-
Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom
The Majin is everything that Ico’s Yorda is not. In Fumito Ueda’s classic, you lead the waif-like girl-child along a castle’s craggy ramparts, crying out to her to follow your footsteps, catching her by her wrist when she falls, and batting away the black ghouls that tug at her bright white dress. It is a ...
-
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon
Once the pinnacle of console military simulations, the Ghost Recon series’ slide into soft-edged mediocrity has been inexorable and somewhat tragic. Ubisoft, in redefining the solemn squad-based franchise as a mainstream rollercoaster ride of set-pieces, may have succeeded in moving Ghost Recon closer to the tone and character of the more successful Call of Duty, ...
-
Shaun White Skateboarding
Ignore the title: Shaun White Skateboarding has surprisingly little to do with the sport. Not in the sense that the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, with its physics-defying stunts and 5000-metre grinds, was a world away from the bruising realities of skateboarding. But rather, the story, themes and systems that underpin Ubisoft Montreal’s game have ...
-
GoldenEye 007
For 13 years it’s been the critic’s go-to reference point for Bond games and movie tie-ins. Endless review introductions have pondered: ‘Will this be the game to match GoldenEye 007′s triumphs?’ before meandering to their inevitable conclusion that, while a valiant effort has been made, the answer is still no. Double-oh-seven out of ten. It’s ...
-
Katamari Damacy’s Takahashi On Life After Namco
What a difference a year makes. At the 2009 Nottingham GameCity festival, Keita Takahashi, creator of the joyful Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy, seemed lost. In a damp house on the outskirts of Nottingham, he worked with balls of plasticine, lengths of string and piles of bended paperclips in search of the design for ...
-
Vanquish
It’s entirely in keeping with Platinum Games’ devil-may-care attitude. For years, we’ve written off Japanese studios when it comes to first- and third-person shooters: always playing catch-up to their American counterparts, never quite delivering. But Shinji Mikami was never going to meekly push his team’s debut shooter centre stage with a deferential bow and an ...
-
Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
Rome wasn’t built in a day. It was built in 365. While the multiplayer component to Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood has been in development for years now, the single-player game has been pieced together in just 12 months by much the same team as built the second game. And how they’ve used that time. When you ...
-
The Curse Of The Videogame Collectible
Behind the third rock to the left of the fourth tree, halfway up the tallest peak in the northernmost tip of Dartmoor in the south West of England, there sits a steel box. Its bright orange paint has been chipped by wind, rain, time and the fingers of victorious explorers. Inside the box there’s a ...
-
Front Mission Evolved
In part, the problem’s with the title. The Front Mission name has always been synonymous with the Japanese tactical RPG: a futuristic robot version of chess, all giant bipedal tanks blowing the limbs from one another with ponderous missile attacks planned in between sips of tea and head-scratching. In 1997, when Squaresoft first tried its ...
-
Births, Deaths and Announcements
I am tired. This is boring, but the reasons for my weariness, perhaps a little less so. At the start of September I took up a position as European Editor of Gamasutra. For those of you who do not work in the videogame industry, Gamasutra is a website written for the people who make and ...
-
Hydrophobia
Water, that most precious of all life’s commodities, is the highest prize of virtual worlds too. Land, in its immovable dependency, has always been a straightforward task for game artists. Water, by contrast, is a creature of ten thousand different forms. So water has become an artist’s calling card and a benchmark of computer performance. ...
-
Quantum Theory
Is it possible to copyright a game mechanic? Many have tried. At the dawn of videogame time, Magnavox sued Atari for copying its rudimentary tennis game to create Pong. More recently, social game developer Zynga, creator of FarmVille, sued rival Playdom for allegedly stealing the ‘Zynga Playbook’, a document outlining valuable concepts, techniques and best ...