fri 11/10/2024

Games

First Person: playwright Tom Fowler on allowing room for 'Hope'

Recently, having just shared the rehearsal draft of my current Royal Court play Hope has a Happy Meal with two close friends, I found myself slightly offended when one of them said, "you can tell you were playing the Nintendo Switch obsessively when...

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Mark Bould: The Anthropocene Unconscious review - climate anxiety is written everywhere

Our everyday lives, if we’re fortunate, may be placid, even contented. A rewarding job, for some; good eats; warm home; happy family; entertainment on tap. Yet, even for the privileged, awareness of impending change – probably disaster – intrudes....

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Sonic the Hedgehog review - stuck in first gear

An early trailer for this adaptation of the ‘90s games franchise caused Cats­-like horror at its overly humanoid Hedgehog. Rather than the former film’s risky freak-show, though, this diligently redesigned Sonic is the most safely saccharine family...

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FIFA 19 review - the best just got a bit better

Reinventing the wheel is no easy task, yet EA, the powerhouse publisher behind the multi-decade long FIFA series, manages to pull the digital rabbit from the hat year after year. The majority of the on-pitch action hasn’t changed in iterations, and...

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Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt, V&A review - gaming for all

Design/Play/Disrupt at the V&A covers a wide variety of games that are spearheading the gaming world at the moment. It takes a closer look at eight of the most innovative and different games that have changed the world of gaming in the last five...

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Detroit: Become Human review – a robot story with real heart

Interactive stories are a tricky proposition. Make the on-screen action too passive and your audience feels like they’re watching a succession of cut-scenes. Tip the balance the other way and it’s just a game with pretensions of cinematic story...

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A Story About My Uncle

Most first-person games immediately stick a gun in the bottom part of your screen. Developers seem to believe that the only exciting agency a player has in virtual worlds is to destroy them and kill the people populating them. A Story About My...

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Modern Combat 5: Blackout

On technical grounds, it's pretty hard as a gamer not to simply be amazed by Modern Combat 5 – it is, pretty much, a fully-functioned, first-person shooter to rival Call Of Duty and Battlefield, only on your phone rather than a dedicated home...

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Sniper Elite III

Sometimes virtual violence can simply be fun, even morally dubious violence. Sniper Elite III is pretty reprehensible and fairly morally indefensible. It gleefully glamorises violence. Yet throughout, it's fun. Really good fun.Sniper Elite's key...

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Murdered: Soul Suspect

A detective ghost story with virtually no violence – Murdered: Soul Suspect is an odd construction. It is part point-and-click adventure game, part interactive fiction and part stealth-adventure – none of which are massively successful elements....

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Watch Dogs

Heralded as the first true "next-generation" videogame, Watch Dogs has either been hugely overhyped or the imaginative leap required for a true new generation of videogaming is entirely absent from mainstream games. Because this cyberpunk-inflected...

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Transistor

Videogames aesthetics are often misleading. There are many examples of beautiful games that have no artistic merit, emotional heft or ludological interest. There are also many examples of ugly games that grip utterly. Of course, the ideal is both...

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