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Dead Rising 2
In ‘Wily Travels’ it’s the PCs and LCD monitors used to book countless budget summer vacations. In ‘Marriage Makers’ it’s the necklaces and bracelets, sparkling pellets on display under the glass counter. In ‘Atlantica Casino’, it’s the tall chairs upon which patrons once sat and played the slots, or the discarded handbags around them, heavy ...
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Last Window: The Secret of Cape West
Last Window offers views onto several forgotten vistas. Immediately it paints a vivid picture of an American city at the dawn of the 1980s. Gleaming skyscrapers stretch at the clouds, each a pointed testament to the unshakeable wisdom of modern capitalism. Keeping their distance, on the outskirts of the city centre, tower blocks stand, heads ...
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Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep
Almost ten years into Square Enix and Disney’s marriage, and the tensions have only grown with time. Not that the union, first consummated in 2002′s Kingdom Hearts, was necessarily ill-advised. Both companies are committed to crafting modern fairytales filled with vibrant, marketable characters for younger audiences; they should make for easy bedfellows. But the differences ...
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Ninety-Nine Nights II
The problem is one of expectation. Players assume that Dynasty Warriors and its impersonators – of which Ninety-Nine Nights II is one – have to behave realistically. Not in the sense that they will recreate the bleak and bloody realities of the ancient battlefield without embellishment. After all, this is a videogame and the spectacle ...
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Valkyria Chronicles II
Lanseal Academy is a Disneyland boot camp. A 200-foot spire at the centre of the military school’s grounds jabs at the clouds, while far below a moonfaced clock tower leans heavy on ancient Doric columns. The building is seasoned with the intricate stone decoration of so many fairytale castles, an unlikely centerpiece for an institute ...
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The Curfew
The Channel 4 adventure game, The Curfew, that I’ve been producing for the past 12 months with Littleloud is now live and available to play in your web browser for free. It’s been in Beta for a fortnight now, and with all of the big bugs squished, I’m comfortable pointing you guys towards it. The ...
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Monday Night Combat
Tower Defense is gaming’s youngest genre and it shows: endless waves of clones clog up iTunes, many as irresistible as their inspiration but few displaying much innovation. That’s natural. Evolution requires a large gene pool before baby-step iterations begin to generate true diversification. For that reason, Monday Night Combat’s giant leap forward for the genre ...
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Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game
Scott Pilgrim is one of us. While Hollywood’s zeitgeist-chasing writers and directors clutch at game references in an effort to appeal to those born into videogames, Scott Pilgrim out-nerds even the medium’s firstborn by knowing the bass line to Final Fantasy II off by heart. Aged 16, he joined a three-piece indie band called Sonic ...
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Atelier Rorona: Alchemist of Arland
Videogames often mirror the values of the culture they emerge from. Tetris’ Eastern blocks must be stacked and tidied with Soviet efficiency, the endgame payoff a rocket ship – that highest of all Russian technological ambitions – finally setting off for the moon. Lara Croft embodies the imagined adventuring spirit of the British aristocracy: old ...
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The Science of Just Dance
A meeting room in the belly of a Parisian office block: Ubisoft producer Florian Granger stands to his feet to address a group of serious-looking, middle-aged men. These are some of the company’s most experienced game designers, artists and coders, veterans of Ghost Recon and Red Steel campaigns, architects of solemn videogames about war and ...
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Maps
“I wonder how much something like this is worth?” asks the journalist to my left, ignoring the sign underneath requesting visitors refrain from taking photographs. It’s a map of a world that doesn’t exist: Vana’diel, the setting of the eleventh game in Japan’s best-selling RPG series, Final Fantasy. The painting is ten, maybe twelve feet ...
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The Week in Links #38
Games can make you well. The Daily Star ‘GTA Rothbury’ apology is full and complete. Rockstar lawyers are terrifying. Dragon Dictation on iPhone. Transcribes speech/ interviews for you on the fly. Also: free. ‘He is not flashy. He is not Chuck Norris. Rather, he is like a sledge-hammer hitting an egg… He simply kills them.’ ...