a Lead Designer role at Q Games in Japan. But despite being settled in a role many within the industry would aspire to, in 2010 he handed in his notice to set up a desk in a house in Cardiff, Wales and, using his savings, began work on his own idea for a game.

“Freedom to work on what I want was definitely the primary motivation. I wanted to work on more than just a few games the rest of my life, and to have a bigger influence in how those games were made. Going solo was just the best way for me to achieve that.”

Luke Schneider had an enviable job in mainstream game development. In the fourteen short years since he joined the video game industry as a programmer at Outrage Games, his credits came to include Descent 3, Alter Echo, Red Faction II, The Punisher, and Red Faction: Guerrilla. His rise through the ranks was fast and steady, culminating in a Lead Programmer role at Volition. But despite being settled in a job many within the industry would aspire to, in 2010 he handed in his notice to set up a desk in a house in Illinois and, using his savings, began work on his own idea for a game.

In the formative days of the industry, aspiring game makers would tirelessly work on a game in their bedroom before sending it out to the most respected development studios in the hope of securing themselves a job to work on the next Mario, Tomb Raider or Halo. But recent years have witnessed a new trend, one that has seen some of gaming’s hardest workers leave mainstream development to return to their proverbial bedrooms in order to work on their own ideas. Publishing platforms such as Xbox Live Arcade, PSN, Steam and the App Store have had a democratizing effect on game publishing. Now, as in the 1980s, it’s possible for one-man bands and close-knit independent teams to design and release their own products to a global audience. And for those people for whom big team development has become a chore, a door to freedom and control has opened that was previously closed.

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

The language of video games is long established. Mario verbs such as ‘jump’ and ‘pound’ joined Pong’s ‘deflect’, Space Invaders’ ‘shoot’ and Zelda’s ‘explore’ in the medium’s formative years to build a basic vocabulary that few deviate from even now, thirty-odd years down the line. Child of Eden, pseudo-sequel to Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s seminal trance shooter Rez, is notable then for adding two new words to gaming’s lexicon: ‘grasp’ and ‘splay’.

These actions occur on our side of the screen where, 99 per cent of the time, video game players merely twitch thumbs to exert their will. But here, you stand in front of the television, watched by the unblinking eye of the Kinect camera, painting on-screen targets – up to eight at a time – with sweeps of your grasping hand.

Then, when you are ready, you splay your fingers outward, as if throwing a fistful of sand away from yourself. In one motion a clutch of tracer bullets tears off into the screen toward the highlighted targets. ‘Grasp’ and ‘Splay’: Mizuguchi’s linguistic gift to motion-control gaming.

Child of Eden – which can be played either with Kinect or using a standard controller – is an on-rails shoot-’em-up. This is important to state from the outset, because the lights and music and idiosyncratic ambiance can disguise what’s going on at a mechanical level. You must shoot them before they shoot you. If your health bar – represented sometimes as petals on a flower, other times as dials on an art deco clock – is emptied, then it’s game over and you must try again.

There are two types of fire: lock-on rockets (fired with the right hand) and a machine-gun volley of purple dots (fired with the left). Enemies are susceptible to one or the other. There are end-of-level bosses with attack patterns and weak spots and, at the climax of each of the five core stages, you are awarded a rating and score based on your performance.

Players who value arithmetic over art can rest easy: Child of Eden is an orthodox video game, with criteria for success and failure, ranks to achieve, percentages to claim, leaderboards to climb and prizes to win.

But to reduce the game to its structural components is to miss the wood for the trees. As with Rez, Mizuguchi appears to have a higher purpose than score attack, despite his own Sega Rally arcade heritage. Child of Eden is an audio-visual journey in every sense of the word. It takes you from one place and one state to another; it hopes to leave you a different person to the one who embarked upon it.

Your bullets, such as they are, have a rhythmic quality, each target struck sounding out a quantized note that adds seasoning to the music that rolls steadily underneath. That music, composed by Mizuguchi’s band Genki Rockets and friends, builds to a series of postponed then protracted climaxes; the game draws you in and carries you along their sound waves, part spectator, part conductor.

In contrast to Rez’s digital, angular enemies, Child of Eden’s targets are organic. You often shoot not to destroy, but to build; your bullets can be catalysts for creation, causing flowers to blossom when you shoot a plant, or triggering deep-sea creature shapes to evolve from one form to the next. There’s a feeling that, while this world is filled with peril, it’s also filled with creative opportunity. Your role in it is not merely to tear down, as in so many shooters, but to build up.

