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Dead Space 2
Some games elicit fear in their player through ambiance: the hollow grumble of a cello, a mortal cry for help daubed in blood on a wall, a rocking horse swaying in an unfamiliar breeze, candles flickering beside some arcane scrawl, a nursery rhyme sung by an unseen child. Other games engender fear through brute shocks: ...
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Little Big Planet 2
Few games leave no room for a sequel. It makes for poor business and, let’s not forget, while the intended destination for most videogame makers is fun, the fuel that gets them there is potential profit. These days, if you want to make money from a blockbuster, the sequel is part of the business plan. ...
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Top 5 Underrated Games of 2010
That videogame blockbusters such as Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops top many of the end of year game lists is of no surprise. Not to belittle their great accomplishments, but these titles have been praised with such predicable enthusiasm over the past month that their celebration can seem ...
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On Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
Need for Speed is the Britney Spears of video game brands, a cipher to front whichever hot producer or fashionable trend its owner, EA, wants to hand creative duties to on any given year. As a result, its games may provide a consistent financial yield, but they are also the hardest to pick out from ...
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On Minecraft
The end of another year and it’s time for retrospective tributes to the best and worst games of the past twelve months. This morning Gamasutra posted its ten best games of the year, and I contributed words on Minecraft, a game released in Alpha form in 2009, but which found its global popularity and its ...
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Quake Arena Arcade
Quake III Arena, from which this Xbox Live Arcade port is derived, popularised many of the conventions and much of the terminology of the contemporary first-person shooter: everything from brown corridors to the term ‘deathmatch’. And yet, sitting down with id Software’s shooter concentrate 11 years after its debut, it’s curious just how different a ...
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Thinking Outside of the Box
The review I wrote of Nintendo’s commemorative 25th anniversary edition of the Famicom Super Mario games last week proved divisive. Not only were many of Eurogamer’s readers unhappy with my approach, but ex-Amiga Power journalist, Stuart Campbell felt compelled to write a rather scathing attack on my approach on his blog. That kind of thing ...
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Super Mario All-Stars
One tragic casualty of the game industry’s creep towards digital distribution is videogame packaging. Games are, by definition, ethereal things: arcane lines of code that push clusters of coloured light from pixel to pixel on electronic displays. As such, the boxes they come in help ground these esoteric journeys of mind and screen in certain ...
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Trials HD: Big Thrills
There are two types of videogame: those in which you develop an avatar’s skills, and those in which an avatar develops yours. Story games – the Zeldas, Final Fantasies and Metroids – generally fall into the former camp. As you lead these characters on a journey, so they grow and develop, slowly becoming more fully ...
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In Conversation With Braid’s Jonathan Blow
The last time I sat down with Jonathan Blow was the day before the release of his first game, Braid, on Xbox Live Arcade. In the weeks that followed, Braid established itself as one of the most successful releases on the service, a fact worth celebrating regardless of what you think about the idiosyncratic experience. ...
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Music To Play Games By
The world’s first videogame console, the Magnavox Odyssey, was mute. Its Kubrick-esque logo and smooth curved white and black casing, like the dashboard of a newborn space shuttle, may have been pure science fiction, but it was a system that asked players to simply imagine the sound effects to go with their on-screen actions. 38 ...
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Def Jam Rapstar
Two years ago I saw the Wu Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah perform at the UK music festival, All Tomorrow’s Parties. There, in a sorry venue at the heart of Minehead’s Butlins, carpet sticky with beer from so many bleak cabaret nights, Ghostface performed to a packed room of largely white, middle-class music buffs and scenesters. ...