Pity Koei, originator and now final bastion of the pseudo-historical battlefield brawler. Its flagship Dynasty Warriors, at one time the biggest-selling series in all of Japan, is viewed by most of the Western world with disdain or, worse, indifference. Once notable for pushing more polygons around an environment than just about anything else and tasking its player to carve their way, often single-handedly, through overwhelming, spear-wielding odds, the series fast settled into a rhythm of bi-annual updates that, on the surface at least, have done little to freshen the formula.

A one-trick war-horse, then? It’s a familiar but unfair accusation, as too often critics and gamers ignore each iteration’s subtle tweaks and novelties simply because of the aesthetic similarities to what has gone before.

Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce is a concerted attempt by the developer to approach the series in a new way, asking, more forcefully this time, that players reassess this peculiar and bombastic brand of action game. Set within the now-familiar Three Kingdoms era of Ancient China, you choose a faction and a character within that faction to play as and set about winning the war, battle by battle.

These are, in the main, similar to what has gone before, as you cut through enemy troops, a furious one-man blur of steel fury, cartwheeling through the encroaching enemy horde as if suspended on stunt wires. The kill count for each mission often reaches the hundreds, as what the opposition lacks in competence it makes up for in sheer numbers, line after line of jabbing Chinese warriors chipping away at your health as they hassle from all sides.

Once again the visuals are functional rather than beautiful, with plain lighting and scrappy textures and a camera that must be continually wrestled into providing the best window onto the action. As a port of a PSP game, play areas are far smaller than those encountered in, say, Dynasty Warriors 6 or Bladestorm, reducing the impact of what has always been one of the unique selling points of this style of game.

Irritating loading screens punctuate each and every transition from one area to the next and the structure of each mission is abridged and simplistic: go here and defeat this person or go there and acquire that item, with none of the tactical considerations that have crept into the series recently. The voice acting throughout is camp and overstated, like a seventies kung-fu overdub, and despite the rich historical context, storytelling is both brief and shallow.

And yet, despite this litany of shortcomings and mediocrity, an engaging game emerges.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here

‘Creature most vulnerable while heaving with sobs‘

Miss Universe Pageant winners, sorted by planet. GO US!

New type of wasp found that makes spiders do its bidding. Cut to grainy video of wasp riding a spider about like a pony; making it cups of tea with milk and two sugars; fetching its slippers.

Timing is everything: How OK Go’s amazing Rube Goldberg machine (which you’ve all seen by now, right?) was built.

The Sound of Summer: Wins advertising today.

Jim’s contribution to Schell debate.

Japanese DSiWare game that uses head-tracking to alter perspective and allow players to find letters hidden in 3D space.

Don’t look at the numbers too long, lest you become one of them.

The new record from De De Mouse features artwork by Final Fantasy Tactics’ Akihiko Yoshida *licks*

One time this guy stuck a bunch of Lego together and this happened.

GTA: Gordon Brown: Taiwanese news visualisation of Britain’s Prime Minister punching, like, everyone.

Auto-balancing Lego Segway built entirely from the from the standard NXT 2.0 set:

Unintentionally lewd logo designs.

Kid hits lion with samurai sword to protect dog. Turns out the lion was actually a raccoon. Hate it when that happens.

Almost half of all primates face ‘imminent extinction’. Another reason why you should call your mum tonight etc.

Pretty much the nicest thing anyone’s said. Here’s to encouraging people whose work you admire, no matter who you are.

Margaret writes for Wired about the parlour game Werewolf/ Mafia. A super read.

Link of the Week

Holy smokes a lot of TV is green-screened these days. Amazing before and after reel:

In recent years the distinctions that once separated videogame genres have blurred and faded. Is Mass Effect 2 an RPG or a third-person shooter? Is Heavy Rain a point-and-click adventure or a QTE thriller? Puzzle Quest is as much a Tolkien-cliché RPG as it is a match-three puzzler, while Peggle is Pachinko meets NBA Jam meets LSD rainbow unicorns. Blockbuster series such as BioShock and Uncharted are slippery in the hands of genre, borrowing as they do elements and ideas from a broad lineage, while WarioWare and Retro Game Challenge boil down gaming’s first principles into a hotchpotch stew that defies easy classification. Systems ooze into systems, enriching one another, and so the old videogame terminology becomes obsolete through promiscuous evolution.

Nevertheless, this diversification works best through osmosis, not Frankenstein-style stitching. In the case of White Knight Chronicles, the bolting together of a traditional single-payer JRPG with an MMO-lite multiplayer component is somewhat awkward. The first 20 minutes of the experience are spent designing an avatar who takes at most a secondary role in the main bulk of the adventure, only slipping into the protagonist’s shoes when taken online to engage in multiplayer side-questing.

Of course, RPGs have always expected their players to assume a transient role controlling a group of characters, but the disconnect between the character you create as your likeness for White Knight Chronicles and the character who drives the narrative forward is a little too jarring for comfort. It’s best approached as a game of two halves then, despite the fact that your character’s weapons, skills and competence carry back and forth between the two modes, and achievements reached in one area are relevant to the other.

As a single-player RPG, White Knight Chronicles continues Level 5’s breezy, fairytale approach to the form. As with the company’s work on Dark Cloud and Dragon Quest VIII, a grand yet bubbly orchestral soundtrack fills the warm air of some of videogaming’s most welcoming vistas. Rolling hills seasoned with flowers in full bloom connect the game’s expansive, enchanting towns and cities, and you’ll often pause to admire the rickety wagons winding their way along sunset-drenched pathways in between clobbering the local hostile wildlife. It’s a sentimental rendition of countryside living, for sure, but no less engaging for it and, for a genre that’s perhaps grown too po-faced in recent years, White Knight Chronicles provides a breath of fresh air.

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

Nathan Copeland, a 7-foot African-Irish breakdancer voiced by the bastard child of Liam Neeson and Samuel L. Jackson, slouches heavy on a leather couch. He is framed centre of a widescreen window in an office apartment at the top of a skyscraper in which people who earn more money than you go about earning more money than you. On either arm purrs a lithe, olive-skinned twin. They have matching afros, skimpy swimwear and the sort of high heels that make you proud to be a biped.

