A criticism often levelled against gun games is their routine failure to address the consequences of the violence they demand their players perform. Nathan Drake may be an affable, swashbuckling hero in the cutscenes, but in action he is a cold-blooded murderer, never pausing to reflect on the cadavers he leaves in his wake.

It is, arguably, a failing of genre rather than a failing of the medium. Most shooting games are analogous to action movies, which rarely show their protagonists reflecting on, say, the death of on Autobot or a Nazi.

Sniper V2 Elite is a rarity, then, in choosing to show in explicit detail the chain of cause and effect after a bullet leaves the chamber and enters a target. It’s about as far from the nuanced narrative reflection that champions of gaming’s capacity for contemplation may be hoping for, instead choosing a somewhat more biological approach. But it’s nevertheless effective.

Squeeze the trigger and time slows to a crawl, muffling sound waves in anticipation as the camera tracks the bullet nose spinning through the air. Then, a hit pause before the bullet enters your target’s body, followed by an x-ray cutaway showing the shot’s trajectory through the torso, slicing virtual organs as it goes.

Score a headshot and you’ll see the cranium cave and splinter, while a shot to the testes will elicit a wince as each bollock quietly explodes inside the body. It’s pornographic, of course, but there are educational undertones too – the occasional note of regret, a whispered reminder that, beneath the uniform and ideology, we are all bones and water, shit and tears.

These kill-cam vignettes provide the high points of feedback in a game that eschews corridor firefights in favour of ponderous ducks and crawls through the rubble of a falling Berlin. The sniper genre – if we can call it that – has enjoyed a rise to prominence in recent years, an antidote perhaps to the reaction-heavy Modern Warfare experiences, a chance for the more ponderous player to settle down, take his time and a deep breath and make a plan of attack away from the pressure of whizzing bullets.

It’s in these moments that Sniper V2 Elite is at its best, offering a great deal of satisfaction from hitting a target hundreds of metres away by correctly accounting for wind and gravity. The physics engine helps with this, allowing you to pick out a grenade on a target’s belt and blow him and his nearby comrades to smithereens.
Sniper V2 Elite

This exactitude is an obvious necessity considering the game’s chosen theme. The opportunity to set trip wires and landmines in order to secure your sniping position allows for tactical preparation – at least, when the mission structure allows for it and the stealth loops are refined enough to let you plan and execute considered strategies.

But up close and personal, Rebellion’s game falters, with awkward shoot-outs, AI that sends enemy soldiers running in and out of doorways with Benny Hill quickness, frantic, jerking animations that reveal the rough edges around the experience. The high difficulty and focus on stealth ensure that, when there are inconsistencies or issues with the AI, the punishment is heavy and restarts frustrating, a shortcoming that has the positive effect of increasing the sense of achievement with every completed stage.

Sniper V2 Elite is something of an anachronism too, a middle-tier boxed game that lacks the budget or refinement of a blockbuster, but enjoys far more craft and spark than a budget release. There is enjoyment to be had among its cobblestones, and the second world war setting, once a weekly staple in the release schedules, has fallen from fashion for long enough to ensure the Enemy At The Gates ambiance feels fresh, not over-familiar.

A flawed action game, then, that misses its intended targets almost as often as it hits them. But also a game that, perhaps unexpectedly, provides a moment’s pause for reflection every time a bullet meets its prey. For that feature alone, it’s somewhat unique.

This review first appeared on The Guardian here.

Often, ahead of a multiplayer game’s release, reviewers are offered a scheduled time to meet with and compete against members of the development team online in order to approximate the general public’s experience. It’s never quite a ‘true’ approximation, of course, as the developers have the benefit of months, perhaps years of experience with their creation – and all of the intimate knowledge of strategies, shortcuts and cheats that come with it.

The reviewer, meanwhile, arrives at the game fresh and inexperienced, groping through the systems, always playing catch-up. Shrewd developers account for this disparity, handicapping themselves in order to level the playing field and allow the newcomer to feel a sense of progress. After all, even the least petulant player eventually tires from repeated losses at the hands of an expert.

“Will you please stop rushing the enemy and giving them free resources. Heal more.”

Jasper from Ronimo’s Xbox Live message was sharp, snappy and made little attempt to mask his frustration at my inexperience – a greenness that was threatening to cost us the match. It’s the kind of frank exchange that happens every day when playing in the wilds of Xbox Live (albeit usually seasoned with more racism and expletives) but one rarely delivered by a game developer wearing kid gloves while trying to provide a reviewer with the best possible online experience.

But Awesomenauts is the kind of game that raises tension between players who fail to work together as a team, and Ronimo Games cares too much about Awesomenauts to deal in niceties. The message reveals two important things: the developer’s passion, not only for the game but also for the sense of competition and comradeship the game fosters; and Awesomnauts’ capacity to raise passions to fever pitch. And Jasper was right. I was rushing the enemy too much, giving away free resources in my gung-ho play style, and, ultimately, losing us the match. Sore from the reprimand, I changed tactics – and we found victory.

MOBA – short for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena – is a clunky umbrella term, but the style of game it represents is anything but marginal. Riot Games’ League of Legends, the preeminent MOBA, is the biggest game in the world today, its community dwarfing even that of Minecraft – some feat for a style of game that arose from a Warcraft mod released in 2003.

Wherever there is creative success, creative subversion is quick to follow, and Awesomenauts is a 2D indie cartoon antidote to the po-faced, inscrutably nerdish visuals of that original mod, Defense of the Ancients, and its ilk. It’s the first 2D, side-scrolling MOBA, the sharp competitive core of the genre softened with a 1980s Saturday morning cartoon aesthetic and giant, pin-sharp sprites that ooze character and humour.

