She Shoots, She Scores A Brief History of Video Game MusicYamantaka // Sonic Titan, the Canadian "multidisciplinary hyper orientalist cesspool of 'east' meets 'west' culture," are quite serious about the multidisciplinary part. The noh-wavers latest excursion beyond music's thunderdome is Your Task // Shoot Things, an infinite-running 2D shooter...Read More
Bioshock Infinite Taking American Exceptionalism to the ExtremeThe year is 1912, just not our 1912, and up above the world so high floats the fantastical city of Columbia, an art nouveau "utopia" that fancies itself the ultimate expression of divinely inspired, capitalism-fuelled American Exceptionalism. But this diamond in the sky has some fatal flaws...Read More
Handmade Tale Ni No Kuni and the Life of Artisanal AnimationDisney recently re-released Peter Pan on Blu-Ray to celebrate the film's 60th birthday and — aside from the racist and sexist portrayals of Indians and mermaids — it looks like it could've come out today. That's the thing about hand-drawn versus computer animation — CGI is...Read More
A View to a Kill Tomb Raider Ramps Up the Violence but Tries to Make it MatterTomb Raider, like many long-running franchises as of late, has been rebooted rather than sequel-ized. So instead of the effortlessly effective, quip-spouting Lara Croft we nowadays associate with an ass-kicking Angelina, Crystal Dynamics delivered a lithe, inexperienced lass, new to the...Read More
Darling Clementine How a digital eight-year-old brought emotion back from the DeadThe beating heart of The Walking Dead, Telltale Games' episodic point-and-click consensus pick for 2012's game of the year, is Clementine. She's a smart, soft-spoken eight-year-old NPC in a blue-and-white ball cap that your character Lee Everett, a regret-filled convicted killer, meets in...Read More
Killing in the Name of…LearningAs the U.S. election raced to its recent finish line with America's biracial president battling Tea Party republicans, gamers were reliving how American democracy took root as a mixed-race protagonist in the Revolutionary War-set Assassin's Creed III — who even dumped some tea in...Read More
Gaming's Two Solitudes Bridging the Gap Between Japan and North AmericaMuch like house and techno, America invented gaming only to see someplace else perfect it. Atari made that initial beachhead, but by the mid-'80s, Japanese games were what everyone played whether the sun rose or set on their lands. Well, not no more. Nintendo (which its remains own unique...Read More
You Forgot It in Pixels Toronto's Gaming Scene Levels UpSound Shapes, the acclaimed 2D musical platformer from Jonathan Mak's micro-studio Queasy, is the most Toronto game of all time ever. The synesthetic PS3/Vita title boasts a host of local graphic artists, developers and musicians including EDM icon Deadmau5, indie stalwart Jim Guthrie...Read More
Does Parody Translate into Pixels?Self-styled punk game designer Suda51, the brains behind iconoclastic Japanese studio Grasshopper Manufacture, likes to take the piss out of gamers and game makers for their juvenile desires, while simultaneously delivering exactly what he's mocking. It's a fine line, which he gleefully blurs, on...Read More
Body Count How Rockstar Deconstructed Gaming's False MoralityNathan Drake, the "hero" of the Uncharted series, is an Indiana Jones-type treasure hunter who cracks wise and makes women swoon. At least that's how he's presented. But if you actually think about the thousands of dead bodies he leaves strewn about historic sites, the guy's white hat seems...Read More
Indie Game: The ColumnIn the side-scrolling days, when you finished a game you started right back at the beginning. So it's poetic that an art form that began with kids coding in their basements would prove similarly cyclical with modern indie games like Fez and Super Meat Boy handcrafted by...Read More
Multiplayer Embarks on a Hero's 'Journey'I am all alone and lonesome in the desert, a red-robed faceless nomad with a matching scarf wafting behind me in the superheated air. The golden sands stretch out as far as the virtual camera can see, though a mountaintop is visible in the distance with an inexplicable light shooting forth from it,...Read More
Game Man Sony's Vita Helps Handheld Gaming Grow UpCinematic may be a too-often used term for videogames, but it rarely, if ever, is used in regards to handhelds. But the PlayStation Vita, Sony's new-gen portable, practically screams cinematic with standout launch games like Uncharted: Golden Abyss and Escape Plan. This latest...Read More
Can Mac Get Back into the Game?The original mid-'80s Macintosh was a prehistoric machine by any modern measure but one that was also, at the time, a great leap forward. The early Mac games were impressive in both design and graphics, even with that quaint nine-inch monochromatic screen. Silicon Beach Software's horror...Read More
Call of Duty: Star WarfareA long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away... No, I mean a really long time ago. Like 3,500 or so years before Princess Leia sported a gold bikini, Han Solo made the Kessel run in under 12 parsecs and Luke Skywalker bulls-eyed womp rats in his T-16. That's the temporal setting of the latest and...Read More
World of LorecraftClimbing up an icy ridge, one of a seemingly endless supply here in Skyrim, the northernmost province of the sprawling continent of Tamriel, I was stopped in my tracks by the Aurora Borealis splayed out across the night sky. Though I'd fought off a few wolves and the odd bandit while heading up...Read More
Story Time Are Videogame Narratives Levelling Up?There are great challenges to writing a videogame versus other art forms. In books, comics, movies and TV, the writer is an omnipotent unspooler of story threads, architect of plot points and creator of characterization. But in gaming, the writer not only takes a backseat to coders and designers,...Read More
Bible StudiesVideogames settings have become played out with most defaulting to urban, fantasy, war or space. But a host of titles have been digging into scripture to create unconventional game worlds, led by the visually arresting and biblically inspired El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron....Read More
Love in the Age of VideogamesThough the average-gamer age grows ever older, games themselves often feel trapped in arrested development, rooted in violence and sexism. Catherine, an unusual Japanese game from eccentric Japanese game publisher Atlus, is the kind of work that pushes the entire medium forward, in this case...Read More
