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Diablo 3’s health bar is a war crime. If, and I appreciate this is improbable, but if I saw it in the street, if I saw that orb rolling around, just doing some shopping in Boots or whatever, I would chase it down and throw it onto a roof. I would slam dunk it into a bin.
– Quintin Smith, Eurogamer -
Renegade Ops is a game that’s decidedly shallow and not very inventive but there’s something about it that makes me not care about all that. This dual-schtick-em-up never truly makes me feel like a kid again but it does a great job of reminding me that I was one.
– Brendan Caldwell, Rock Paper Shotgun -
What great science fiction has always done is offer a glimpse of our own world – a clearer glimpse – though the telling of a story from another place. Whether I Dream of Electric Sheep, Alien, Dune, or Robocop, all are useful windows through which to perceive our own world. While Deus Ex approaches the shores of great science fiction, what ultimately holds it back is its own failure to stick to its own story and offer a truly meaningful picture into our own world.
– Chris Johnson, RobotGeek -
– Christian Donlan, EurogamerNook has lead a lot of people to suggest that Animal Crossing is little more than a capitalism simulator: a toy-box treadmill away from your normal every day treadmill, a place where you spend your free time working to acquire tables and chairs and funny little doodads to fill out your pretend house.
From this perspective, it’s a bleak game; a Diablo for soft furnishings, in which you divide your life between toiling for wages and frittering those wages away, and a game that serves only to remind you how stupid you are, selecting a form of play that looks so very much like work.
There’s something to that, certainly, but it’s possible that there’s something beyond it, too. I’ve started to think that Animal Crossing has a deeper motive. I’ve started to think that it builds a rat race in order to give you the option to step away from it.
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Shadows of the Damned lacks the polish of Mikami’s Capcom work, showing a rough edge that its creators no doubt hope communicates their punk attitude to game development, but really just comes across as a bit shoddy. But at a time when few publishers of EA’s stature are willing to take genuine risks, its uniqueness is welcome and interesting. And as a celebration of the puerile, it leaves Duke Nukem Forever standing, staring longingly at its tit bridge.
– Simon Parkin, Eurogamer -
– Quintin Smith, EurogamerThe Agile body type was what I was interested in. Selecting this body type gives your character all the muscle and poise build of a man raised on milk and biscuits. You take a penalty to health and can’t even carry the Medium build’s array of assault rifles and shotguns, instead being restricted to sniper rifles, pistols and SMGs. The trade-off for all of this is that not only do you run and climb faster than anybody else, you slide farther and can perform wall-jumps.
It’s not even a choice. I pick Agile like a drowning man grabbing at a rope, the match begins, and I’m off! Off, into a world of much bigger men with much bigger guns.
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Let me put it this way: [Super Meat Boy] is the game we’ve been training to beat our whole lives. It’s our reward for decades of timing our jumps, making split-second decisions and tempering the subsequent frustration of failure in order to maintain the concentration necessary to finish what we started.
– James Ransom-Wiley, Joystiq -
Minecraft proved that attending every industry party in town and endlessly posting expensive trailers doesn’t achieve what it used to. The games business has changed. The world’s appetite for games has changed.
– Alec Meer, Eurogamer -
In Splinter Cell: Conviction, I wade through the corpses of my fallen enemies, and interrogate people by smashing their faces into concrete. I don’t feel like a good person. I’m not Batman, Dark Knight, doing what has to be done to protect the people from evil. I’m John Rambo, the empty male power fantasy. It’s kind of sad; like Rambo before him, Sam Fisher has been transformed over time into an empty, unstoppable killing machine.
– Jonathan Stickles, Preparing for the Apocalypse -
The opening of the game bundles you onto a bus, probably off to some grim labour camp, and then forces you to watch two parents get executed via firing line while their now-orphaned child screams nearby. The occupying Korean force should be more careful: that’s how Batmans get made.
– Martin Gaston, VideoGamer (Note: this except is from one of my pieces, which is at best a hideous bit of vanity posting and at worst a shameful wallop of self-promotion. In my defence, however, it wasn’t actually submitted to the site by myself)