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

“Why do you still play video games?”

Shigeru Miyamoto is tired. Jetlag is partly to blame, the 11-hour flight from his hometown Kyoto to Paris combined with a day’s worth of interviews with journalists eager to pull headlines from his lips accentuating the bags under his eyes. But it’s more than that.

This November Super Mario’s father turns 60 years old. Having spent over half of his life working at Nintendo (his first and only job) on over 100 games, a little vocational weariness is inevitable. But it’s more than that too. The pause before he answers is born from somewhere deeper than the fug of travel exhaustion or the fatigued plod toward retirement. While his face remains composed, there’s an internal scrabbling for an acceptable answer to the question.

Eventually, a sharp intake of breath and a smile: “I still play video games because I still make video games, of course,” before adding: “Just playing the stuff I make myself keeps me very busy.”

He looks down.

Miyamoto may not have fathered the videogame medium, but perhaps more than anyone else, he has been responsible for raising it. From his first unexpected success with Donkey Kong, a game designed to shift 2000 Radardscope arcade cabinets sitting unsold in Nintendo warehouses in 1981, through the creation of multiple multi-million selling series based around characters of his own design, Miyamoto has stayed abreast of every generational leap in technology in a way not one of his contemporaries has managed.

For over twenty years his most famous work, Super Mario Bros. remained the best-selling video game, selling over 40 million copies worldwide and popularizing a character that, by the 1990s had become more recognizable amongst American schoolchildren than Mickey Mouse. Mario’s iconography came to define the medium in popular culture: the red splash of his plumbers’ costume; the unfashionable cap and moustache; Koji Kondo’s irrepressibly joyful theme tune; the squat, shifty-eyed Goombas and the spike-backed kidnapper, Bowser. The rude surplus of ideas behind the pixels which, combined, continue to represent video-gameness to so much of the world.

Beyond the recurring play myths he originated – Donkey Kong, Zelda, Mario, Miyamoto was the first to master not only the technological transition from 2D to 3D graphics with his seminal titles, Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, but also the accompanying creative transition in game systems and mechanics this dimensional expansion brought with it. Then, in more recent years, his hand on Nintendo’s visionary tiller brought motion control to the masses by way of Wii Sports and Wii Fit, both games that broadened both the definition of games as well as the audience that consumes them.

Miyamoto was honoured as the first inductee in to the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame in 1998 and is the only videogame designer to have been knighted into France’s Order of Arts and Letters. If the esteem in which he is still held in was in any doubt, just four years ago he placed first in the Time Magazine reader choice ‘100 most influential people.’

As such, to hear this visionary say that he only plays video games because he makes them is jarring. Surely his love for the medium he has spent a lifetime working to shape and define is more than just a job? Surely.

“Could it be that you might not play games if you didn’t create them?” I venture.

Again, the long pause; a quiet search for an answer already sat on his tongue:

“It could be that… I might not be playing games.”

Could it be that Shigeru Miyamoto is tired with video games?

………………….

“The thing with Shigeru Miyamoto is that you think you’re meeting Walt Disney when, in reality, you’re meeting Mickey Mouse.”

I had shrugged off my journalist friend’s sharp warning that Mario’s maker can be something of corporate mouthpiece in interviews these days. But now, sat opposite him in the plushest hotel room in Paris that yen can buy, this diminutive designer, producer and director appears more spokesperson than creative genius.

It’s partly understandable. He’s here to promote Nintendo’s latest project, an interactive guidebook on 3DS for visitors to the Louvre museum, an app, if you will, not a game. Instead of a Walkman or iPod with spoken notes delivered as you strain to see the Mona Lisa, now visitors may rent a Nintendo’s latest handheld, offering 700 commentaries about the artworks and a real-time map to show your position in the museum.

It’s a gimmicky idea but a well-executed one, designed to show off some of the 3DS’ lesser-known features to the general public and, no doubt, help drive sales for a handheld whose sales have been generally underwhelming. But my interest in in Miyamoto’s game work, not his promotional role in quirky tour guides. This doesn’t stop him from working the Louvre guide into every other answer, with quietly cheeky stubbornness.

Miyamoto’s dedication to remain unflinchingly on-message reflects his unusual position in the company. Fusajiro Yamauchi may have established the Marufuku Company in 1889, the company that would shortly thereafter become the Nintendo Playing Card Company, but without Miyamoto the Nintendo if today would not exist. It’s from his creative heart that Nintendo’s brand, mascots and most valuable game series have sprouted. Miyamoto is inseparable from contemporary Nintendo and Nintendo is inseparable from contemporary Miyamoto.

And whenever a creative becomes synonymous with a corporation, there’s a danger that creative pursuit slips into corporate concern, especially when business falls upon tough times. Indeed, it’s easy to forget that Miyamoto’s current job title is ‘General Manager’, a role that belies his expertise, inferring generalist, unspecified supervision.

So just how much input does the one-time artist and designer have in Nintendo’s creative output? What does a day in the life of Miyamoto look like in 2012?

“My days all follow much the same pattern,” he explains. “They are structured and typical. Roughly half of my time I spend checking new games that Nintendo’s directors are working on. I sit at my desk, play their games and create checklists of comments and amends that I then send out to the directors. Then, the rest of my time is spent attending various meetings, talking about management decisions for the general business direction of Nintendo.”