The lift doors carrying Travis Touchdown to the unlikely scene tsshck apart, and he steps out, aviator sunglasses masking quick eyes. Nathan Copeland holds the silence for a second before rising to his feet and using the momentum to lift the twins into the air. In a single arcing motion he hurls them at Travis Touchdown, who steadies himself against the incoming fleshy projectiles by placing his weight onto his back foot and firing his beam sword to humming, luminous readiness. Catching the twins mid-trajectory, Travis flurries his weapon back and forth across their twitching bodies, each suspended in midair by anime cliché.

Nathan Copeland leaps in slow motion towards the scuffle, his arms turning into two oversized ghetto-blasters as he does. The scene freeze-frames for a moment and the orchestra ducks sheepishly under the silence. Nathan and Travis catch eyes and the camera drops like a yo-yo to the floor, just in time to catch the coconut donks of two identical lipstick-wearing heads drop torso-less in front of it. Beat.

The world un-pauses and No More Heroes 2’s director Goichi Suda presses the beam sword into your palms. Three minutes later, or however many continues it takes you, Copeland is vanquished. Travis Touchdown has cleared the second boss on the road to revenge and, perhaps more pertinently for his pubescent players, to the knickers of the pretty French girl who’s promised you maybe-sex should you defeat them all.

If Dante’s Inferno sought inspiration in 14th Century Catholic nightmares, then No More Heroes 2 peers into the wet dreams of every 14-year-old boy with a boner and a power fantasy. The result is no less fearful, but, if approached as a celebration of juvenility rather than evidence for its condemnation, far more enjoyable.

It mixes toilet humour with lightsabres, decapitation with banal one-liners, themes of stiff-lipped revenge with themes of pet care, Telecaster riffs with violin soliloquies and John Woo action mechanics with Famicom-aesthetic mini-games. And somehow, in amongst all of the confusion and tension and mess, a videogame of coherent vision and engaging execution emerges.

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

The Westerners saving the Japanese games industry from within.

James Kay decided at a young age to turn his hobby into a vocation and design games instead of merely consuming them. It was a dream he realised quickly, working at a clutch of British developers in the late nineties. But despite succeeding where many others have failed, Kay wasn’t satisfied with his lot. Mario, Sonic and all of the other icons of his childhood were Japanese, their prominence in gaming’s canon matching Japan’s seemingly inextinguishable dominance of the global games industry.

What could be better for Kay than working at a Japanese studio, making the best videogames in the world under the leadership of the medium’s best-known auteurs? In 2001 he emigrated to Tokyo, landing a job at a prestigious Japanese developer, working alongside his idols. Kay had made it big in Japan.

But the reality fell some way short of the dream. As one of only a few foreign game developers in Tokyo, work was lonely. Moreover, he found the salaryman studio culture that demanded employees work long hours into the night wearying and infuriating, perceiving the practice to be merely for show and not endeavor. Partly to vent his frustrations, and partly to expose the grim realities of life at a Japanese games developer, Kay assumed the penname JC Barnett and started blogging his experiences at Japanmanship.

“I hope my writing didn’t come across as disillusioned so much as unapologetic,” he says today. “Too many people were still enamoured by Japanese games and would hear no wrong about the system that produced them. People dreamed of working in Japan without really understanding what that entailed. I hoped that I could offer a realistic view of the situation, and I was always sure to encourage people to make the move, so long as they were fully informed.”

The site fast became the go-to place for young men who, like Kay, dreamed of working abroad on the sort of games that had enriched their childhoods. But the timing of the site’s popularity ensured Japanmanship became far more than just a travel guide-cum-careers advice column. As the industry collapsed around him Kay became a reporter on the frontline, offering a window into a secretive industry in decline. With the keen, raw insight of an insider, Kay offered a glimpse of how and, perhaps more crucially, why the Japanese games industry was coming apart at the seams.

“I do not, as they say, have what it takes [to work at large Japanese games company],” he wrote in December 2008, soon after leaving to set up his own Tokyo-based company, Score Studios. “I blame my low bullshit threshold and my desire to have professional, rational work practices… I still care deeply about my work and the final product, which is why I let things get to me so easily.

“It’s not that I always know best, but I can recognise disaster… Japan has been getting away with too much for too long. Because Japanese games enjoy a certain amount of adoration, people have been too ready to forgive the many little issues that have been growing over the recent generations, and now things have come to a head. With even big-name Japanese products being technical disasters, [we have] to come to terms with the idea that, well, Japan isn’t the Mecca of video games… not any more.”

While the rest of the world watched, Kay’s posts charted the last days of an empire.

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

The pressure to reinvent is the curse of every one-time maverick. Find success in tearing up the rulebook with bold originality and it’s only too easy to merely iterate on that first idea or innovation for the rest of your life. So the idea becomes a series, becomes a franchise, becomes an institution. And the young, brash innovator finds herself head of a new establishment, replacing that which she came to undermine.

So it is with Nippon Ichi, the diminutive Japanese developer who in 2003 reinvented the strategy RPG with Disgaea. The game’s irreverent approach to both narrative and mechanics took apart the genre’s stagnating, Chess-like elements and put them back together as something at once fresh and familiar.

And while Nippon Ichi’s unconventional approach has continued to be expressed in new IP, its flagship Disgaea series has shifted only in subtle ways across its trilogy. Now, as the developer ports each title to handheld formats, it’s that much harder to search out the nonconformist heartbeat that gave life to the first game.

All of which is not to say that a handheld version of this sequel is unwelcome. Few games suit portable play so well as Disgaea, which can be savoured equally in nibbles or gulps of time. And the ability to dip in and out of a particularly tricky stage with a flick of the on/off switch makes the journey through the game immediate and smooth, even it’s a staccato rhythm.

Moreover, Nippon Ichi has lifted a number of the new character classes and systems found in the most recent PlayStation 3 title and reinserted them into this older game, changes that ensue this is undeniably the definitive version of Disgaea 2.

However, it’s hard to shake a sense of re-release ennui. Disgaea games aren’t taken on lightly and, for those who have plunged into the time-sapping depths of three distinct yet similar titles now, no amount of tweak and polish can freshen the formula. This isn’t helped by the fact that Disgaea 2’s story is the weakest of the trilogy, lacking the style and pizzazz of the first game, which remains the series highpoint. In both the first and third games, you play as an anti-hero, a likeable Netherworld dweller whose moral vacuity plays off the traditionally conscientious RPG plotlines to great comedic effect.

In Disgaea 2 you play as Adell, a typically upright Japanese RPG protagonist on a quest, not to save a princess from a castle, but to return her. Her father, the Evil Overlord Zenon, has turned Adell’s town, which forms the hub of the game, into a netherworld and its inhabitants into monsters. Rozalin, the Dark Lord’s daughter, summoned to the village by mistake, agrees to convince her father to reverse his spell, if Adell can return her home safely.

