Die Hard Trilogy on the PlayStation and Sega Saturn was able to give the players a 3D skyscraper, airport and basic city to blast around and have explosive action adventures in. The games were perhaps less effective at exploring the appeal of John McClane .
The television show GamesMaster, broadcast on the UK’s Channel 4 between 1992 and 1998, would serve as an early attempt at looking at the wider cultural and economic significance of Super Mario Bros and Sonic the Hedgehog. It would also experiment with whether it was also possible get real world clout from stunt playing two Virtua Cop 2 cabinets at the same time.
The second half of this year’s highlights included a deceptively cutesy and sometimes brutal cult simulation adventure game and a look at how you can make a virtual punch feel truly satisfying.
The first half of this year’s round up contemplates what it means to call yourself a ‘musical’ game and how songs for a hero and Tetris Effect create radically different approaches to playing to the rhythm.
What does it mean in a Mario Kart race where blue shells are ubiquitous and first place becomes a form of unrelenting penance?
It is fair to describe Blasphemous as an adventure game in the style of latter-era 2D Castlevania games. However, in replacing Dracula and his monstrous minions with a devout order of religious zealots striving to uphold a brutal church-like structure, are the player’s violent actions a justifiable response to a different kind of monster.
The idea of playing a doomed videogame protagonist who spends real world hours and days on an entertaining and ultimately futile quest of violence can be a difficult concept to fashion into a satisfying interactive narrative.
Is it delusion, or a fair choice for the player to determine that their so-called ‘cult’ is actually a functioning and somewhat symbiotic community of individuals working and thriving together?
While essentially just providing a choice of swords, axes or bow and arrows, each of the dozen or so weapon types available in the Monster Hunter series effectively offer very different ways to play – as if they offer different genres of game to master.
Google’s experiment in hosting a purpose-built gaming platform is over. Yet predictions for what this means for the future of cloud gaming are not so clear.
squareblind 