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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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....
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...
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...
Playing Both SidesIn Akira Kurosawa's signature film Rashoman, the Japanese director's black & white movie revealed reality's endless shades of grey by telling the same story from different characters' perspectives. Splash Damage's first-person shooter Brink attempts a similar feat by basically having...
The Sworcerer's ApprenticesAnd lo, a great darkness covered the land of Jobs as Apple's game-playing apostles were abandoned by the game wizards of the '90s who swore allegiance first to the Gates of Bill and then to the clans Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo. The great rise of the iPhone and iPad has heralded a new dawn and...
Shattered Glasses: Is Nintendo's 3DS a Game Changer?Barack Obama may have coined the Charlie Sheen-ian slogan "win the future" during this year's State of the Union address, but Nintendo is actually attempting to do so. Which makes more sense, actually, since gaming is not only inherently based on #winning but is also a future-fixated industry that...
Stacking the OddsCharlie Blackmore may be a wee chimney sweep, but just because he's undersized doesn't mean he should be underestimated. As the star of Stacking, the latest tiny title from Tim Schafer's indie studio Double Fine Productions, Blackmore is the smallest character in an old-timey Dickensian...
Cape Town: Could DC Universe Online Kill PC Gaming?My supervillain's name is Silent E, a ninja. No mere black-clad Asian acrobat, he can also fly, wield dual daggers and shoot awesome fireballs out of his hands. Gotham hasn't been the same since I joined forces with Catwoman to take down the Bat brigade. Then again, the streets have been crowded...
May the Light Cycle Be Unbroken How Tron Shaped GamingArcades were all over '80s cinema, providing youth culture flair from War Games and TheLastStarfighter up to Terminator 2. But only one movie dared delve into the games themselves: 1982's once-and-future geek-pop touchstone, Tron. (After all, not just any...
D.O.M. (Death of Multiplayer)I come here not to praise multiplayer, but to bury it. Oh, I know I'll have little luck ― even Jay-Z couldn't kill Auto-Tune and multiplayer is far more prevalent, especially as we roll into the holidays with nearly every new game tacking on multiplayer modes whether it makes sense or not. I...
Ctrl. Alt. Tab.Gaming may evolve with software, but industry revolutions require leaps in hardware ― which is exactly what has happened in 2010 with nearly 13 million iPads making their way into the wild and word that in the U.S. Apple iOS gamers (also including iPhone and iPod Touch) have nearly doubled...
Arty For the AgesThere's been a longstanding debate over whether or not videogames can be art, but even infamous critic Roger Ebert admitted: "That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept." But while arguments rage on over authorial control versus interactivity, the games...
Crackdown G20Crackdown 2 was pretty fun when I first played the demo. But before I got my thumbs on the final code, the G20 summit tore apart downtown Toronto — including an incursion of 300 riot cops into my neighbourhood to raid the protestors' Parkdale headquarters — and shook my faith in...
Gaming Enters the Next DimensionWhen Super Mario went from scrolling across your TV screen to moving around inside it in the mid-'90s, the addition of virtual 3D space was a great leap forward that the industry has been unable to replicate. After all, there is no fourth dimension ― theoretical physics, notwithstanding. Each...
POP & ROCK: Beach House - Bloom
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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....
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...
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...
In Akira Kurosawa's signature film Rashoman, the Japanese director's black & white movie revealed reality's endless shades of grey by telling the same story from different characters' perspectives. Splash Damage's first-person shooter Brink attempts a similar feat by basically having...
And lo, a great darkness covered the land of Jobs as Apple's game-playing apostles were abandoned by the game wizards of the '90s who swore allegiance first to the Gates of Bill and then to the clans Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo. The great rise of the iPhone and iPad has heralded a new dawn and...
Barack Obama may have coined the Charlie Sheen-ian slogan "win the future" during this year's State of the Union address, but Nintendo is actually attempting to do so. Which makes more sense, actually, since gaming is not only inherently based on #winning but is also a future-fixated industry that...
Charlie Blackmore may be a wee chimney sweep, but just because he's undersized doesn't mean he should be underestimated. As the star of Stacking, the latest tiny title from Tim Schafer's indie studio Double Fine Productions, Blackmore is the smallest character in an old-timey Dickensian...
My supervillain's name is Silent E, a ninja. No mere black-clad Asian acrobat, he can also fly, wield dual daggers and shoot awesome fireballs out of his hands. Gotham hasn't been the same since I joined forces with Catwoman to take down the Bat brigade. Then again, the streets have been crowded...
Arcades were all over '80s cinema, providing youth culture flair from War Games and The Last Starfighter up to Terminator 2. But only one movie dared delve into the games themselves: 1982's once-and-future geek-pop touchstone, Tron. (After all, not just any...
I come here not to praise multiplayer, but to bury it. Oh, I know I'll have little luck ― even Jay-Z couldn't kill Auto-Tune and multiplayer is far more prevalent, especially as we roll into the holidays with nearly every new game tacking on multiplayer modes whether it makes sense or not. I...
Gaming may evolve with software, but industry revolutions require leaps in hardware ― which is exactly what has happened in 2010 with nearly 13 million iPads making their way into the wild and word that in the U.S. Apple iOS gamers (also including iPhone and iPod Touch) have nearly doubled...
There's been a longstanding debate over whether or not videogames can be art, but even infamous critic Roger Ebert admitted: "That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept." But while arguments rage on over authorial control versus interactivity, the games...
Crackdown 2 was pretty fun when I first played the demo. But before I got my thumbs on the final code, the G20 summit tore apart downtown Toronto — including an incursion of 300 riot cops into my neighbourhood to raid the protestors' Parkdale headquarters — and shook my faith in...
When Super Mario went from scrolling across your TV screen to moving around inside it in the mid-'90s, the addition of virtual 3D space was a great leap forward that the industry has been unable to replicate. After all, there is no fourth dimension ― theoretical physics, notwithstanding. Each...
