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How great puzzle games deconstruct our world The Witness, Gorogoa and Baba Is You reflect the societies they come from.
Games often reflect everyday suppositions about how the world works, whether or not they’re set in a version of reality. They are, after all, made by people who live in the reality as everyone else, exposed to the same opinions and language, and their creative expressions are embedded with society’s dominant ideas about success, duty, relationships and countless other subjects. Equally, however, games are well-suited to challenging the ‘common sense’ status of many notions. While they reproduce the operations of daily life, they also provide us with ways to imagine and interact with the world differently. Regardless of any explicit political commentary, games can stimulate us to think more critically about our…
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The weirdest fighting games of all time Most fighting games have some degree of strangeness to them, but there are those who are downright bizarre.
Does the C64 Mini’s games library do the Commodore 64 justice? The real reason it trumped the Speccy and Amstrad was breadth and quality of software.
5 plot twists that would have made great games even better When done right, a twist can be truly spectacular. Here's what they should have done...
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What do you do after you’ve made one of the world’s most successful games? King was bought for $5.9 billion by Activision last year. It has two of the most successful games in the world right now. Where can it go from here?
King is a very, very rich company. Its flagship mobile game – Candy Crush Saga, a game so omnipresent that it surely can’t have escaped your notice over the past few years – made almost $2bn a year at its height in 2013, and still pulls in hundreds of thousands a day. It is, by any possible measure, one of the world’s most successful video games of any era. Activision-Blizzard spent $5.9 billion on acquiring King in November last year. Even a game that successful does not guarantee the long-term security and success of a company, however. Just ask Angry Birds developer Rovio, or Farmville developer Zynga, both of which have been…
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Playing with the human side of history Games traditionally present history as monolithic spectacle, but this new breed focuses on the individual experience of simply existing alongside great events.
The 11 most ridiculous Pokémon ever captured Not every pocket monster is a classic. Once you’ve run through the good ideas, you have to start looking a little deeper for inspiration.
You can now play 10,000 Amiga games in your browser for free, on archive.org Take a nostalgia trip with some real retro classics.
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Square Enix’ shift to mobile gaming is good, actually Square is doubling down on what its doing right in a surprisingly self-aware move.
If you’re aware of the much-maligned Final Fantasy XIII trilogy, you most likely know that Square Enix’s console efforts have fallen far below the bar the company set for itself with its classics. However, if you’re an avid mobile gamer (or toilet gamer, which is basically the same thing), then you’ll know that Square seems to dominate the mobile gaming scene. Square Enix knows that too, and that’s why the company announced that it’s now shifting its main developmental focus from console games to mobile. Using the 2007 release of the original iPhone as a point of reference, Square Enix has been involved with the release of over 70 mobile games in North…
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The making of Until Dawn The story behind one of the best horror games of recent times.
Why video game movies fail as adaptations What are movie makers doing wrong?
The weirdest fighting games of all time Most fighting games have some degree of strangeness to them, but there are those who are downright bizarre.