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

The logic is sound. For decades gamers have been called upon to rescue the American president, be it indirectly in staving off threat of invasion to US soil in Modern Warfare or directly, in thwarting kidnap attempts in Bad Dudes Vs. DragonNinja.

One way or another, we’ve saved the President more times than Princess Peach. So no wonder Team Ninja has turned to the British Prime Minister in search of an alternate international figure to assume the role of hostage in need of rescue. Variety is the spice of life. Even for a cold, emotionless ninja like Ryu Hayabusa.

Nevertheless, as compelling premises go, Ninja Gaiden III’s opening political gambit is lost a little in translation. David Cameron is about as unappealing a damsel in distress as it’s possible to imagine (try it now: that reflection-in-the-back-of-a-spoon visage, framed by a flowing blonde wig, fluttering fake eyelashes at you as you carry him in your arms down the winding staircases of Big Ben).

Besides, Cameron always has his sleeves so precisely rolled-up in public in order to show the nation that he’s perpetually primed for action. Let him fight off the bogie men. A few flesh wounds might inspire him to hang on to the NHS a little longer. At the very least get a Brit to carry out the rescue attempt. Perhaps we could get Lara Croft back from raiding those foreign tombs (or better still, a man!). Those Japanese ninjas, coming over here, stealing our jobs.

While satire might be some way down the list of Team Ninja’s aims and objectives in this, the first Ninja Gaiden to be developed away from the steering hand of series producer Tomonobu Itagaki, lazy stereotyping appears to be top priority.

The 20-odd minute E3 demo features a parade of English clichés, from the Dick Van Dyke cockney accents of the Prime Minister’s kidnappers you slice and dice around Downing Street (“Looks like we’ve got another Jack The Ripper on our hands” remarks one soldier upon finding his chopped up comrade, with biting 19th Century relevance), to the heavy fog that swirls around.

But beneath the stereotypes, Ninja Gaiden III enjoys many of the characteristics that, before Bayonetta at least, had made this Japan’s premier hack and slash export. You’ve two primary sword attacks: one light, one heavy. Stringing these adjectives together in different combinations will create a variety of brutal offensive sentences.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.

Last year, while doing the weekly search for video game covers to post to the Box Art tumblr I stumbled across this MSX game with hand-drawn crayon artwork.

It had been developed by a company I’d not heard of: ANMA.

Gamefaqs listed just two releases from the company and I couldn’t find any readily available details elsewhere. Over the following months I found it hard to push ANMA from my mind. Frantic was released in the early 1990s and, while I knew the MSX was home to numerous releases from upstart developers, I found it incredible that a commercial release could have been released in the 1990s with such lo-fi cover art. There had to be a story here.

In February this year I posted the artwork to ANMA’s Nosh to Box Art and, once again, felt the itch to find out more about this mysterious company, this time with renewed resolve. My search took me to MSX.org, a well-maintained fan site dedicated to the MSX platform and its games.

Here I found out about a few more of ANMA’s releases, including what appeared to be the company’s final release, Troxx.

A YouTube search turned up a video recording of the intro sequence and outro credits to Troxx including the company sting that appears on load: a zoomed-in sniper pan across a ripped bodybuilder’s torso.

This was pretty much the final straw. I HAD to find these people.

The Troxx credits in the YouTube clip listed two names: Andre Ligthart and Martijn Maatjens, but Google wasn’t too much help in finding where they might be today.

So I returned to MSX.org and fired off an e-mail to one of the site admins, Sander Zuidema, who had posted about meeting one of the developers in a forum post a few years earlier.

Sander replied to my mail almost immediately, explaining that ANMA was not a registered company like I’d presumed, but one of the many Dutch hobbyist groups that were active in the 1990s. ANMA was comprised of just two staff, both of whom had been schoolboys at the time.

Then he confirmed that he had been in touch with Andre a few years ago and asked if I’d like him to see if that e-mail address was still active.

The buzz you get when you receive a response like that never dulls. Sometimes it’s exciting because you know in your gut the story is going to interest hundreds of thousands of people if you manage to reel it in. And sometimes it’s just because you are one step closer to solving a dumb mystery that nobody except you cares about very much.

Either way, if you are the kind of person who likes to find stories and write them down, it’s why you do what you do.