While the premise gently turns convention on its head, in the context of Nippon Ichi’s irreverent world-building playing as a good guy simply isn’t as fun as playing as a hapless demon. Numerous PSP-exclusive cameos from characters from the first game including Etna, Fallen Angle Flonne and, of course, Laharl only reveal how memorable the original cast is by comparison.

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

In videogames bigger has always equated better. Marketing men spray ever-greater numbers at us like schoolboys competing to see who can pee furthest up a wall. ‘Wonder at how many colours a MegaDrive can display!’ they say. ‘Marvel at how many minutes of cut-scene you can store on a PlayStation disc!’, ‘Quiver at the number of polygons that now comprise Lara Croft’s cleavage’.

The inference is that quality always stays abreast of ambition; that the bigger, faster and more numerous the virtual things we have to play with, the happier we will be. As a result, it’s numbers that fuel the fires of the console hardware cycles, and it’s numbers that justify gaming’s interminable sequels, explaining in neat accountant’s rows why it is that we need another Gran Turismo, even when in the hands, the difference can be imperceptible.

More recently, however, there’s been a trend away from obsessing with figures. Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Natal are arguably technological sidesteps, focusing not on multiplying the underlying numbers, but on changing the way we interact with them. And as gaming hardware has begun to languish, so developers have been forced to focus their ambitions elsewhere. Why the shift in focus? It’s financial, for sure. As the boundaries of what’s possible in a videogame have widened, so the costs of meeting this potential has become unaffordable. But also, there’s a realisation that bigger doesn’t always equal better; that, while the promise of battles featuring 256 players make for fantastic headlines and excitable playground whispers, players are nowadays more concerned with quality than bulk. Gamers, perhaps more than anyone, know that size only superficially matters. It’s what you do with it that counts.

It’s a distinction that Zipper Interactive, developer of the world’s largest scale first-person shooter, has clearly kept to the fore of their minds. While most press attention has been on MAG’s unprecedented scope, in play it fast becomes clear that the game’s value is not in merely delivering a giant war-game that maintains a solid 30 frames per second, but in what the developer has done next.

Not that you’ll perceive their cleverness at first, however. As you enter your first 256-player battle, a tiny camouflaged cog in the fearsome machinery of war, there appears to be little rhyme or reason to the battlefield. Bodies scarper over hills, through bushes and in and out of buildings with no apparent tactical cohesion. Dive into the throng and, to begin with, you too will act like a headless chicken, applying your default Modern Warfare lone wolf tactics to the sprawling battlefield, and floundering in a wash of bullets, blood and confusion. Stand atop a hill looking down on the action, and you’ll see little more than a sea of insects in a scramble for territory, one that’s mostly devoid of logic or strategy.

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

“Whether we were developing the game for Save the Children or a puppy-killing Evil Mega Corp is irrelevant to me.” Ste Curran, creative director at Zoe Mode, the Brighton-based developer responsible for Chime, is adamant. “I still want to make something that people think is awesome. The aim wasn’t to make a game as a half-hearted thank you to people for donating money to charity. It was to make a game that’s worth every one of your 400 Microsoft Points, with the added warmhearted glow that comes with gaming philanthropy after purchase. Zoe Mode doesn’t do business with corporations that kill puppies, by the way. I’m not sure if that’s company policy or whether we just haven’t found one yet.”

Chime is what happens when you cross the music of classical composer Philip Glass with the blocks of Tetris, the principles of music sequencers and the philanthropic drive of Bob Geldolf. A music-based puzzle game, it’s the flagship title of OneBigGame, the charity project that has commissioned fifteen developers to each create a game and donate the proceeds to worthy causes. The brainchild of Martin De Ronde, co-founder of Killzone’s Guerilla Games, OneBigGame has secured the involvement of developers as diverse as PaRappa the Rapper creator Masaya Matsuura, Broken Sword creator Charles Cecil and Earthworm Jim’s Dave Perry. But it’s fallen to Curran, best known for his role as co-host of Resonance FM’s award-winning videogame radio show, One Life Left, and his team to launch the first game in the project – five years after its inception.

“The idea for Chime predates One Big Game – but when the opportunity to build something for OBG came around it felt like a perfect fit,” Curran tells me. “Because, if nothing else, it gave us some hard deadlines. And yeah, doing things for charity is good. Obviously. But it hasn’t changed the way the game has been handled at all. It’s a full-time project like all the others in the studio, with a team and goals and all the joy / frustration / fast food that comes with that.”

There has to be something in it for Zoe Mode though. Is Chime really a purely philanthropic project for the company? “Zoe’s a business and businesses always need some kind of logical motivation,” Curran explains. “But you can find lots of those that don’t clash with charitable concern. And we’ve donated all of the revenue we’d get from the sales of Chime – we’re not covering our costs here. In terms of personal motivation, and I do not have an ounce of compassion in my cold robot heart so this is simpler: I like the game, I want to see other people play it, and I want to build on it.”

Curran’s playing down of the charitable aspect to Chime could be interpreted as dismissive, but it reflects the wider concern of the OneBigGame project: to base success on the merit of the games released, not on the worthiness of the concept. Contrary to what one might have expected, the clutch of developers involved want to release the very best games they can, as a matter of pride – not to merely create a giveaway experience to thank donors for their 400 MSP. In the case of Chime, the length of the game’s gestation is testament to the ambition.

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

H. G. Wells reviews Metropolis. I’d describe his general tone as ‘pissy’

Professor Layton no doubt relieved to have ‘only’ been accused of giving children rickets in the papers this week.

David Simon interviewed on the Journal. Well worth the time.

If I ever have to own a gun, I’m going to get me one that fires owls like this one.

The World’s Most Important 6 Second Drum Beat:

“If I’m lucky…Mr. Talent…will rub his…tentacles on my art.” Cartoons are funny!

Main quest or mini-game. The eternal dilemma…

If you were in any doubt about Unity being the most exciting middleware tool in gaming right now, read this.

Wutang vs. The Beatles. Properly amazing. (Very subtle use of the latter, in case they annoy you.)

It was Martin Luther King day last week. Here’s a cute, poignant story about why that matters.

The first level proper in MW2 and parts of Episode 2 of Generation Kill are frame for frame identical. Someone should do a side by side comparison! Exhibit A.

