I remember a movie review of Inception pointed out how we ‘just accept’ where we are when a dream or movie scene starts. Leo makes the point of dreams doing this by asking (Elaine Paige?) does she remember how the got to the cafe they are sitting at. Films do this all the time and we just accept it, it cuts out the…

Also I’m well aware of execs signing off on things without due diligence but it’s a bit of an ask to assume they’d check and spot this work as plagiarised. Somebody did this knowingly and didn’t say. The question becomes how far up the chain did people know?

I never see it mentioned but the thing that pushed me to get a PS1 was Fade To Black, an almost unrecognisable sequel to “Another World” an absolute classic platformer/sci-fi game from Delphine Industrie (A french company I think?). Another world still holds up as one the best games I’ve ever played. You wake up in an…

I suspect they’ve probably cross a line in the terms & services that has to do with selling games in bundles, possibly abused some loophole with the comfort of thinking “but 1000s of other developers do it on Steam as well” and Steam has just closed the door. I suspect Steam doesn’t want to shout about it and the…

As much as I’d have loved more Half-Life, imagine if this had been a Ubisoft property? We’d be on Half-Life 15 and it would basically be the same game as Half-Life 2. There’s a problem these days with franchises. Look at the (big) films and games released in a year and I suspect more than half are now franchises. How…

Can’t help but feel this is one giant marketing test? A bit like the first Xbox. A large corporation that’s closely aligned to video games sees a market it hasn’t tapped but is ‘adjacent’ to their business. Like Microsoft Google can afford to throw money away on this and see if anything marketable pops out. I suspect…

The legend is greater than the reality. I completely missed the first Half-life game but went back and played it after playing the crap out of the outstanding Half-Life 2, ....and it felt like crap. The reality was Half-Life was brilliant and ground-breaking for it’s time. Half-Life 2 was brilliant and ground-breaking…

I think you are spot on but it’s also slightly larger than that. Both Xbox and Sony will continue with consoles but I think you’ll see a significant pull back on marketing. They’re already both cutting back the E3 extravaganza and other shows. People don’t think about it much but consider Netflix and Spotify and Valve…

I think people forget that Indiana Jones was one of the most successful franchises ever BECAUSE he was a ‘normal’ aged man who would be treasure hunting as opposed to a 20something hipster who would still be working on his postgrad?

I would say the general appeal of all souls games is that the sense of achievement comes from getting better at the game, not just level or story progress. Too many games seem to work on the idea that if someone just grinds away enough, without actually getting better, they can progress. See almost every multiplayer…

Proud to say I persisted until I did a near-perfect run and beat the mission. I think I was 2 seconds away from running out of fuel. I knew immediately which mission the title was referring to before I opened the article. It was optional but not if you were trying to 100% every GTA game when they came out.

I thought this was going to be a discussion how Mario and Dark Souls have very similar game design. Do an area/level over and over, learn the new enemy moves, keep trying until you get so good you can make it to the boss level. Beat the boss and then move to the next level. Occasional secret areas and passages.

Interesting stuff. AI is so tough to get right because the slightest oddity goes straight in the uncanny valley, or a glitch youtube video

Disclosure is the key. I think it should be clearly stated “This thing you are about to watch was paid for by...” and if the conditions of that contract mean they have to talk favourably about the product then it needs to be stated. For example “This Clueless Gamer segment was paid for by Bethesda. None of the…

Well that makes me instantly stop caring. Of course, as far as I can tell, there’s absolutely no way of knowing if any attack on your base is legitimately another player or Konami-bots trying to drum up some insurance cash. So yeah, a protection racket, and they only way to beat a protection racket is to not care…

Had could you not notice the missing eye!? It was well gross, particularly if you zoom in to look at the empty socket.... eurgh!? Also, points lost for lack of realism Kojima, I kicked my dogs loads of times and always forgave me (always accidentally, bloody num-nuts have no sense, I’ve been working with chainsaws and…

I always felt bad for MOH:WF- The campaign was pretty boring but not as ridiculous as any CoD:MW (except CoD4 of course). And nearly all the missions were based on real spec op situations (even has a short sniper mission pulled straight from Captain Phillips). I really liked the multiplayer though because I could…

As a kid in the C-64 days pirating games was one of the only ways to play them as they weren’t really sold in many shops. It didn’t make it right but the fault lay largely with how games were published and marketed. Now I’m older I prefer to pay for games because I can see the damage piracy does to developers and the…

Part of me wonders if it is a good thing. I loved Dark Souls but Dark Souls II lacked some of the creativity of the first. I still enjoyed it even though it was missing Miyazaki’s amazingly spiralled levels but a good time was had. But one of the main elements that made me love Dark Souls was it’s novelty. There’s…

9 years after the PS3 was released and 18 months years after the PS4? And won’t come out for another year?... ????