This article is part of PS2 Week, a full week celebrating the 2000 PlayStation 2 console. To see other articles, go here. /// Up until Grand Theft Auto III (2001), it was standard to classify videogames by their central mechanics. There were stealth games, platformers, shooters, racing games, actio
It all stands out to me as clear as yesterday. A scrawny, bright-eyed teenager circa ‘07, sat across the aisle with his friends, popcorn gripped between thighs, the SMS touchpads of flip-phones being thumbed impatiently. It’s the opening weekend of Michael Bay’s Transformers and we are ready to see
This article is part of a series called Shut Up, Videogames, in which critic Ed Smith invites games old and new to pipe down, or otherwise. In this edition, he looks at the genre defying third-person action-adventure, The Order: 1886. It’s no masterpiece—it’s the story of immortal knights fighting w
Kickstarter darling Undertale came into our lives in 2013 with the scent of butterscotch-cinnamon pie. It cradled us in its furry arms, gave us comforting and encouraging glances, before leaving us to rot—cold and alone—for two long years. Now, it’s finally returning next Tuesday the 15th, and I can
In the increasingly crowded market for home omni-directional treadmills, there is one that doesn’t look like a form of mind-washing reconditioning at a terrorist training camp. Recently on display at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Expo, the Infinadeck is a frameless, treaded walking machine that
The developer of Cookie Clicker has created a highly verbose random game idea generator and it’s ridiculously good. Some of the gems we’ve been clicking on around the office include: -a god game where you explore hipsters through terrorism; -a social media game where you cook jewels to buy virtual
A live-action, interactive parade into the spirit world is being hosted this weekend in Melborne as part of Pop-Up Playground’s Fresh Air Festival. Called Spirits Walk, the gist of this otherworldly street game is that participants will take to the streets for some good old-fashioned LARPing, but wi
There are rumblings out of Klei Entertainment about their slick-looking spy game. Specifically, that the game once known as Incognita but is now being called Invisible Inc. is making progress, entering alpha phase. Klei rumblings, unlike volcanic rumblings, are the best kind of rumblings, because th
We love how Titanfall is plopping down some towering robots into the standard tactical-cooperative-shooter. But how will the average Battlefield 4 devotee who lives and breathes through the barrel of an AR-15 feel about it? Well, that’s what the guys at Respawn Entertainment want to know, as they ha
The only reason I can figure Kim Swift is releasing Soul Fjord on January 28th as an OUYA timed-exclusive is because the little cuboid console fondly reminds her of the Portal cube. That, or money. In either case, we have the first footage of it in action, which you can scope at the 1:15 minute mark
If there’s one thing that games excel at, it’s capturing grimy post-industrial apocalypses. But the other thing they’re really good at is portraying really adorable, cutesy stuff. The good folks who are making the platformer Rain World (they don’t have a studio name, just the makers of Rain World) c
In games, we typically see the same brainless dolts for zombies. Yeah, clickers in The Last of Us were a nice change of pace, but as a whole videogame zombies haven’t evolved far beyond the mindless shufflers from Night of the Living Dead. They’re just fodder. But zombies are a lot smarter than you
Jonathan Blow, the creator of the allegorical Braid, a game-changing platformer about rewinding time, thinks that some games are evoking the cookie-cutter mentality of terrible television of yesteryear. In a talk titled “The medium is the message,” given at Creative Mornings, Blow summoned the spiri