Candyman: the David Klein Story. “Spilling the beans”. A good day in the office for whoever came up with that tagline:

First Person Tetris. Will make you sick in 20 seconds max.

1983 comic themed around computer games. This is genuine treasure. Go look.

Suki’s pretty upset with game journalists this week. If you wrote a dumb/ over-reaching review of Bayonetta, ready up.

“Self-potato?” Amazing incorrect answer on Wheel of Fortune.

Wooden recreations of extinct animals. I had a panda toy when I was a kid. They said it’d soon be extinct so I’d sniff it so I’d always remember the scent when they were gone. *ahem*

12,000 years of population growth in a single graph.There’s no room at the inn.

Link of the Week

The Eurogamer 2009 Score Analysis. Like games? Like statistics? You’ll like this! Turns out I am soft on games; soft on the causes of games.

Is it possible to exhaust a genre’s potential? There may be only seven stories to be told in the world, but in the multitudinous hues of character and scenario it’s possible to dress them in infinite ways – and so keep our bookstores stocked with novelty.

Not so game systems, which in their stark mathematical and tactile nature are near impossible to disguise. Tetris is Tetris, no matter what colour the blocks or which imagery is used for the background. And so it seems feasible that some genres can be exhausted, mined of potential permutations to the extent that there are simply no truly new games to be made in that particular form.

It’s an argument given credibility by the story of the strategy RPG, that Japanese sub-genre that marries chess with Tolkien and anime eyes. From its origins in the Shining Force series through Yasumi Matsuno’s Ogre Battle games up to his masterpiece, Final Fantasy Tactics, the genre quickly pressed up against its self-imposed boundaries, leaving precious little room for any newcomer to manoeuvre.

More recently Nippon Ichi smashed through these constraints with its dazzling Disgaea series, opening up dizzying potential for customisation and pushing the conservative framework in new and interesting directions. But as a result the strategy RPG arguably became something else. Even if it was evolution rather than revolution, a great many players were left disorientated and disenfranchised by the complexities it introduced.

In the face of Nippon Ichi’s bold innovation most Japanese developers walked away from the genre, and those who didn’t consigned their creations to orthodoxy and handheld formats. The genre, it seemed, had been exhausted.

It’s into this landscape that Konami steps – resurrecting its SRPG property from the genre’s PlayStation heyday, handing development over to a Western studio and choosing to publish to PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade, where Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment joins Band of Bugs as just the second grid-based tactics game on the service. And while there’s a lot of expectation on the game’s shoulders, both for fans of the original duo of Vandal Hearts titles (to which this is a narrative prequel) and for fans of the genre, poorly-served for so long, this is a game that does little to refute the argument.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.

Despite serving downloadable content since 1995 with the Satellaview, Nintendo still hasn’t got a handle on how to best present and promote games that don’t come in boxes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the curious scrubland of DSiWare, the company’s digital distribution platform for the latest iteration of its ubiquitous handheld.

In addition to the confusion that comes from the service’s region-specific stores (which last week resulted in Q-Games’ Dylan Cuthbert finding out his game Reflect Missile had gone on sale in America via Twitter) Nintendo’s promotion of titles on the service is negligible, leaving gamers in the dark as to which games are arriving when, or why indeed they should care when they do turn up. Despite this, or rather because of it, there’s a thrill to be found in panning for gold amongst the digital dross, one heightened when you do discover treasure.

Starship Patrol is treasure, a jewel of a game obscured by the plain rocks that surround it. Q-Games’ second title for DSiWare, it forms an excellent companion piece to Reflect Missile, once again trimming away the superfluous fat of its influences while assuming an understated, minimalist aesthetic to deliver an elegant, engaging package. This time the developer takes on the divisive fixed-path Tower Defence form, in which you use funds to place fixed turrets onto a game board and then watch as your arrangement fends off wave after wave of enemy attackers.

Despite the intergalactic back-story, the game’s visuals are plain and star-less, presenting pencil sketchpad approximations of hulking spaceships as viewed from above, like colouring-in book architectural plans. The utilitarian effect is heightened by the stark backgrounds, which backdrop the action with uniformly gridded rows, like maths paper pulled from an exercise book. The grey and white lines are interrupted by only the most restrained splashes of pastel colour in the HUD and attacking ships, and yet the understated approach manages to be both contemporary and stylish despite its obvious thriftiness.

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

“Uncharted 2’s success may take us away from the potential that videogaming has twitching in its womb.” Best of 2009. But in which medium? Contains a few of my thoughts.

Power Glove + Arduino + Unity3D. Yowzers.

Mario vs. Bowser, inspired by Alan Moore. The league of extraordinary plumbers.

30 beautiful/ terrifying Christmas short. Let’s just hope this idea doesn’t get into THE WRONG HANDS.

Thing I’m gonna read in 2010. That Chabon endorsement on the front cover is the best endorsement ever.

15,740 self-proclaimed social media gurus on Twitter. You become one too if they touch you! Like zombies, but shit.

“We’re looking for a songwriter to create lyrics for a theme song to our next game” A job for the Doyouinverts?

Tiny Cartridge’s ‘09 handheld recommendations are good. Also, that screenshot at the top (from the brilliant Retro Game Challenge) makes me cry a little

Exhaustive breakdown of Pitchfork scoring in ‘09.

DieHard Battery vs. Reggie Watts. This is an excellent advertisement:

Woah. This is the best chiptune I’ve heard. Simultaneously the soundtrack to the past AND the future.

Brandon Boyer’s list of games to look forward to in 2010 is useful and typically leftfield.

A Flash game. Superb execution.

The joke, so it goes among Final Fantasy’s legions of hecklers, is that aside from some new belts, buckles and hairspray nothing ever really changes in Japan’s most misleadingly-titled RPG franchise. Rather, each subsequent release echoes the preceding one in both form and function, the aged, crumbly mechanics that drive each game merely obfuscated by ever more dazzling CGI.

Glance behind the curtain of technological wizardry, they say, and you’re left with an experience that’s only superficially changed from the one its creator laid down over 20 years ago. While the worlds and characters that inhabit them change from Final Fantasy to Final Fantasy, the rest stands resolute; everything changes, it all stays the same.

While there are kernels of truth to this scoffing, its greater falsehoods are made plain when comparing Final Fantasy XIII, Japan’s great, white RPG hope for the PlayStation 3 (and, later this year, Xbox 360), to its immediate predecessor. Chalk and cheese, the two games have an almost diametrically opposed approach.

Final Fantasy XII was a bold pushing of the genre’s boundaries, combining a deep and innovative MMO-esque tactical battle system with liberating freedom to explore its rich, European-influenced towns and cities. By contrast, the first five hours of Final Fantasy XIII take the form of a fiercely linear walk, one interrupted by frequent, usually unavoidable battles, even more frequent cut-scenes, and not a single town or city to explore.

There are familiar ideas and motifs, such as the Yoshitaka Amano artwork brandished across the start screen, the traditional blip sound effect as you scroll through the menus and the tiny Chocobo that lives in the hapless Satzu’s afro (although curiously the fanfare that traditionally closes each successfully completed battle is gone).

These touchstones help tether the thirteenth mainline title in the series to its umbrella branding, but it’s difficult to consider the wider choices the developer has made as anything but a retreat into JRPG conservatism after the bold creativity of the twelfth.

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

Street Fighter IV wasn’t my game of 2009. Rather, 2009 was my year of Street Fighter IV.

It devoured time, of course, as the 350 hours tallied in the player’s record screen attest. But more than that, Capcom’s inspired, distinguished reinvention of its most popular fighting franchise demanded devotion, yoiking me from whichever other game was vying for my attention like a jealous, insatiable lover.

Because of this game I’d often find myself playing in Goodge Street’s Casino or Trocadero whenever passing through London, trying out in public arcades those virtual lessons learned in private. Because of this game I spent four months pursuing an interview with Daigo Umehara, the elusive Street Fighter world champion. Because of this game I spent countless hours watching YouTube videos of tournament matches, trying to pick up on the rhythms and techniques of the masters. But most of all, because of this game, I gained a new lens through which I view all videogames, where the medium has come from, and where it’s headed. Its significance to me is immeasurable.

If 2008 was defined by grand narratives, 60-hour epics played out across Fallout 3’s radioactive Washington or Fable II’s leafy Albion, then this year was about a single, recurring 99-second vignette: two characters sparring for dominance. It may be a short story with only two possible outcomes (three if you count the occasional Double KO), but it’s one told in a hundred thousand different ways, each with its own nuance and pace. From a relatively small palette of moves, players can express themselves in myriad different ways. It’s this combination of tight breadth and unfathomable depth that continues to make Street Fighter IV such an irresistible proposition, 10 months down the line.

Because, yes, for all the grand accolades laid at Uncharted 2’s hiking boots, few of us are still playing that game on a nightly basis. By contrast, last month, long after the game had any professional relevance to us, I found myself sitting in the South London flat of Capcom’s European PR manager, drinking cups of hurriedly-brewed tea and KO’ing till dusk. While we played we discussed characters, tactics and examined our individual strengthes and weaknesses in the game. This sort of thing rarely happens to people who write about videogames for a living, as becoming attached to a game after the potential to make money from the relationship has passed is an occupational hazard. But Street Fighter IV transcends mere product: it is a way of life.

In part the game’s success in my world can be attributed to combination of circumstance and convenience. As we grow older and responsibilities make ever-greater demands of us (and, after all, who else does Street Fighter IV primarily appeal to than the 25 to 35-year-old males driven into its arms by memories of the forebears it so carefully tributes) so the appeal of concentrated entertainment rises. This is a game that can be enjoyed in a 15-minute leisure window, delivering maybe 10 highly charged, satisfying and diverse matches in the time it would have taken me to plod through an RPG’s loading screens. While today’s gaming culture conflates value with expanse, my life’s circumstances ensure the most rewarding and valuable games are those that can be savoured in chunks in between changing a baby’s nappy, or hoovering the lounge. Brevity is often a virtue.

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

36 years on and there’s still inspiration to be drawn from Breakout, Atari’s formative, blockbusting arcade game that helped define the very vocabulary videogames have been jabbering ever since.

A sort of inverse Peggle, with Bjorn the Unicorn swapped out for a missile-riding Tron nanobot, Reflect Missile does little to advance upon its primal inspiration’s simplistic visuals. Instead, it snuggles up to the primitive 8-bit aesthetic, placing cool monotone green or red Amstrad blocks atop school exercise-book graph-paper backgrounds and soundtracking them with chiptune lullabies. Only the tiniest flashes of contemporary flair are permitted here: fading missile trails that bisect the screen or pixel-art fireworks that bloom when a stage is completed.

No, at 500 DSi Points, Q-Games isn’t interested in turning Breakout into Virtua Tennis. Rather, it’s interested in taking Breakout, snapping it apart and putting it back together again with some of the pieces back to front.

The developers’ ability to take a building-block genre and simmer it down to a zingy concentrate has been proved time and again by way of its PixelJunk suite of titles on PlayStation 3, which have variously reduced and reshaped tower defence, racing and shoot-’em-ups. While Reflect Missile doesn’t bear the family name, it certainly shares the family likeness of its PSN cousins, adding a few precise rules and ideas to its inspiration to create something that’s at once entirely fresh yet entirely familiar.

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

In the ten years that separate the end of Bioshock from the beginning of its sequel, the underwater city of Rapture has deteriorated. It’s not that the place has necessarily decayed, though the art deco signage and once plush 1930’s fixtures and fittings exhibit perhaps a little more wear, tear and gunshot wounds than before. Rather, it’s those inhabitants that roam its deep-sea corridors who have worsened with the passing of time, their hellish mutations accelerated yet further by another decade’s worth of substance abuse.

ADAM, the curious, DNA-altering essence extracted from sea slugs and injected into the veins of Rapture’s bored and disillusioned citizens, has diversified and toughened the city’s monstrous population in terrible ways. If Bioshock was about the utopia project turned to dystopian ruin, then Bioshock 2 examines what happens when dystopias descend to hells. 2K Marin is quick to point out that Jack, the brawny but essentially human protagonist from the first game, simply would not survive in this cruel new world of heroin-chic splicers and ethically-bankrupt scientists.

So perhaps it’s just as well that this time around, you play not as a plane crash survivor who stumbles serendipitously into Rapture’s depths, but rather a prototype Big Daddy, one of the hulking creatures – part oversized diver, part portable drill bit – who plod its network of underwater tunnels. Known only as Subject Delta, your character has become separated from his little sister, one of the waif-like girls who accompany each Big Daddy around Rapture harvesting ADAM from its dead and dying citizens. Subject Delta has gained sentience and, importantly, a free will of his own. Unshackled from the whims of his creator, you’re free from the relentless task of hunting ADAM; free, if 2k Marin are to be believed, to become whoever you choose to become.