The trail went cold at that point. Sander didn’t mail back and I figured, for all the initial excitement, perhaps the ANMA mystery would remain unsolved. Perhaps Andre was embarrassed about that time in his life. Or maybe he was too busy to talk to a journalist. Or perhaps he changed his e-mail address and never told a random forum moderator on an MSX fan-site the new one.

Three weeks later I received an e-mail that read:

“I am Andre, The ‘AN’ of ‘ANMA’. I was the coder of all ANMA products. I also thought out many ideas and concepts. And I did some drawing. Best regards, Andre.”

Over the next few weeks we talked back and forth. Andre reconnected with Martijn, the ‘MA’ of ANMA, and, with the team back together, I was able to draw out their story a little.

The result is a cute (to me!) tale of two schoolboys who went indie before ‘going indie’ was a thing with a name.

One time they offered to deliver a giant pie to the person who first completed one of their games. When someone wrote in (via postcard) with the secret code to prove they’d finished the game, they drove the pie to his house.

The pair even managed to negotiate a publishing deal to have their games sold in MSX vending machines throughout Tokyo, no mean feat for two schoolboys living in a tiny village in rural Holland.

You can read the story of ANMA over at Gamasutra. Thanks to Christian Nutt for agreeing publish what is, admittedly, a pretty niche account about an obscure moment in video game history. And thanks to ANMA for being so agreeable.

Neither man makes games now. But that’s OK. They had their time and it was awesome. And maybe that was enough. I hope you enjoy their story.

The National Archives, Kew: home to records, documents and other ephemera of cultural importance. It may be a short distance from the grime and bustle of Westminster, where Britain’s future is cut and shaped daily, but to enter its leafy grounds is to press pause on that work. Instead, it offers a chance to reflect upon and study the notable detritus of our past, a national Wikipedia made of bricks and mortar, where history is held and filed in neat, curated rows.

It’s here that Iain Simons and James Newman, co-founders of the National Videogame Archive project, have called a meeting to discuss their efforts to preserve the digital heritage of the interactive entertainment industry. It’s a poignant choice of venue. For all the great many things preserved at The National Archives, not one is a video game.

“In part, it’s because of the self-destructive nature of video games,” says Simons attempting to explain why there has been no successful effort to preserve the medium’s past to date. “The games industry has created a cycle where it actively chooses to de-value its own heritage. It has, in fact, created business cycles entirely predicated around the idea that new stuff is better than old stuff. The next game is always the best game. Logic tells us that old games should disappear because the new ones are the only ones that are relevant. It’s not even an upgrade culture: it’s an obsolescence culture.”

To illustrate his point Simons pulls out a paper bag, emblazoned with the video game retailer Game’s logo. The idea, he explains, is that consumers grab one of these bags from one of Game’s stores, take it home and place their old games in it, ready to trade in for new ones the next time they visit. “It looks like a sick bag,” observes Newman. “It’s a cross between cash-for-gold scheme and a receptacle for digital vomit.”

“There is a churn in the games industry of something that was once valuable at its point of sale that then becomes inevitably recyclable,” says Simons. The trade-in economy writes out the value of old games, he argues. “There becomes an urgency to get something played as quickly as possible before it turns to worthless rubbish in your hands. The obsession with pre-owned games alongside the astonishing depreciation of games in the pre-owned market is something that is particularly influential in focusing players on the future and discarding, or at least devaluing the past.”

While the sense that old games are little more than currency to be used in purchasing new ones is built into the contemporary retail landscape, for Newman it’s also built into the development cycles of our industry. “We have become used to thinking about videogames as hardware and software rather than cultural products. We talk about them in marketing and advertising in the same way we talk about Windows or Office.

“Even when games are reviewed we often see talk of ‘graphics’ and ‘audio’. We focus on the technological. We obsess about polygon fills and screen resolutions. We look at how much more ‘photorealisic’ the characters are in the sequel compared with the original. So often, we invoke old games and old games systems as benchmarks by which we judge how much better, faster, wider, the successor is.”

Indeed, of the 40 or so people in attendance at the presentation, only two of us are journalists. Everyone else works for the National Archives. It’s a clear illustration of the institutional disinterest in our medium’s heritage at every level of the industry, from publisher to retailer, to consumer to press. Who would want to read about bygone games? We are taught that they are old, obsolete, worthless.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer.