while Switch Sports football is not exactly a simulation of the beautiful game, it can be pretty evocative at recreating the childish thrill of running around fields trying to feel important with an misplaced, overambitious diving headers.
When released in 1984, the lightgun shooter Hogan’s Alley gave gamers a crude means of shooting an approximation of a generic bad guy through their screen. Yet after decades of software and hardware development, the sophistication of more modern first person shooters still ultimately hinges on the simplistic and cathartic appeal of blasting away and blowing up wrong ‘uns.
Whether or not we one day find ourselves playing through an all encompassing, multi-brand Super Sonic Chocobo Team Cash Kart or not, Super Mario Kart has now effectively spawned an entire genre of racing games. But can any title that seeks to emulate Mario Kart ever truly break from the mould of their source material and do we really want them to?
Just about every videogame released over the last few decades has used music in some form or other – but how exactly can you make a videogame into a musical in a way that effectively combines sound, actions and emotion?
In asking a player to be both a counterweight as well as literal and figurative support for their real world partner, the co-op robot exploration game Biped can be a thrilling, if frustrating experience for duos and couples to play through.
In forcing two players to try and overcome gravity, disgruntled household appliances and dynamic camera angles together, it is not just the story of EA’s It Takes Two that ask players to think about what works and doesn’t work in their relationship.
In the modern era of gaming, ending the main campaign or scripted narrative of a videogame is not always its end.
The second part of our annual review of 2021 considers why Super Mario Party’s Slaparazzi might be the definitive minigame, the implications of Amazon’s New World and the concept of teamwork in Back 4 Blood and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy game.
The first half of Squareblind.co.uk’s annual review of its gaming misadventures looks at new approaches to conveying narrative complexity in the classic brawler genre of games, how important the cost of a game is to player enjoyment and what makes a good 2D Zelda ‘clone’.
Back 4 Blood and the Guardians of the Galaxy use their respective gameplay mechanics to try and explore the idea of what makes great or not-so-great teams.
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