This split of Miyamoto’s time clearly reflects the split in his professional responsibility: half to the company’s creative output and half to the company’s corporate future. I wonder if he misses spending the majority of his time creating. “Not at all: the decreased workload allows me to do new projects like the audio guide,” he replies, with typical Japanese diplomacy. “But I am still very close to the game development. Although I am not a director myself I do check all of our games and discuss them over email. I visit Nintendo’s Tokyo EAD team every few weeks too, so I don’t really feel detached from the game side of the business.”

Miyamoto’s schedule may still be demanding, including a significant amount of foreign travel to promote Nintendo games as well as his monthly trips to Tokyo but there is a sense that, as he approaches 60, he is winding down, stepping aside to allow others to carry the creative flame.

The most recent Super Mario and Zelda titles have credited him as “General Producer” with direction and design duties falling to others, most notably Koichi Hayashida, director of Super Mario Galaxy 2 and, more recently, Super Mario 3D Land. I ask him how he has been working to ensure that there are artists and designers to take his place when he retires, a question that is greeted with a gently frantic response.

“There have been numerous media reports that I am about to retire and I very much want to emphasise that this is not the case.” This eagerness to dismiss his (inevitable) retirement plans is understandable. When a video game blog recently claimed he was looking to retire soon, Nintendo’s stock price fell the same day, a further indication of just how closely Nintendo’s fortunes are perceived to be dependent on his involvement.

“I believe that if I remain in the same position as a leader of the development teams within Nintendo, then the entire structure will grow or revolve around me. I’ve certainly seen there are other people within EAD that have the potential to be leaders. I wanted to give these people a chance to lead their respective teams. When I said in the press that I would step back a little I was just saying I want to support the company from the side, rather than being front and centre all of the time.”

Despite this eagerness to push others to the fore, Nintendo’s recent unwillingness to stray far from characters and series first developed by Miyamoto is worrying. Without risk-taking at a managerial level, surely there’s little creative soil from which the next Miyamoto may emerge and flourish. Nintendo EAD has always had the air of myth about it, a Chocolate Factory for games (the handful of journalists who have visited the Kyoto or Tokyo premises rarely see anything more than the lobby and a meeting room separate from the machinery of game development) with Miyamoto a subdued Willy Wonka.

With this in mind, I ask him how he spots new talent when hiring. “We don’t usually hire game designers,” he explains. “We almost exclusively hire artists or programmers; people who have learnt a technique and have a basis that we start with. Recently we have hired a few game designers, but generally they have already had careers in other companies and then joined us. But we hire a lot of people out of university. They bring basic knowledge and we start from there.”

This was certainly Miyamoto’s own route into the industry. Born and raised in the 1950s in the rural town of Sonebe, near Japan’s ancient capital, Kyoto, Miyamoto was a short, unassuming boy. With no television in the family home he relied on the natural world outside for excitement, spending countless hours exploring the woods, caves and riverbanks near his house. It was here he fostered the love of discovery and these childhood adventures inspired his games, a local chained-up barking dog making an appearance as the Chain Chomp enemy in Super Mario Bros. 3 and his beloved caves appearing throughout the Zelda series, myths that appear to grow in the re-telling.

Graduating with a degree in Industrial Design in the mid-1970s, Miyamoto’s father asked an old friend, Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of the toymaker, Nintendo whether he had any jobs available for his son. Miyamoto’s first task at the company was to design art for the outside panels of some arcade cabinets Nintendo was working on: Radarscope and Sheriff. Two years later Yamauchi called Miyamoto into his office and asked him if he’d like to design an arcade game. Miyamoto jumped at the chance, drawing the game’s characters on square paper, each block representing a single pixel on the screen, calling the resulting game Donkey Kong: ‘Donkey’, as a synonym for ‘Stubborn’ and ‘Kong’ for gorilla.

Is there a difference between the kind of designer that started in art, like Miyamoto (who is ambidextrous – both Mario and Link were designed with his left-hand), to one who started in programming, I wonder? “I don’t think there is a big difference,” he says. “Obviously people from artist or programmer backgrounds have to work together soon enough. So I think there are two key characteristics: a positive attitude towards new things, and someone who doesn’t easily give up in the face of problems or criticism. That’s what I look for in a new hire.”

………

This tenacity has defined Miyamoto’s own career at Nintendo, his creative commitment to perfection delaying the launch of the Nintendo 64 by three months to afford his team time to finish the game of his vision. “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad,” he quipped at the time.

More recently, he has contended with a troubled launch for the Nintendo 3DS. “Especially for the first six months following the system’s release sales were weaker than the DS. This was mainly due to the fact we didn’t have any big first party titles I believe. Also the price point was too high. In fairness to us, we realised that, reduced the price and worked very hard to have a strong line-up for the Christmas season, which we offered with Super Mario 3D Land, Mario Kart 7 and Kid Icarus. Looking at the situation in Japan today, the console is selling very well. We have now sold 5 million consoles there, which is respectable for a console in its first year. The challenge now is to continue to put effort into making the 3DS more widely known. The Louvre guide is another way of doing that.”

There’s humility to Miyamoto’s analysis of the 3DS’ fortunes to date, even if, when I ask him what he might have done differently, his solution is to fall back on old ideas and past successes. “I think if I could rewind the clock I would change the line-up for the 3DS launch so it had more Mario titles. Not only that, but we also have some excellent features that appeal to non-gamers: 3D photography, the augmented reality features and other preinstalled apps. We tried hard to communicate these but we failed. If I could go back I would have communicated these things differently, and spent more time working out that message.”

