Here’s a tip: If you ever fancy paying a morbid visit to a police station’s morgue, it’s a good idea to ask first at reception. Regrettably, oblivious to the clerk sat behind glass, I instead try to barge into the station’s innards like the unruly lout I am. No such luck. Undeterred, I exit the police station in search of an alternative way in.
I eventually come upon a convenient air vent about 4 storeys up the side of the building, it leads right into the heart of the station. I spend the next thirty minutes skulking around in offices, avoiding security cameras and knocking out anyone who has the misfortune to get in my way. Continue reading →
And so another platformer manages to escape the gloomy limbo that is Xbox Live Arcade.
Quite why Limbo took a year to find its way I have no idea, maybe it couldn’t find the door shrouded in darkness… *does research* Rather more predictably, it turns out the awkward bouncer that is Microsoft decided to bar Limbo entry onto it’s niche platform, the personal computer. In spite of it showing quite the appetite for indie platformers. Another score for common sense.
But to call Limbo a platformer is a slight understatement. Sure, it’s 2D and you have to do a fair bit of jumping, but your protagonist is by no means a contender for the 2012 long-jump. Everything about the boy you control reminds you that he is still alive: His eyes shine brighter than anything in the black and white world around him, his run is imbued with a sense of innocence and helplessness – traits that are incredibly human, and seldom evoked in games. When the boy pulls a lever it seems to require every inch of his life, a life that I have squandered on far too many occasions. Continue reading →
Some games are adept at teaching history in spite of your best efforts to avoid everything baring any resemblance to education. Jamestown is no such game. The year is 1619. The English are at war with the Spanish – “well the game’s only a couple of decades off…” The war is being fought over the outskirts of English expansion, Mars. “Wait, what?!”
If there’s anything that’ll draw me into the warm fold of a bygone genre its such an absurd display of imagination. Jamestown is a shoot ‘em up, in true Space Invaders fashion you’re meant to obliterate the enemy multitude whilst evading their unrelenting attempts to shoot down your ship. Of course, the first time you play Jamestown you won’t be paying enough attention to any of this. Rather, you’ll be ogling Final Form’s beautiful, pixelated realisation of a colonized Mars as it scrolls past in the background. Which is why you’ll promptly die. Woops. Continue reading →
There are plenty of things that we can predict with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
The world’s population will inevitably hit the 7 billion mark by the end of the year, and is likely to peter out at 9 billion by 2050.
This year the developing world, spearheaded by China, India and Brazil, will grow four times as fast as the rich world, and China is on track to become the worlds largest economy by 2050.
2050 will also see global temperatures to have already risen by about 2 degrees, an amount that may seem negligible until you consider that the current global temperature is only 5 degrees warmer than the last ice age.
And yet, as I leafed through the Economist’s predictions for the “world in 2011” with the aim of getting clued up on the art of crystal gazing, I found no mention of the most significant event of the year so far – that being the political upheaval that is continuing to sweep across the Middle East and North Africa with tremendous consequences. Continue reading →
So you want to know about the fate of the world huh? Well, to tell the truth its pretty shitty. Fortunately, the game on the other hand is quite good (see what I did there, oh the hilarity!). So, the set up: You have somehow landed the job of world dictator, but it’s okay – you’re no Gaddafi, you’re of the cuddly dictatorial variety, like… God? Continue reading →
Conversation. Games barely ever get it right, in fact it’s so often bodged that I for one find it a relief that Half-Life‘s protagonist is a mute; better that than being forced to watch hour after hour of boring cut-scenes whilst my character acts like a nob. Yet it’s not as if conversation has to be tiresome, anyone who’s ever watched The West Wing will know that it can be downright compelling when it is infused with a sense of urgency and importance. Games have undoubtedly seen great advancements over the last decade, but the fact of the matter is that in the talking department games remain as stunted as they always have been. My perfect game would put an end to this sorry state of affairs. Continue reading →
In Gemini Rue it’s hard to tell how life got so grim, it just is, and seemingly always has been. At least half of the planet’s populace has a drug habit, and the other half probably work for the Boryokudan – a crime syndicate that more or less owns the place. Uncomfortably poised amongst the future-noir squalor you play Azriel Odin, an ex-assassin who’s here to seek out his brother. Before you know it, you’re playing detective: searching people’s apartments, working your way around uncooperative locals and reluctantly doing odd-jobs for the Boryokudan in return for morsels of information. Continue reading →
Never again will I unconsciously drift onto a 52 bus with a fifty pence piece clutched in my hand, and neither should you. I implore you to take a second to think of the men and women who have devoted their brain cells in an act of sheer selflessness to the design and running of our city’s glorious transport system.
While Call of Duty is busy portraying the horrors of war, Cities in Motion directs our attention to the truly under-appreciated endeavours of technocrats. Your job is to improve the public transport of a selection of European cities over the course of the last century, along the way seeing through technological innovations such as the introduction of Metro. Ultimately, your objectives are to achieve profitability and to provide the city’s citizens with the service they (claim to) deserve. Both require hours of fiddling and can prove nigh on impossible to achieve – especially in the first half of the 20th Century where apparently buses couldn’t move ten metres before bursting into flames. Continue reading →
Paper Plane begins with its world washed out and desolate, seemingly lacking any character bar the tree-house from which you set off in your paper plane. Your aim is to restore the childhood memories locked in this landscape by flying around it; fly through the chains of a swing and a colourless sketch of a tree sprouts out of the ground, go on to fly a ring around its trunk and it is beautifully coloured in before your eyes. In this manner you slowly repopulate a rustic setting with all its particulars and eccentricities. Continue reading →
Posted in Gaming, Indie
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Tiny & Big is the only game ever to have a writer completely dedicated to onomatopoeia. This fact may be grounded in no evidence, but it still a reasonable conclusion to come to as the scenery is regularly interrupted with over-sized exclamations: SMURTLE! as your character, Tiny, laser-cuts through a column of rock; SPAK! as your grapple is attached to one of the resulting segments; and as you pull it to the ground it lands with a GNIRSH! Continue reading →
Posted in Gaming, Indie
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