Eve of ConstructionReturning home from forest raves and warehouse parties in the early 2000s, I'd while away my morning hours playing Rez. Created by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, then at Sega and already boasting a cult following for his 1999 Dreamcast dance game Space Channel 5, it mixed old-school vector...Read More
HIP-HOP: J. Cole Born Sinner
Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, the Canadian "multidisciplinary hyper orientalist cesspool of 'east' meets 'west' culture," are quite serious about the multidisciplinary part. The noh-wavers latest excursion beyond music's thunderdome is Your Task // Shoot Things, an infinite-running 2D shooter...Read More
The year is 1912, just not our 1912, and up above the world so high floats the fantastical city of Columbia, an art nouveau "utopia" that fancies itself the ultimate expression of divinely inspired, capitalism-fuelled American Exceptionalism. But this diamond in the sky has some fatal flaws...Read More
Disney recently re-released Peter Pan on Blu-Ray to celebrate the film's 60th birthday and — aside from the racist and sexist portrayals of Indians and mermaids — it looks like it could've come out today. That's the thing about hand-drawn versus computer animation — CGI is...Read More
Tomb Raider, like many long-running franchises as of late, has been rebooted rather than sequel-ized. So instead of the effortlessly effective, quip-spouting Lara Croft we nowadays associate with an ass-kicking Angelina, Crystal Dynamics delivered a lithe, inexperienced lass, new to the...Read More
The beating heart of The Walking Dead, Telltale Games' episodic point-and-click consensus pick for 2012's game of the year, is Clementine. She's a smart, soft-spoken eight-year-old NPC in a blue-and-white ball cap that your character Lee Everett, a regret-filled convicted killer, meets in...Read More
As the U.S. election raced to its recent finish line with America's biracial president battling Tea Party republicans, gamers were reliving how American democracy took root as a mixed-race protagonist in the Revolutionary War-set Assassin's Creed III — who even dumped some tea in...Read More
Much like house and techno, America invented gaming only to see someplace else perfect it. Atari made that initial beachhead, but by the mid-'80s, Japanese games were what everyone played whether the sun rose or set on their lands. Well, not no more. Nintendo (which its remains own unique...Read More
Sound Shapes, the acclaimed 2D musical platformer from Jonathan Mak's micro-studio Queasy, is the most Toronto game of all time ever. The synesthetic PS3/Vita title boasts a host of local graphic artists, developers and musicians including EDM icon Deadmau5, indie stalwart Jim Guthrie...Read More
Self-styled punk game designer Suda51, the brains behind iconoclastic Japanese studio Grasshopper Manufacture, likes to take the piss out of gamers and game makers for their juvenile desires, while simultaneously delivering exactly what he's mocking. It's a fine line, which he gleefully blurs, on...Read More
Nathan Drake, the "hero" of the Uncharted series, is an Indiana Jones-type treasure hunter who cracks wise and makes women swoon. At least that's how he's presented. But if you actually think about the thousands of dead bodies he leaves strewn about historic sites, the guy's white hat seems...Read More
In the side-scrolling days, when you finished a game you started right back at the beginning. So it's poetic that an art form that began with kids coding in their basements would prove similarly cyclical with modern indie games like Fez and Super Meat Boy handcrafted by...Read More
I am all alone and lonesome in the desert, a red-robed faceless nomad with a matching scarf wafting behind me in the superheated air. The golden sands stretch out as far as the virtual camera can see, though a mountaintop is visible in the distance with an inexplicable light shooting forth from it,...Read More
Cinematic may be a too-often used term for videogames, but it rarely, if ever, is used in regards to handhelds. But the PlayStation Vita, Sony's new-gen portable, practically screams cinematic with standout launch games like Uncharted: Golden Abyss and Escape Plan. This latest...Read More
The original mid-'80s Macintosh was a prehistoric machine by any modern measure but one that was also, at the time, a great leap forward. The early Mac games were impressive in both design and graphics, even with that quaint nine-inch monochromatic screen. Silicon Beach Software's horror...Read More
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away... No, I mean a really long time ago. Like 3,500 or so years before Princess Leia sported a gold bikini, Han Solo made the Kessel run in under 12 parsecs and Luke Skywalker bulls-eyed womp rats in his T-16. That's the temporal setting of the latest and...Read More
Climbing up an icy ridge, one of a seemingly endless supply here in Skyrim, the northernmost province of the sprawling continent of Tamriel, I was stopped in my tracks by the Aurora Borealis splayed out across the night sky. Though I'd fought off a few wolves and the odd bandit while heading up...Read More
There are great challenges to writing a videogame versus other art forms. In books, comics, movies and TV, the writer is an omnipotent unspooler of story threads, architect of plot points and creator of characterization. But in gaming, the writer not only takes a backseat to coders and designers,...Read More
Videogames settings have become played out with most defaulting to urban, fantasy, war or space. But a host of titles have been digging into scripture to create unconventional game worlds, led by the visually arresting and biblically inspired El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron....Read More
Though the average-gamer age grows ever older, games themselves often feel trapped in arrested development, rooted in violence and sexism. Catherine, an unusual Japanese game from eccentric Japanese game publisher Atlus, is the kind of work that pushes the entire medium forward, in this case...Read More
Returning home from forest raves and warehouse parties in the early 2000s, I'd while away my morning hours playing Rez. Created by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, then at Sega and already boasting a cult following for his 1999 Dreamcast dance game Space Channel 5, it mixed old-school vector...Read More
