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The joys of taking a shower and sipping coffee in Indigo Prophecy

This article is part of PS2 Week, a full week celebrating the 2000 PlayStation 2 console. To see other articles, go here. /// In the men’s restroom of a New York diner, a dazed man stands over a corpse. He knows he killed the person but insists, to no one other than himself, that someone else was controlling him, that a moment of temporary possession had caused him to murder the restroom’s other occupant. Panicking, he struggles to hide the body in a stall, grabs a nearby mop to clean the red off the floor, washes the blood from the…

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A creator of SOMA on the surprising merit of Until Dawn

Sometimes, a big budget game comes along that, despite an almost Duke Nukem Forever-esque level of development redos and challenges, finally reaches your videogame system only to impress rather than disappoint. It’s so rare that it almost feels like magic when it happens. But the question is: how come a game like Until Dawn—originally created for the PS3 and with the expressed intent of tricking you into believing Playstation Move wasn’t useless—transforms into a beautiful butterfly while games like Duke Nukem Forever turn into steaming piles of shit? It must be those fickle videogame gods at it again, arbitrarily deciding who goes to heaven and who is Duke Nukem Forever. Of course that isn’t…

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With Detroit: Become Human, David Cage makes some uncomfortable parallels

David Cage, the game developer equivalent of an ex-boyfriend who refuses to accept you’ll never love each other the same way again, announced his next title at Paris Game Week yesterday. Coming off the heels of Indigo Prophecy, a game often touted as ahead of its time, and more recently Beyond: Two Souls and Heavy Rain, games often touted as generally pretty useless, Cage released a conceptual trailer for a project he’s calling Detroit. Okay, that’s not the full title. The full title to David Cage’s next game is cringingly—no, sickeningly—Detroit: Become Human. Originating from the 2012 tech demo called Kara, Detroit will continue the story of a female…

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Videogame designers big and small agree on what’s broken, just not on how to fix it.

Anna Anthropy, acclaimed designer of games such as Dys4ia and author of Rise of the Video Game Zinesters, thinks that game development should be blown wide open. According to Zinesters, Anthropy wants everyone in society – particularly the outcasts – to be making games, so that the actual opinions of the underrepresented become the majority. The cream will rise to the top in her scenario, and the underground will become the mainstream. She has little patience for the celebration of adolescent male power fantasies we so often see in big budget titles. Believe it or not, Heavy Rain creator David Cage’s recent DICE talk…

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Are games stuck in Wonderland? David Cage explains why the medium needs to grow up and how he can do it.

In the east side of Paris, in the 20th arrondissement known as Ménilmontant, there is a the largest cemetary in the city. It is called Père Lachaise and to be buried there is to share an eternal home with some of the greatest men and women of culture and politics in human history. Composer Frédéric Chopin. Singer Maria Callas. Artist Max Ernst. Writer Gertrude Stein. And of course, poet and playwright Oscar Wilde. About a 20 minute walk from there lies the home Quantic Dream, a French game company run by a composer-turned-game designer David Cage. The proximity to the…