You can read the rest of this piece over at VG24/7 here

When I finally go, can it be in the claws of a GIANT EAGLE?

Castle of Cagliostro scale model. Probably the best anime for non-anime dorks, right?

Playing card spheres. A Christmas project if ever I saw one.

Capitol Records sues Vimeo over lip-dub videos. Because they are colossal, near extinct twits.

Extended US Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks TV commercial. A brazillion times better than the European one:

I really like this poster for Disney’s Mulan.

Robotic Doppelgangers For Sale. $223,000. AND WORTH THREE TIMES THAT.

Now that’s a kill screen.

Cowboy vs. Batman? Short, sweet post from Tom Armitage on how our approaches to game puzzles are tied to the imagination

Guitar Hero with 21,268 Christmas lights:

“Prominent blog Kotaku said that the ‘boobs smorgasbord’ was a ‘pathetic attempt at enticing people to play‘”

Whereas, a ‘boobs smorgasbord’ is perfectly acceptable when trying to get people to “read”…

Martin Sheen’s in Mass Effect 2?! WOAH.

Politicizing game rewards: “Earn Farmville cash by writing to Congress to oppose US Health reform” This is how the world ends, FYI.

Dave Eggers on selling out. Awexome.

The Citizen Kane of regrets: “I’m ashamed of Rosebud… It’s kind of a dollar book Freudian gag”

Ghosts of Shopping Past. A collection of still images of America’s abandoned malls.

“The hit detection is extremely hit or miss” In other words: perfect, then.

The peerless Phoenix perform 1901 in front of the Eiffel Tower for French site fantastique, La Blogotheque.

“The spiders are harnessed … held down in a delicate way.” Tapestry woven from the silk of a million spiders.

Link of the Week

On finding the single unknown fighter who boxed Ali. When I grow up, I want to write about videogames like this.

Half-Minute Hero is a two-fingered salute to anyone who’s ever complained that the Japanese RPG is too long and tedious to be worth the bother. From the moment your hero leaves his pastoral village to when he lands a death blow upon the world-threatening overlord, the game distills the traditional 60-hour play arc of Japan’s interactive fantasy epic into 30-second speed-run concentrate. It may be a single-note joke – building a frantic dash against the clock in the gaming genre least suited to the task – but it’s an excellent joke nonetheless. Moreover, in its self-assured execution and endlessly inventive subversion of cliché, Half-Minute Hero succeeds in becoming a masterful reinvention of that which it parodies, simultaneously celebrating the form while overhauling the function of one of gaming’s oldest templates to create something fresh and imaginative.

Like the Reduced Shakespeare Company, Half-Minute Hero appropriates the language and aesthetic of its influence (in this case, the 8-bit JRPG) but trims away the bulk. The result is a conveyor belt of ADHD-friendly bites of play. Entire plotlines are snipped through like shorthand synopses; random battles explode and vanish like double-time fireworks while your character levels up in the blink of a transition screen. The need for all this hurry is pressing: in 30 seconds’ time an evil overlord is set to whisper a spell to end the world. The aim (at least within the core game mode) remains resolute throughout: race from your home village to the overlord’s castle and defeat him within this improbable time limit in order to save the world.

While traditional random battles interrupt your progression on the world map, you have no direct control over combat. Instead, your character careers across the battle screen from left to right, bumping heads with enemies until one or the other’s health is depleted. Post-battle there’s no results screen. Any experience points gained are added to a hidden total and, if you earned enough, level your character up, ensuring the next battle is faster won.

An unflinching digital countdown timer is constantly stamped on the screen, revealing how many milliseconds are left till global annihilation, adding a near relentless pressure to proceedings. Time pauses only when you enter village safe havens, where you can replenish health, purchase better armour and weaponry or gather clues for how to reach the overlord’s castle. Step outside again, and the mere suggestion of sloth is enough to invoke the apocalypse.

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

Continuity is an AMAZING flash game

Muscle March coming to the West. The best homoerotic gaming since Cho Aniki/ Gears of War?

50 awesome things about Tokyo. Hott tips.

The brilliant 25 Times a Second gives up AAA games: “No more grinding. No more 15 hour stories that aren’t worth 15 minutes.”

Sin and Punishment 2 box art. I would marry this artwork in the face.

YouTube Piano. Neat, if ultimately useless, idea.

FAO: Nepalese chickens. Might be time to emigrate.

The DeLorean Motor Company in its heyday. If you already saw these then travel back to a time when you hadn’t.

The amazing photographs of Barry Underwood.

Accidental geography. For people who see maps in the unlikeliest places.

Pentecostals vs. Drum and Bass: This is amazing.

Social media sites as substance vices. At this rate I’ll be dead by 31.

How biologists leave their wives.

Read the micro-poem ‘Troths’ by Carl Sandburg again. The last two lines win poetry. Also: my heart.

TheJapanese are better at barcodes than you.

Scientists Create Bacteria that Glows to Reveal Land Mines. Hope they develop some that works on lost car keys.

Things Magazine writes about the GTA4 time lapse videos uploaded by Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry. Good stuff all round.

Link of the Week

What Philip K Dick thought of Blade Runner. An amazing document.

“Right now, there’s nobody younger than me that I feel threatened by. I haven’t met anyone that I felt possesses the skill to surpass me in the future. I’m not over-evaluating myself. I can analytically see their weakness, their ineptitudes.”

Daigo Umehara is better at Street Fighter than you and he knows it. Fighting games always bring out the inner show-off, but his is no hollow boast. Earlier this year, the 28-year-old Japanese defeated American champion Justin Wong at the Evolution 2009 Championship to take the Street Fighter IV world title.

Daigo Umehara, it turns out, is better than everyone at Street Fighter.

This victory was just the latest in a long line of high-profile competitive achievements that Umehara (Ume, to his friends) has to his name, the most famous of which is his astonishing comeback against Wong during the 2004 Evolution loser’s bracket final. You don’t need to understand the intricacies of Street Fighter III’s parry system to appreciate that something extraordinary is happening as he bats away each of Wong’s potentially lethal attacks before taking the round with a dazzling special move of his own. The crowd’s ecstatic reaction, coupled with Umehara’s understated demeanour in the face of such deafening adulation, catapulted the clip to YouTube stardom, where it ranks amongst gaming’s most famous.