When I ask whether some of the hardware’s failure to inspire sales might be down to the core selling point – stereoscopic 3D – being gimmicky, Miyamoto is indignant. “Actually, 3D is really the most normal thing because it’s how those of us with two eyes usually see the world. TVs are the unusual things in 2D! We don’t look at stereoscopic as a gimmick. It’s rather the most normal way to display things.”

The obsession with targeting “non-gamers”, as Miyamoto puts it, has defined Nintendo’s recent output, a direction the company took following the mainstream success of the Wii console and game-lite software such as Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training and Wii Fit. “There are big lines between those who play video games and those who do not. For those who don’t, video games are irrelevant. They think all video games must be too difficult. We want to remove that barrier,” he said at the time of the Wii’s launch. That work continues today. Indeed, one of the most successful features of the 3DS has been StreetPass, software that detects when another 3DS is in the vicinity and adds the owner’s avatar to your own system, in a kind of human zoo (“I just heard today that people in France meet to Street Pass one another. That kind of phenomenon is happening!”).

But in recent times the new focus has been sharpened by Apple’s land grab for the hearts and minds of casual players. Indeed, Nintendo’s immediate plan for the 3DS is an overhaul of the eShop, the Japanese company’s competitor to Apple’s App Store. I ask him if the plan is to create a more open platform for game-makers to be able to upload their own games, in much the same way as Apple has lowered the cost of entry for would be game-makers hoping to publish their titles to iDevices.

“Obviously that would mean making development tools more easily available,” he says. “Maybe we should look into it but any tools we offer would need to be supported… From my perspective we want to reach out to smaller studios and work on smaller projects while supporting them as an easier and faster way to get smaller studios involved. I think that would be the best way to go personally.”

Apple’s entry to the handheld market has caused Nintendo some problems in envisioning its next move in handheld system innovation. “Obviously a lot of the potential of handheld game systems can now be covered by smartphones,” he says. “When we think about new hardware we need to think about what things we can add that you can’t currently do with a smartphone. For us, we would need to have a good reason to launch a new hardware – something necessary.”

It’s this sense that Nintendo is not quite sure what it can offer that’s novel – that has defined the company’s approach to software in recent years as well. While Miyamoto is quick to point out that Wii Sports and Wii Fit are both new game series, he is forced to retreat to the Gamecube release Pikmin in response to the accusation that Nintendo EAD has become conservative in recent years with regard to new game launches. “We need to continue releasing new games in existing franchises otherwise those franchises might die,” he says. “That’s not to say that we aren’t interested in new games. It’s just a case of picking a new game idea. When we have the opportunity we want to create new things in the future, certainly.”

With this in mind I wonder if Miyamoto has a yearning to create any particular game that he hasn’t yet been able to? “I don’t have a big list of ideas I want to realise,” he replies. “I usually come up with new ideas while I am working on other games. That said, there’s a strong possibility we will introduce some new characters to the scene soon.”

While it’s easy to accuse the company of over-reliance on its established characters, arguably Mario has become a cipher for controlled innovation. For example, Super Mario 3D Land may chare an interactive vocabulary with Super Mario Galaxy, but the ideas and execution in each are diverse. This sense of restrained invention reflects Miyamoto’s own primary interest in the medium today. When I ask him what excites him about games he answers: “I think the key thing is surprising people. Videogame development is actually a very easy tool to use to surprise people and to offer new, unexpected things to players. It can actually be done quite easily. It doesn’t take a lot to do this. There are exceptions but games can be created quite easily. I love that.”

33 years into his career and I wonder if Miyamoto believes it’s growing hard to surprise people, whether the ideas are running dry? “Yes, it’s become more difficult,” he says. “In the past it was just you touch a button and something happens on screen and this was surprising enough to people! Like, magic. Nowadays we have experienced players and players with no experience and we must accommodate the needs of both groups. It’s becoming increasingly difficult. ”

Miyamoto prefers to talk about Nintendo than himself. “You can ask pretty much anything,” the PR girl told me before our interview, “but he’s specifically asked that you don’t talk to him about his hobbies.” Rather than an indication that Miyamoto has taken up some unspeakable pastimes in recent years, his request indicates a shyness, a natural tendency away from the limelight. When I ask him of which of his games he is most proud, he squirms and looks uncomfortable.

“It’s difficult for me to answer,” he says, eventually. “Looking back, Donkey Kong is close to me because it was the first game I made where I realised I could actually make a living from this. Then the title that made games known worldwide was Super Mario Bros. so that’s incredibly important to me.” He laughs. “But this is a very generic answer and maybe doesn’t help you too much. Actually, a big innovation was Wii Sports. With this game we kicked off an adventure into something new. I want to be able to do this bold step many times in my life.”

It’s telling that Miyamoto’s choices centre around innovation and breakthrough. I wonder: what about his games that iterate and perfect on what has gone before? “It’s an excellent point because my desire is always to attempt to perfect my games. I think the Zelda series… You know, I am not so deeply involved any more compared to the past, but Skyward Sword is a very complete and exceptionally well-polished title.”

And that’s when we talk about why Miyamoto still plays games, and the fact that, if he weren’t making them today, there’s a very good chance he would not be playing them.

Why?

“I think it’s the lack of time in general,” he offers. “And maybe I don’t see so many titles that I find fascinating enough that I want to spend time playing. Time is precious and a game has to be worthwhile, right? Another problem is that there are so many games on the market today that it’s difficult to find the right one. In many ways I think I am in a similar place to the average game player. I think this is one of the greatest challenges for the industry right now.”

