Sometimes games want you to think they're critiquing violence, but instead they legitimize it

There is a cost for everything. Video games, I worry, carry this unknowing. We agree to things that would be utterly horrific in the actual fictions of a game. I want to distinguish between the anti-violence, anti-“manshooter” rhetoric that most

The Ugly Paulistano

Every tourist is an ambassador for its country. As a man who mostly communicates with bullets, Max Payne isn’t perhaps the best man to represent its country.

Max Payne has always communicated through bullets, though. In Max Payne 3, the only difference is that he is now restrained from relying on any other means. As an ignorant foreigner, unwilling to learn the local language and expecting the impoverish locals to know his, Max forces us to play the role of the ignorant foreigner.

I’ve been living in São Paulo, or Sampa for short, for almost a decade now. A German friend of mine asked me how it felt to play as an alienated foreigner while being able to understand everything being said by the locals at the same time.

Finding out the answer scared me.

How do you Solve a Problem Like Max Payne?

The man is a high-functioning alcoholic. He spends his nights drinking himself into oblivion while the light of day finds him planting heavy metals deep into the flesh of his enemies with the biologically-ingrained certainty of a fifth generation lead

Mortal Kombat (2011) – Review

As the most violent Mortal Kombat game to date arrived (hey, the competition is tough nowadays), we’ve asked ourselves if the violence really was the key to the franchise’s popularity and survival. It wasn’t. MORTAL KOMBAT (2011) is a videogame

Dead Island and Indiscriminate Violence

I stomp my boot against the head of a zombie, and feel its skull slowly pressing in, bending. A split-second later it has exploded in a visceral show of blood-spatter and brain-matter. My pants are soaked in it. Yet I

Why Fight When You Can Run?

It is an idea that most games discourage, to say the least. Combat, hitting things, shooting things, cutting things, breaking things, slaying monsters, just fighting seems to be the big focus of most of the more well known, popular games

Watch the First 10 Minutes of Shank

As of today, the intensely violent brawler is available on both PSN and XBL for 15 bucks–but, maybe you’re still not sure about purchasing the title. That’s fair. If you don’t feel like testing out the demo for whatever reason,

The Ultimate Reward

I used to play Gears 2 non-stop. I rolled with the top-dogs, the people who played so flawlessly that it was more common for the opposite team to rage-quit than it was for us to lose. In retrospect Gears was