Since then, Umehara’s fame and reputation has spread through the fighting game community and beyond. He plays with unrivalled precision and grace, combining the reactions of a peak-form Muhammad Ali with the strategy of a Garry Kasparov. He is undoubtedly the greatest Street Fighter player to have played the game.

But his own understanding of his supremacy comes not from the vanity of world championship titles but rather from the measured perception of a giant. “I think, right now, I may well be at my absolute peak,” he tells me. “My reactions are probably comparable to when I was younger, but I no longer grow agitated when I’m cornered. Nothing can mentally break me anymore; I have mastered nervousness and tension. I can instantly tell opponents apart and categorise them into groups and types according to their personality and weaknesses. As I haven’t felt my physical abilities weakening yet, I think I might be at the peak of my career as a fighting gamer.”

Spoken by anyone else, this might come across as supreme arrogance. But while Umehara’s known to his fans as “The Beast” (a term he neither coined nor uses himself), his real-life persona ill-fits the nickname. This tall, handsome Japanese is altogether shy and unassuming. In contrast to his American rivals, Umehara shuns the spotlight, rarely giving interviews to the press or meeting fans.

He is a star born in the arcade scene, a dimly lit underground world filled with cigarette butts, bleeping neon lights, cathode-tan boys and the sweat of twitch competition. His digital sport has neither the glamour of boxing nor the ceremony of wrestling: there are no promoters or agents to turn talent into stars in this world. Even if there were, one feels as if Umehara’s well-mannered, nice-boy exterior would always mask the inner beast.

Umehara is near-impossible to track down. Initially, Capcom suggests I fly to Tokyo, find an arcade where he’s playing of an afternoon and sit next to him with a tape recorder. After he declines an invitation to a UK tournament and fails to show up to a meeting we schedule during this year’s Tokyo Game Show, Capcom steps in to help organise a cross-continental rendezvous, using one of Umehara’s bilingual friends as an intermediary, to put my questions to him.

His reluctance to talk to interviewers coupled with these difficult-to-reach circumstances have contributed to the enigmatic legend that is Umehara. Rumour and speculation follow his every move. When, in 2005, he took a two-year break from the fighting game scene, some fans speculated it was so he could focus his attention on his other love: pachinko. His reactions, so the story goes, are so supernaturally fast that he is able to tilt the odds in his favour far enough to earn a living from what is essentially a game of chance. In truth, Umehara works in the public welfare/health sector by day, following in the footsteps of his parents who both work at a hospital in Aomori, Japan.

“Playing games professionally is not really an option in Japan,” he explains. “If I did really want to do something with my gaming skills in the industry, I think I would have already done so by now. It’s only relatively recently that I started to receive invitations to overseas tournaments with prize money. In Japan, games are something you play for enjoyment; you don’t expect anything in return.”

You can read the rest of this featureover at Eurogamer here.

Kieron Gillen on ‘No Russian’, the controversial level from Modern Warfare 2. Pretty much the last word on the subject.

Last week the eloquent, anonymous ex-London call girl, Belle de Jour, revealed her identity. Here’s an excellent side story about a blogger who figured it all out years ago, and how he helped keep her secret from the press.

Someone forgot to consider the SUN when designing this wall.

The 100 best quotes from The Wire:

Veteran video game writer Susan O’Connor (Far Cry 2) on ways to advance the craft of game narrative.

Matthew Wasteland writes apologetically about Citizen Kane and videogames. Great stuff.

LEGO Architecture Series: Empire State Building

‘Space Invaders explores the increasingly blurred boundaries between videogame spaces and real spaces’. Let’s all definitely go.

A lawnmower being controlled by a Wiimote. We are basically three steps away from F15s being controlled by Guitar Hero.

Two kite surfers jump over Worthing pier: THEY JUMP OVER WORTHING PIER.

Turns out Russia’s the airport massacre level of Modern Warfare 2.

Three guesses as to whether this Tipalet cigarette slogan was conceived by a man or a woman.

‘Broken Things’, an exhibition by Chilean artist Livia Marin. Sort of want to eat these…

The French are better at zombies than you. Braaaaiiiiiinnnnsssss-a-hon-hee-hon.

Gaming will eat itself.

The UK trailer for Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno looks INCROYABLE: Let’s all see this, OK?

Quizipedia. Excellent multiple choice quiz generated from Wikipedia scrape data.

Jordan Mechner’s 11 tips for designing narrative-driven games. Concise and brilliant.

Howl’s Moving Castle, recreated in Lego.

iPhone developers troll Tim Langdell.

Link of the Week

Readers, meet Josiah James Parkin. Look around son. One day, all of this could be yours… (He is the reason for the sporadic updates in the past fortnight. Apols but, y’know…)

The best two Japanese action games of the year are diametrically opposed in approach. Demon’s Souls is a brooding traipse through the corridors of purgatory, fair but relentlessly unforgiving. It teaches that modern videogames have made us weak and stupid, that our gaming muscles have atrophied through the efforts of so many mollycoddling developers. Every sword strike must be carefully considered, and button-mashers are not so much ridiculed as downright abused for their lack of sophistication. The result is a tense but ponderous experience, one that demands supreme trepidation before each step taken, careful contemplation before every input made.

In Bayonetta, meanwhile, you press a button and your television implodes.

Beloved is a celestial giant with the face of a three-year-old cherub and the body of a weightlifting Buddha, who falls from heaven to cobblestone with a squelchy thwack. Standing just 20 feet from this sudden epiphany, Bayonetta smirks to the cameraman, who’s angled our viewpoint on the scene from ground level in order to fully celebrate the titular anti-heroine’s ninja Barbie physique and secretary-cum-sex-worker attire. Her wink to lens is the starter pistol for interactivity.

You rotate the left analogue stick and hit the X button on cue, and Bayonetta cartwheels into a handstand, firing the twin pistols attached to her stilettos into Beloved’s rolls of fat by clicking her heels in rapid succession. You break the sequence short with a triple jump through the air, esoteric purple wings momentarily sprouting from her arched back as you do so, before landing on Beloved’s shoulders. The camera wheels and dives around, matching the kinetic assault of Bayonetta’s body blows with dazzling movements of its own.

Finish him: an invitation to execute a Climax Attack on your wearied angelic opponent stamps onto screen. As you make the input, Bayonetta plants her feet square on the ground. Her black latex suit is absorbed into her skin, inexplicably extending the strands of her hair as it’s drawn up through her body.