It’s a fair point. With tens of thousands of games hitting the App Store each month, the pool of potential avenues for play has broadened and deepened, and the sheer number of options can be overwhelming. I wonder if Miyamoto is concerned for the future of game, of his medium.

“I am not that concerned, actually. Nintendo and I have always hoped that games would someday become a more accepted part of our day life. Every month this becomes closer to the reality we live in. Games have grown and developed from this limited in-the-box experience to something that’s everywhere now. Interactive content is all around us, networked, ready. This is something I’ve been hoping for throughout my career. With this success comes a new challenge of course: how do we make our titles relevant in this world of games. How do we keep going when everything has changed? It’s a huge challenge. But it’s a good one. It’s what we always wanted.”

Shigeru Miyamoto is tired. But he remains undefeated. As he enters the twilight years of his career, the industry is as exciting, diverse, tumultuous and unpredictable as it ever was. Just as it appears as though the medium is creatively stagnating, everything changes again in the wake of some technological advance, or systemic invention. Miyamoto might not play games if he weren’t making them today. But he believes in them and celebrates their ubiquity. And why wouldn’t he? That ubiquity is his very legacy.

NOTE: An edited version of this column first appeared on The Guardian’s Comment Is Free here.

The aftermath of any public killing spree will include tears, candlelit vigils and, if the perpetrator is under the age of 40, a spotlight on video games questioning whether their shadow falls across the story. At one time these headlines were generated in the cultural friction that exists between generations. On one hand, the game literate, for whom video games have forever been part of the entertainment diet, alongside Blue Peter and Enid Blyton. On the other, the video game illiterate, for whom games are to be mistrusted in their ability to paint games of Cops And Robbers in gruesome pixels, to make the implied malice of our playground fantasies explicit.

In terms of news reports, this friction has been expressed in the clash between old media and a new medium, editors playing to the numbers, generating indignation and outcry amongst a majority readership that, to date, has been culturally predisposed to be anti-video game. Those video games had a hand in this. I just know it.

This, at least, has been the traditional argument of the maturing generation of video game players, who understand the medium to be nothing more (or less) than the current pinnacle of achievement in fulfilling humanity’s collective drive to play. To us, the claim that a video game caused a real life murder is as preposterous as suggesting the board game Risk inspires colonialism, or party game of Pin-The-Tail-On-The-Donkey leads to animal cruelty.

Studies continue to be inconclusive as to whether there is a causal link between violence and consumption of violent media, such as video games. While the police were only too eager to point to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s gaming hobby – Harris created his own levels for Doom that were widely distributed – in the aftermath of the Columbine Massacre 13 years ago today, at most, violent games were here simply providing an escape for troubled minds.

But when killers cite specific video games as being ‘training tools’ for their killing sprees as in statements delivered at the trial of Norwegian mass murderer, Anders Breivik, yesterday it’s more difficult to dismiss the headlines as reader bait. The link between video games and mass murder was made even more quickly in the case of Brievik due to entries in his ‘manifesto’ diary in which he mentioned completing the Tolkien-esque fantasy role-playing game Dragon Age: Origins, using the online game World of Warcraft to relax and playing Modern Warfare 2 as part of his “training-simulation”.

In context, the quotations were part of a general discussion of pastimes Breivik used to unwind, and crucially, came long after he had formed his initial plan for mass murder. This didn’t stop papers such as The Mirror claiming that Modern Warfare 2 allows players to “shoot people on an island”, implying a causal link between the game and the killings.

Then, yesterday, Breivik fanned the controversial embers once again by testifying of his fondness for World of Warcraft and his particular understanding of Modern Warfare 2 as a ‘police shooting simulator’ leading to headlines such as The Time’s “Breivik played video games for a year to train for deadly attacks.” It’s difficult to imagine World of Warcraft could ‘train’ a person for any acts of violence, other than perhaps suggesting that murdering swamp rats is an effective way to pay for some fur-lined boots. More importantly, for many of its 10 million monthly subscribers, it’s an experience that creates community, provides the lonely with a virtual family, and promotes teamwork and competition.

Modern Warfare 2, meanwhile, while a game thematically more analogous to real-life shooting, is as mainstream as a Michael Bay summer blockbuster, selling more than 10 million copies in the US alone. In both cases, as with Poker or Golf, the games are rule sets that allow humans to play, compete and make social connections. They may improve hand-to-eye co-ordination, and in this sense could be used to ‘train’ one for murder, but no more than an obsession with clay pigeon shooting might.

Most would argue that Brievik’s actions were insane. Trying to rationalise the irrational leads to a peculiar type of madness of its own, one that editors have been only too quick to enter into in exchange for page views. But beyond the media sensationalism, it’s more difficult to explain away the medium’s disproportionate focus on violent content, a point that few of video gaming’s apologists bring up.

Hollywood may share an obsession with bullets and explosions, but cinema’s thematic range is more diverse, offering romance, drama and documentary, subjects that games fail to meaningfully address. In part the juvenile focus is tied to the medium’s own adolescence, game designers only now begin to explore away from the baser themes of competition and domination. In part it’s a technological bias: the barrel of a virtual gun allows players to impact a 3D game world both near and far with the touch of a button in a way few other of humanity’s tools manage.

While it’s inevitable that blaming video games in the aftermath of a murderous tragedy will fade as game literate writers rise to editor positions in the mainstream press, designers must work to broaden the thematic ambition of their work. But even then, broken humans will no doubt draw whatever inspiration they are seeking from it to feed their own madness. That’s one protection no creator can offer their creation.

