Catherine

Catherine is two puzzles games, really: one of the heart and one of the mind. In the first, shabby protagonist Vincent – a 32-year-old who is aimlessly stumbling through life – must choose between two women. His long-term girlfriend Katherine is career-minded, focussed, and eager to formalise their commitment in marriage. She mothers Vincent but ...

Final Fantasy 13-2 Review

Final Fantasy 13 reflected the character of its heroine, Lightning: an elite, standoffish soldier who would let nothing come between her and her mission. The game presented a journey so focused and linear that its first 25 hours could be mapped out as an unbroken corridor. And Lightning’s purity of focus saw Square Enix discard ...

Scarygirl Review

With a tentacle arm, a prosthetic hook hand, an eye patch and a Nightmare Before Christmas rictus grin, Scarygirl lives up to the somewhat unkind name her parents burdened her with. But it’s a Gruffalo kind of scary, the sort of character a 14-year-old girl with pink hair and thick mascara who hates her dad ...

Trends of 2012: Indie Games

In much the same way that the music industry struggles to define indie music, so indie games is a term that’s increasingly slippery in the hands. Most would agree that an indie game is one produced without the financial backing of a publisher, but as the lines of sales and distribution blur with each passing ...

Weight Watchers’ new game – a tough diet pill to swallow

“Play to Win” declares the new Weight Watchers slogan, although “Play to Lose” would surely be a more appropriate battle cry to lead those resolved to shed the Christmas pounds in the new year diet game. The UK is the fattest nation in Europe and with the number of obese adults in the country forecast ...

Game of the Year: Portal 2

It’s gaming’s oldest trick: the mute protagonist, allowing us to project our own thoughts, words and humanity onto the blank slate avatar. But Portal 2′s silent heroine Chell invites us to identify with her in deeper ways. She is the white-collar worker in all of us, awakened to the corrupt, abusive system in which she ...

Game of 2011: Dark Souls

A hazy myth, an elegant contraption, an eccentric vision, an unforgiving mistress: Dark Souls has many sides. All bear the fingerprints of creator Hidetaka Miyazaki, who in 2011 established himself as the most interesting designer working in blockbuster games today. Not that this, sequel to Sony-born Demon’s Souls, has much aside from giant sales figures ...

Clone Wars: is plagiarism killing creativity in the games industry?

“Most people would assume it’s the money that hurts most and yes, the entire thing made us question whether we would be able to support ourselves financially moving forward. But that isn’t the main blow you take when your game is cloned. It’s more abstract, more fundamental than that…” Cloning – the practice of reverse ...

Sonic CD

Sega is a shadow of its former self. Its star developers are scattered to the four winds while treasured series hang cracked and dry from so much tireless, often unsympathetic milking. The company is perhaps the greatest casualty in the collapse of the arcade scene, once the fertile breeding ground for its most daring ideas ...

Minecraft

By offering us the tools we need to express ourselves, and by constructing the world from 1×1 blocks, video game atoms that can be arranged in every imaginable combination, Minecraft is perhaps the closest we have to a true god game.

And yet, it is also a game that indulges the instincts and aspirations of man, from lighting that first candle in a cave in order to ward off monsters, to building a tower to the stars. And beyond this, Minecraft has irrevocably changed the landscape of gaming, even as we have irrevocably changed its landscape in kind.

Gears of War 3: Raam’s Shadow

If Gears of War 3, for all its impressive refinements, had become predictable, the chance to play as this final boss in this downloadable add-on is anything but.

Fractal: Make Blooms Not War

Puzzle games that trade in honeycomb hexagons crowd the gaming landscape. But Fractal: Make Blooms Not War (from Auditorium and Pulse developer Cipher Prime) shares only a few strands of DNA with the tired match-3 genre, instead asking that players clear seven like-coloured hexagons in a game of block shunting of often confounding complexity. The ...