Looking past the structure

Here’s a common scenario: you have to save your loved one but the game keeps asking you to enter that sewer level collect some kind of completely unnecessary item. Or maybe you want to escape your average zombie-infested Police HQ, but has to deal with chess keys first. The task structure thrown upon you matters and should not be ignored.

On Entitlement: Are We Whiners, Or Just Passionate?

Image by Daniel Horacio Agostini, licensed under Creative Commons Just when you thought the word ‘fanboy’ had gone away and gamers could have conversations without throwing trite slurs at each other, there’s a new villain in town: ‘entitled’. It crops

How to Shep a Shepard – A cosplay help guide

(Cosplayer: Elizabeth DeLoria) This isn’t a step-by-step tutorial. Partly I didn’t leave a good paper trail, partly because I found it’s next to impossible to replicate a cosplay armour because of the lack of standardisation. Instead, I hope this works

The Lost Words of Mass Effect 3

“You have messages at your private terminal.” In Mass Effect 3, this single quote is repeated more than any other sentence to the player. Just approaching the the galaxy map will prompt Specialist Traynor to dutifully tell Shepard when new

Entitled, Insatiable Whiners. Yea, I'm Looking at You Gamers

Gamers, that most thankless sub-culture of righteous, misanthropic critics. We are never pleased, often discontented, and consistently better informed (or so we like to think) than our video game loving counterparts in every other part of the industry proper. Who could love

Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut is a Watershed Moment in Videogame Narrative

(Note: Just to be clear, there are some light spoilers regarding the ending of Mass Effect 3. If you haven’t played through it, I recommend going through and experiencing the “disappointing” ending before Tuesday so you can know what all

Owning Games Isn't What it Used to be, and That Needs to Change

Much of our lives are moving online. Last night, I ordered Chinese takeout through Grubhub in-between talking with friends over Gchat and Twitter, and then later played a few (fruitless) hours of Modern Warfare 3‘s multiplayer, before returning to my

Soundscapes – The Future of Sound

Have we perfected sound yet? No, not by a long shot. We imagine that graphics will be “done” when we can create anything we can imagine without hitting a hardware limit. Whether it’s a perfect recreation of reality or whatever

Why Blizzard's surrogate ruins Diablo 3

Video games, at heart, are about us. We may be someone else, but we’ll always be ourselves, too. Whether that someone is Gordon Freeman, physicist and monster-killer, or Kratos, menacing god of punching dudes with chains, or Lara Croft, we’re

Smart phone connectivity is a way better industry fad than motion controls.

Easily the neatest rising trend in the game industry right now is the connectivity we can have with our games when we’re not playing them. Thanks to smart phone connectivity, we can bid on auction house items in WoW and keep our galactic readiness in Mass Effect 3 at a reasonable level without even booting up a PC or console. There’s even an app for an interactive map of Skyrim out there.

And so early in the event that keeps our YouTube and Google Reader tabs constantly open we have already have seen how Nintendo and Microsoft are making sure we don’t ever escape from our little gaming worlds.