Five years in the making, and yet as fresh as one of the 10×10 pixel daisies that punctuate its felt-tip green hills, Fez is at once a tribute to the joy of childhood exploration, the wonder of adolescent Nintendo video games and the adult realisation of life’s unending mysteries. It’s a game without peril, without combat (none of the game’s flora or fauna will harm you), with no character upgrades and where the only enemy to slow you down lies within your own ineptitude or puzzlement. A rare game indeed, then.

Fall from too great a distance and Gomez, the fez-wearing protagonist, will crumple in brokenness, only to be returned alive and well to the platform without penalty. But don’t mistake the lack of health bar, lives or any of the usual video game measures of skill and jeopardy as indicating a lack of challenge. Fez is a game of knotted conundrums, secret rooms, locked chests, arcane treasure maps and rabbit holes that lead you on and on through clockwork contraptions that must be conquered before they yield progress. In this way its systems feel as much a homage to the Nintendo games of its creators’ youth as the striking pixel art graphics used to theme them. Its pastel shades and avatar’s immortality belie a heart of fiendishness.

At this core sits the game’s Escher-like spatial conceit. Fez is a 2D platform game set within a 3D world. A squeeze of the trigger and the scene rotates horizontally by 90 degrees, bringing, for example, two floating shards of land that were once floating 100 metres apart into direct alignment, allowing Gomez to cross unimpeded. Essentially each scene is comprised of four scenes, its physical structures interlocking in four different ways.

Braid had players manipulating time to solve its maker’s conundrums. Fez asks us to manipulate space in order to progress, choosing just a handful of unflinching rules and spinning out five hundred vignette ideas to puzzle and delight. As the game progresses you must use you perspective shifting ability to align ladders, to create runways for moving platforms to travel along, and to chain together explosions in the rocks in order to create new passageways. Just when you believe designer Phil Fish has exhausted the potential in the core idea, a new surprise is sketched into a scene, the building of an orchestra of ideas, the likes of which is rarely seen outside of Nintendo EAD’s greatest work.

Despite the variety, your core task remains resolute and straightforward: collect 32 golden cubes, each one constructed of eight disparate shards. Like Mario’s stars, these can be found sitting atop trees, underneath waterfalls, behind walls that must be cracked open with cartoon bombs and at the summit of mountains painstakingly scaled. They are scattered across a world interlinked by doors, each one leading to another section of the warren-like superstructure, which reveals itself scene by scene on an esoteric map. Collect all of the shards in a scene, along with any maps, keys or other secrets tucked away there, and the node turns golden on the map, the ultimate aim to bring the complete Midas touch to the universe.

As with Braid and so many other of the indie blockbusters made by thirty-something creators, the game is seasoned with references to seminal 16-bit games. Treasure chests open to Zelda arpeggios as the camera turns dramatically around Gomez. Tetris pentominoes are bolted onto walls, clues to greater puzzles used to tidy up this game. Gomez has a lazy, Super Mario feel in the hands, requiring momentum before he’ll make his longest leaps, and a stab of the up button to cling onto vines to save a fall. But Fez never relies upon homage to carry the experience. These are warm nods to the greats, Fish creating his own idiosyncratic patchwork from the fragments he borrows.

It’s a game in which the true aim is nothing more than to explore and to find treasure while doing so. So many video games borrow this voyager mentality, offering boisterous, darting journeys through shark-infested, bullet-dodging dangers. And yet, in Fez’s purity, coherence and pacifist heart we find a treasure so much greater. Here is a keen reminder of gaming’s ability to provide we who live in a world charted by satellites and Google Maps with new frontiers, with the unfettered joy of discovery, with the sense of our own psychical and mental horizons being expanded.

This review was first published at The Guardian here.

“Legends are almost always beautiful. The reality often leaves a lot to be desired.”

The witcher’s remark is aimed at the Elves, who have strained out the grit of life, love and loss before writing down their history, leaving only romantic, idealistic odes to the past. But it could just as easily be applied to the role-playing game: video game memories that sit warm and pretty in the heart, the reality of their original awkwardness so often lost to time and nostalgia.

So we remember the vainglory of slaying the dragon atop a mountain in Skyrim, not the 20 minutes of tacking zig-zigs on horseback that it took to reach its summit. So we remember Aerith’s hands clasped on her still chest in Final Fantasy 7, not the machinegun volley of random battles that prevented us from reaching her in time to save her life. So we remember the silhouette of Fable’s sheepdog fighting faithful by our side, not those times he caught upon a sticky polygon, or lost his mind to AI Alzheimer’s and tore off to greet the distance. Legends are almost always beautiful. The reality often leaves a lot to be desired.

The witcher’s game – his second, a Polish blockbuster exquisitely rebuilt stone by stone for Xbox 360 from the 2011 PC original – has been designed to ensure that, wherever possible, the legend and the reality match.

It’s in the interface, which allows you to hack, slash, parry and throw spells with the touch of a button, stylishly slowing time to a crawl as you select a different brand of magic from a radial menu before winding it back to full speed once selected with decidedly un-RPG-like flair. It’s in the cut-scenes, which press interactivity into the player’s palms at every opportunity while maintaining their Game of Thrones-style directorial drama.

