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Final Fantasy Live in Paris
In 1913 the audience of Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées flirted with full-scale riot during the lusty premiere of Rite of Spring. That flirting no doubt felt like uninhibited manhandling for the poor, soon-to-be-bruised souls in the orchestra, pelted with whatever objects were to hand by an audience driven furious at the avant garde-ness of Stravinsky’s ...
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Games of 2012: Tokyo Jungle
It’s a dog-eat-dog kind of world out there. Not literally, in the case of Tokyo Jungle: cannibalism is one of the game’s few taboos. But the fiery Pomeranian will happily bite his kin to death, even if he’s forbidden from chowing down on the furry corpse thereafter. Figuratively then, it’s a dog-eat-dog world. Literally? Well, ...
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Persona 4: Golden – Review
Ostensibly, Persona 4 is a game about a group of teenagers living in extraordinary circumstances. Not that the rural Japanese town of Inaba – the community into which your character disembarks at the start of the game, having fled Tokyo’s smog and commotion to stay with his detective uncle and young cousin – is particularly ...
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Lego The Lord of the Rings
The Lego games, which seek to rebuild colossi of contemporary family cinema franchises in miniature bricks, have rather less to do with the plastic stuff from which they take their name than appearances suggest. The physical toy is a creative material that allows us to build from the imagination in near limitless ways. From a ...
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Who spilled Hot Coffee?
Not for the first time that month, Patrick Wildenborg was disoriented. With a one year-old baby in the house he was familiar with the fug of a deep sleep cut short by noise. But this awakening was different. It was prompted not by an infant’s wail but the hysteria of a telephone ringing in the ...
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Borderlands 2: Mr Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage – Review
It’s the revenge fantasy of every developer wounded by a ruthless critic: a side-quest in which you send your player off to murder an unsympathetic game journalist. It escalates, of course, as all revenge fantasies do. At first your task is merely to take down the author of a mean-spirited 6/10 review for a game ...
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PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale – Review
The thought of a fighting game featuring a cast of characters plucked from Nintendo’s heritage was so unthinkable that for a while its thinker, Mashahiro Sakurai, kept it entirely to himself. Knowing the chances of securing Nintendo’s permission to pitch Princess Peach against Luigi in a commercial cat-fight were slim, Sakurai made a prototype of ...
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Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified – Review
Black Ops Declassified is a Call of Duty game minus the spectacle. And for a series that has placed almost all of its energy into developing spectacle over the past few years – the snowmobile leaps over famished ravines, the horseback charges into tank fortresses, the collapse of the Eiffel Tower – this leaves us ...
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Karateka – Review
Mariko, just like every winsome princess trapped against her will in a castle, longs to be rescued. But being rescued isn’t her only longing. There is, of course, the delicate matter of the rescuer. Salvation is all well and good, but the specifics of the saviour are just as important. Who’s the face behind the ...
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Halo 4 – Review
It’s the end of Halo 3 and the world has ended with a bang, not a whimper. More specifically, it’s ended with our protagonist Master Chief riding a jeep off a flaming planet into the bay of a derelict escape ship: a catastrophic boom, not a whimper, perhaps. The aliens retreat, the flames turn to ...
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A League of their own
Twice a month Riot Games, creator of League of Legends, hires an actor to visit its Santa Monica studio. While the developer adds a couple of playable characters to the online PC game each month, this performer isn’t hired to provide voice acting for a new champion, or to be rigged with Ping-Pong balls and ...
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Fable: The Journey – Review
Motion control cannot be recalled. It cannot be uninvented. But, like the fake plastic guitars of the past, the stereoscopic 3D of the future and all those other tech gimmicks that sizzle in and fizzle out, it will in time be removed from our video games. In that sense Fable: The Journey feels like a ...