Kindness = chaos: the problem with choice in Tetris 99
Tetris 99 serves to show us that no gamer is an island – that every choice we decide or refuse to take reverberates all around us in sometimes unexpected and unintended ways.
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Category Archives: Features
Kingdom Hearts month: Holding back the years – retro appeal or timeless game design
Kindgom Hearts, much like the colourful denizens of the 100 hundred Acre Wood that are part of the series, seems to exist in a time bubble untouched by broader technical developments in video gaming
Madden 97 – Finding sporting purity in America’s brashest hobby
Stripped away of most of the commercial considerations that are a vital and complicated component of modern sports, Madden 96 let you act out getting onto a field for a bout of kicking, tossing, catching and making some VERY big tackles. In a way, sport at its purist, well…. apart from the exercise.
Super Smash Brothers on N64 – the ultimate smash?
The original dozen characters in the first Smash Brothers game were a revelation in just how many played almost exactly as if they were an actual standalone Kirby, Yoshi or 2D Legend of Zelda game.
Spinning plates – Simulated chaos in Overcooked 2
Overcooked 2, much like its predecessor, is a kitchen chaos simulator, yet the game is only tangentially about food. Its universal appeal is arguably more based on throwing a group of friends or strangers together and seeing the sparks fly as they fail to get the dishes done.
Bloodborne: Can videogames genres ever die, or do they become….. something else
Unlike humans, genres arguably never die. But much like us, they do get older, adapting in unique ways to the rigours of time, while stubbornly sticking to other things they maybe should have let go. Out of this, greatness is sometimes haphazardly realised
Into the Breach – the immersive appeal of the digital board game
In a world of ubiquitous microcomputers, the humble board game should be an anachronism consigned to a pre-digital age of entertainment. Yet the stripped back experience of rolling dice, picking cards and moving pieces around a board within carefully structured rules seemingly lends itself to good video game design based on the idea of doing more with less.