It’s in the story itself, which is written at a geographical, architectural level just as much as it is written in the words of its characters. It’s in the trade-post town of Flotsam where you spend the first few hours of your adventure, a riverside settlement where racial tension, poverty and hopelessness are scrawled into its dirt and structural layout as much as the dialogue boxes of its inhabitants. It’s in the whorehouses, gambling dens and fighting rings where you can fritter away your hard-earned pennies on womanly comfort or manly jeopardy – downtime that might not make it to the history books, but which adds spice and grit to the true tale behind the telling. If The Witcher 2 is the stuff of legend, it’s a legend rolled from s**t and blood, semen and mud; a plausible legend.

Read the rest of this feature over at Eurogamer here.

“There’s this quotation from St Augustine…”

Jenova Chen puts down his hamburger and fixes me with a warm but firm stare. Trust the designer of Flower and Journey to invoke a 3rd century theologian as an entry point to the subject of online tea-bagging. “Augustine wrote: ‘People will venture out to the height of the mountain to seek for wonder. They will stand and stare at the width of the ocean to be filled with wonder. But they will pass one another in the street and feel nothing. Yet every individual is a miracle. How strange that nobody sees the wonder in one another.’”

Chen takes a quick breath. “There’s this assumption in video games that if you run into a random player online, it’s going to be a bad experience,” he continues. “You think that they will be an asshole, right?”

I nod, still thinking about Augustine and the sense of wonder I’ve felt since first sitting down to talk to this studious Chinese game developer.

“But listen: none of us was born to be an asshole,” he says. “I believe that very often it’s not really the player that’s an asshole. It’s the game designer that made them an asshole. If you spend every day killing one another how are you going to be a nice guy? All console games are about killing each other, or killing one another together… Don’t you see? It’s our games that make us assholes.”

Chen and I meet for lunch a few days before the official release of his latest game, Journey, in a bustling café a couple of hundred metres from the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It’s filled with loud bits of conversation, snatches of dialogue from people taking a food stop midway through the Game Developers Conference.

Chen speaks with the manner of a computer science nerd; quietly thoughtful in a way that some might take to be nervously arrogant. But his words are that of the exuberant preacher, a humanist sermon to a congregation of one delivered as a call to action for game designers to create better systems in order that they might create a better online world.

Not for the first time during out lunchtime discussion, I touch my arm and feel goosebumps. Chen, as a music journalist from the 1960s might say, has soul. But where did this heart come from? What journey led the designer here?

The Call To Adventure

At the age of 14, perched on the edge of his bed in a tiny apartment in Shanghai Jenova Chen put down the controller and cried.

“My parents were incredibly strict about what I was allowed to read or watch,” he tells me. “I had limited access to novels, television or movies so this game was the first piece of media that moved me to tears. It was my first cry and it was so deep and strong. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before.”

The Legend of Sword and Fairy is the equivalent of Final Fantasy 7 in the Chinese RPG history. Its story of love and loss deeply affected a generation of Chinese. “Looking back today I find the game shallow and clichéd,” he says. “But it was the first impact a medium made on me in this way, and I fell in love.”

Through those tears Chen found catharsis (a term he returns to time and time again during our conversation) and, when they had dried, he felt a peace in which he began to question his existence. “I found myself asking: what kind of life do I want to live? What is good? What is bad? Why am I here? Afterwards I felt like a better person.”

“Then I began looking to the future and I decided that I wanted to dedicate my life to helping others experience what I had just felt. I didn’t know it was gong to be through games at that time, but I knew it was going to be through something.”

For the first 22 years of his life, Jenova Chen didn’t leave Shanghai.

His was a childhood defined by boundaries: physical, social and parental. The city’s over-crowding confined his family to a small apartment. China’s one-child policy ensured he had no siblings, while the country’s lack of state or company run retirement plans placed full responsibility for his parents’ pension on his shoulders.

The burden to succeed at school in order to earn a good salary was immense. For Chen, a gifted and talented young student placed in a class of high achievers, this pressure was heightened yet further still. “It’s a cruel system,” he tells me. “Every semester the last three kids in the class are kicked out. I was in this elite class so if you were kicked out you dropped to a ‘normal’ class and people would call you a loser.”

Boundaries, competition, leaderboards: all societal systems that Chen grew up with and that are also prevalent in most videogames. And yet, they are curiously absent from his creations. I ask him if the pressure of growing up within these physical and psychological confines is what has drove him away from competitive, task-based games. After all, Flower is set in the countryside, its chapters interspersed by short cut-scenes showing a wilting flower in an urban apartment, perhaps dreaming of freedom from Shanghai, while his latest creation, Journey, is a game with the capacity for multiplayer competition wholly removed.

Until now, Chen has spoken in gentle voice, pausing to compose each response, occasionally reflecting inquiries back at me. But at this question he becomes visibly irritated. “I am a competitor,” he says. “I play and love competitive games. You know, I was champion at a fighting game in high school. I was a StarCraft champion in college. I still play DOTA. I love to win. I love to win. When it comes to making games it’s not like I love peaceful games. I make this kind of game because I want to win as well. To me the measure of a human’s greatness is the value they can contribute to society. The game industry doesn’t need another shooter; it needs something to inspire them.”

Read the rest of this interview over at Eurogamer here.

The voice actor is almost certainly not English, his cockney twang too off-kilter and overstated. Regardless, he takes to the role with enthusiasm, backing away from ninja Ryu Hayabusa, gun dropped, mouth wagging with laboured pleas for mercy. The last man standing from a platoon of soldiers now twitching on a London pavement wet with rain and blood, he hopes to appeal to Hayabusa’s humanity with talk of a daughter back home and the fact he only took the job for the money.

