Jenny LeClue
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Yep, Jenny LeClue will still be your teen girl detective for 2017

Oh, look at that, it’s 2017. You want some new games to look out for this year? Well, my dear, let’s start by focusing our lens on the upcoming teen girl detective game Jenny LeClue. Its creator Joe Russ has re-confirmed to me that Jenny LeClue will be out for Steam later this year. It will also be coming to PlayStation 4 and mobile but only after the Steam version is out. Got that? Good. However, you don’t need to wait any longer to actually play the game. There’s a playable teaser of Jenny LeClue available on itch.io that is meant to…

DISTANT
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Introducing DISTANT, a game about saving dreamscapes from destruction

Many words can be used to describe last year’s endless snowboarding game Alto’s Adventure, but the one that stands out for me is flow. This encompassed the curves and angles of its snowdrifts, its wordless storytelling, and how smoothly it reset you to the top of its mountain once you fell. It was a game in harmony with itself, perfecting the loop that most mobile games aim to persuade their players to get caught up in, but giving you beautiful Peruvian horizons to admire rather than stooping to tiring exchanges of virtual currency and statistics. I was delighted, then, when Ryan Cash…

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My experience as a virtual war photographer in Battlefield 1

Heterotopias is a series of visual investigations into virtual spaces performed by writer and artist Gareth Damian Martin. /// What makes a battlefield different from any other place? Our towns, cities, fields, and parks are all potential battlefields, with lines of sight, choke-points, defensible terrain and no man’s land, all waiting to be activated. But how do you design a battlefield, balance the distribution of buildings, the flow of landscape, the arrangement of forms? It started as an investigation. I would trawl the lone map of Battlefield 1‘s open beta to try to catalog the space custom made for its warfare. Stripping the game of its HUD…

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The disjointed Prague of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Heterotopias is a series of visual investigations into virtual spaces performed by writer and artist Gareth Damian Martin. /// To me, Prague has always felt like a city uniquely in communion with the past and future versions of itself. I remember my first visit, a local friend taking me to the once mysterious, now legendary Cross Club: an amorphous labyrinth of scrap metal occupying the lower floors and basement of a decaying, communist-era panelák. Stumbling past the ubiquitous leather-clad and shorn-headed bouncers into one of its dancefloors was like wandering into a William Gibson wonderland, bubbling tubes of mysterious green liquid and angular metal…

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Heterotopias: The domestic disorder of Uncharted 4

Heterotopias is a series of visual investigations into virtual spaces performed by writer and artist Gareth Damian Martin. /// There’s an unlikely thread of domesticity that runs through the heart of Uncharted 4, alongside the exoticism of its adventuring and the breezy violence of its combat. On three separate occasions the game puts us in a house, and asks us about its occupants, casting the player as an archaeologist not of rare antiquities, but the artefacts that tie a place to a person. The first of these houses, the marital home of Nathan and Elena Fisher, might be imagined as an ideal one; our…

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Virtual reality photography will change how you take screenshots

First, there was the talkie. Then, the amazing technicolor. Soon, cineplexes started handing out paper red-and-blue glasses to show their movies IN THREE-DEEEE! Once revolutionary in their time, all of these features now come standard on even the cheapest of smartphones (well, so long as you still have a pair of red-and-blue 3D glasses kicking around a junk drawer somewhere). On the creator’s side, producing films with all of these advancements is practically no-budget at this point, and cheap consumer options allow even amateurs to get in on experimenting with stereoscopic 3D and resolutions as high as 4K at a…

Postcard From Capri
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Postcard From Capri, your upcoming videogame vacation

More videogames should be set in the places their creators want to go on vacation. I’m not sure if the person behind Postcard From Capri wants to travel to the Italian island of the game’s namesake but, hell, after having seen the work-in-progress screenshots, I know now that I certainly want to go there. It’s described as an interactive short story played from the first-person perspective. So far so ordinary. OK, but you play as either a detective or a journalist (to be decided, I guess) who receives a mysterious letter that contains a postcard, a ticket, and enough money to travel to…

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Honoring the rich, bizarre universe of Doom’s user-created content

All images taken from the WADbot Tumblr. /// The virtual world of Doom is so big these days as to be intimidating. Since 1994, modders have been creating their own Doom levels with the tools that the game’s creator id Software released, as well as those they’ve made for themselves. All of these user-created levels, amounting to tens of thousands of files, are hosted in the idgames archive—itself being a mirror of the old id Software-hosted archive. According to Doom enthusiast and independent videogame creator JP LeBreton, each of these files, known as WADs, might contain between one and 32 maps.…