Shielding what’s left of her modesty with her arms, Bayonetta flings her head backwards and her new 30-foot hair extensions assume the form of a black dragon: follicular shape shifting. It bares shadowy tooth shapes before lurching forward and down onto the cherub’s torso. You madly hammer X to fill a Megaton bonus-point gauge, each mash encouraging the beast to chew a little harder. Then, in the final moment of climax, it rips Beloved’s torso in two, dropping a crimson waterfall onto the cobblestones below like a dead weight.

Bayonetta’s hair retracts itself back into her scalp. Her clothes re-envelop her body. She pops a lollipop into her mouth and sucks twice. Lara Croft shivers. Airport massacre levels, be damned. Bayonetta eats angels with her hairdo. Let’s have a discussion about that on the Today programme.

You can read the rest of this review here.

Twice, Infinity Ward asks if you’re absolutely sure you want to see it. The scene, the fourth you’ll encounter in the most widely anticipated game of the year, could be “disturbing” or “offensive”, repeats the warning. You smile and agree that, yes, you are sure you want to see it. This is a videogame. They give them 18 certificates, but only to appease people who don’t really understand what’s going on. Sure, the images of violence and bloodshed on Modern Warfare’s battlefields can be disturbing to an onlooker, but death in a first-person shooter is a five-second setback, a micro-reincarnation designed to provide challenge and an impetus to improve, not distress.

Likewise, the crimson firework that explodes whenever bullet meets target is merely a visual cue to indicate another object removed from the shooting gallery, while the wash of blood that temporarily clouds your view when you’re wounded is just a health gauge obfuscated. The orchestra-swells and military bombast? All window dressing for what is, essentially, Space Invaders evolved. You take cover behind walls and shoot aliens. In 1978, these were line-dancing pixel clusters from outer space. In 2009 they’re Afghans. The metaphor’s changed, but the principle remains the same: avoid missing headshot for high score. A videogame. Yes, I’m sure I want to see it.

The first three missions of Modern Warfare 2 do little to change your mind. The training level, set in a desert encampment somewhere in the Middle East, is literally a shooting gallery. You race from pillar to post, refreshing muscle memory, making split-second fire/hold-fire decisions, flitting between your rifle and pistol while racing against the clock to reach the end of the assault course. Not satisfied with your score? Have another go. Shave seconds from your time by improving your speed and accuracy. The sand particles billowing in the wind, the off-duty soldiers playing basketball in the communal yard and the throb of the noonday sun are of a fidelity not seen in games before, but the systems they dress are as old as videogame time.

Then you move out onto the streets of Afghanistan in the boots of one PFC Joseph Allen, 1st Battalion 75th Ranger regiment. The faded Arabic slogans daubed on the walls and the upturned supermarket trolleys under dilapidated bridges invest a foreign-correspondent air of believability into the scenario. But the unlikely hail of RPG-fire, screeching overhead jets, sub-bass thwap helicopters and balaclava-wearing hostiles ensure it’s the 10 o’clock news played through a Michael Bay filter: reality, with the contrast turned up.

In the following level, now playing as British soldier Gary Sanderson in a duo mission with the understated Soap MacTavish, you tear down a snowy mountain in Kazakhstan on an implausibly fast snowmobile, steering with your right hand, taking down enemy riders with a pistol in your left. As you finally perform a Hollywood leap across a 40-foot ice ravine, the series settles into the sort of James Bond action preposterousness of which it’s always managed to remain short.

Yeah. A videogame. I am absolutely sure that I want to see it.

The voiceover that precedes what will shortly become the most notorious scene in gaming makes it clear that your mission is a necessary one. You are a good guy, dressed as a bad guy, and while bad things are about to happen, good will out. Ding, and the lift doors unclasp. You step out onto an airport foyer, and into an entirely new idea of what constitutes an 18-certificate videogame.

You don’t have to shoot. But you do have to observe. Forced into an unbreakable stroll, your only choices are where to look and whether to stay abreast of your murderous companions as they gun down the crowds of innocents, or whether to lag behind and administer a coup de grace to the terminal’s terminally wounded. In contrast to the dry professionalism of soldiering displayed in the rest of the game, there’s an inefficient laziness to this terrorist spree. The men fire from the hip in sweeping arcs, their purpose merely to create mayhem, not to eliminate threat.

The screaming is the soundtrack to post-traumatic stress; the visuals like snuff CCTV footage lurking under some evil stone in a dark corner of the internet (albeit undermined somewhat by the curiously small palette of civilian character models being gunned down). One man who takes a shot to the stomach crawls along the ground on all fours, blood pouring from his fingers. Finish the job, watch or walk on: these are your options. The removal of player agency is at once frustrating and brilliant: through it, the limitations of the first-person-shooter’s purpose and themes are revealed. In a genre that limits you to interactions sent down the barrel of a gun, for perhaps the first time in history, Infinity Ward makes you wish for a bandage instead.

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

Hey, Obama! Dude, you won already…

Succeed blog. Positively wonderful.

I am a grown man. I have responsibilities and dependents. And yet this squat chocobo tat steals my heart. Idiot.

“Many gamers would rather take a beating if they think that they are accomplishing something” Nice little post.

List of cats with fraudulent diplomas.

I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of pictures of Japanese men pulling silly faces.

Awesome ‘No Smoking’ ads.

The batman. Sort of.

Long live the author. Good thoughts, well-expressed.

Slightly incongruous message but super sweet 3D work in this short animation from Tronic Studio:

Vehicle smashing minigame returns to Street Fighter. Oh! My car…

How to use an apostrophe. A useful chart.

Chiddy Bang’s first record is out. And free! Hyper sweet Philly hipster-hop.

Lichtenstein’s iconic blond made flesh.

Paper sneakers. Good in the sun. In the rain, not so much.

Knitted Panda ski mask. Combine with www.banknotes365.com for criminal win.

This comment on Gamasutra about defining the role and purpose of a game designer is brilliant.

A death on the line.

Wataru Itou: better at origami than you.

Banner ads literally tied to flies: Oh advertising…

Link of the Week

The disappearing man. Excellent at hide and seek. Providing you count to five thousand before going looking.

“Those are good things. But a mind is blown when something you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true; when the world turns out to be far vaster, far more marvelous or malevolent than you ever dreamed; when you get proof that everything is connected to everything else, that everything you know is wrong, that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing off its nethermost edge.”

The peerless Michael Chabon on storytelling for children. Read and digest.

Also, while we’re on the subject, here’s one of my favourite extracts from Kavalier and Clay again, for those of you who missed it the first time around.