His back thuds against a truck. There’s nowhere left to retreat and nothing left to say. A giant button icon flashes up on screen, indicating that control has switched from the cut-scene director back to your hands. The game side-glances at you as if to say: ‘What you gonna do?’

It’s an illusion of choice, of course. There is no decision to be made, no capacity for mercy. You must press X to eviscerate. There is no other way. Place your controller on the floor just to see how long these two men will stand in quivering silence while the rain pitter-patters around their puppet bodies, and you’ll be waiting forever. All that happens is that the button pulses ever more feverishly on screen, as if to say: ‘Finish it, coward!’

All that is left to be done is finish it then, not through choice but through a lack of choice, despite the pretence that there’s another outcome. It’s irritating not because the soldier gurgles his way through the death scene like Dick Van Dyke spearing himself on a Chim Chim Cher-ee broom handle, but because if a game is going to force you to play like an a**hole, it should have a stronger reason for doing so than ‘You’re a ninja, duh.’ Ninja Gaiden 3 has none.

Read the rest of the review over at Eurogamer here.

Teasing a character out of 21 years of retirement offers a rare opportunity for the video game designer. Two decades is an epoch-and-a-half in game development terms – and so Masahiro Sakurai has been able to approach this, the third game in the Kid Icarus series, with none of the baggage of expectations that most of Nintendo’s icons labour under.

Sakurai has always been a risk-taker within Nintendo. He developed the prototype for Super Smash Bros. in secret, knowing his employers would likely baulk at the idea of their beloved mascots tearing one another limb from limb. So too with Kid Icarus: Uprising we see a designer straining to broaden the definition of a Nintendo game.

This is a lithe, sharp, focused game that rewards skill, punishes stupidity and prizes high scores in a way that none of the publisher’s output has dared to for the past five years. Kid Icarus is a contender’s game – and, just maybe, a sign that the publisher has flown a little too close to the mainstream sun in recent times, and is ready to tumble back into more complex waters.

But such business considerations couldn’t be further from your mind as you swoop and soar over verdant landscapes, firing orbs into the face of a mile-high Medusa. It’s a game with many strings to its bow, but at its core Kid Icarus: Uprising is an on-rails shooter in the vein of Panzer Dragoon, Rez or Sin and Punishment.

Pit, the angelic protagonist, is unable to fly without the help of Palutena, whose magic propels him through the first half of each of the game’s stages. Her pixie dust only lasts for five minutes, however, at which point Pit takes the battle to the ground for the second half of the level: an off-rails section that gives you free control as you rush about dungeons in search of loot and the stage boss.

Movement is handled with the analogue slider and aiming with the stylus on the touch-screen. You fire your equipped weapon with a squeeze of the L-bumper, making holding the 3DS somewhat awkward as you simultaneously grasp, balance and thumb-tweak with your left hand. The on-foot sections make similarly numerous control demands as you sidestep and roll with swipes of the stylus, like a jabbing, sweeping symphony conductor. It’s this section of the game that demands the most of its player; mastery is measured in hours, not minutes. (The game also supports the Circle Pad Pro add-on for twin-stick control, which is probably the only way for left-handed players to get to grips with it.)

The environment designs are stunning, the 3D effect picking out the fine detail of Roman cities nestled within patchwork-quilt fields. Up close, enemy models are intricate, animations are expressive and dungeons are filled with happy secrets and visual jokes. Nevertheless, when set against high points in the genre, Kid Icarus: Uprising falters. Nintendo fails to keep up with the inventive moment-by-moment design seen in Treasure’s Sin and Punishment 2, with enemies fast becoming repetitive and some clunky jumping and driving sections interrupting the flow.

But Sakurai’s brilliance has always been found in the systems that surround his core game mechanics – and it’s here that Kid Icarus: Uprising turns from a good game into a great one.

Read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.

It’s not the first time that two rival fighting game families have come together in a controversial, unexpected marriage. But when Capcom and SNK ran away together a decade ago, at least the two parties lived on the same side of town: 2D, sprite-based fighters that shared DNA and – in the case of some members of the Street Fighter and King of Fighters casts – a creator in Takashi Nishiyama.

By contrast, Tekken and Street Fighter hang at different ends of the fighting game family tree: entirely different creatures that share a genre but no family likeness whatsoever. Street Fighter is defined by sweeping stick motions, sneaky cross-ups and punctuation-mark special moves. Tekken, by contrast, is known for its visual spectacle, quick jab stick motions and four-button combination button presses. Few tournament players double-dip, as the mental and physical approach required for each is so radically different. You’re born Street Fighter or you’re born Tekken. Never the twain shall meet.

And yet, in this meeting, we find a marriage that not only works – it transforms and inspires. Street Fighter is the dominant partner (while Tekken will take the lead in Namco’s version of the game, whenever it surfaces) and the foundations of the game are built from Street Fighter 4′s building blocks and aesthetics. Players who have grown proficient with Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li and the other big ticket characters from Capcom’s recent fighting game resurgence will slip into the roles like a comfy old gi, the move lists and inputs mostly shared, even if the speed and timbre of the outputs are quite different.

It’s a faster game, for starters, sitting somewhere between the weighty thoughtfulness of Street Fighter 4 and the ADHD jitter of Marvel vs. Capcom 3. The tag team backbone, which has you tapping the two medium attack buttons to switch partners in and out of play, adds to the rapid-fire tempo, while the fussy double-turn inputs for Ultras have been cut in two to lower the barrier for entry to newcomers.

Read the rest of the review over at Eurogamer here.