I’ve written about videogames for Kill Screen, Den of Geek and No Added Sugar (now sadly defunct). I love an interesting interview and a succinct review, an incisive analysis and a broad opinion piece. I believe good writing needs to entertain just as much as it informs, and that reviews shouldn’t just be a buyer’s guide.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
First article for Videogamer.com: a review of Super Hexagon
Super Hexagon is hard enough to infuriate, but its competent design makes it inviting as well. This game will invite you to have one more try (taking less than a second to restart), and it’ll invite you to immerse yourself and play instinctively too: for a game like this, that’s the greatest invitation of all.
Read the rest here: http://www.videogamer.com/iphone/super_hexagon/review.html
Kill Screen: More Imagination, Not Less
Article pondering potential futures in games.
It follows that game systems have increased their processing capabilities roughly along the lines set out by Moore. With each superior generation of consoles has come not only another hand on the Twister mat of visual fidelity, but the connected ability to simulate more complex systems. Huge amounts of memory are needed to simulate a globe’s worth of soccer leagues in Football Manager, or track the status of thousands of characters and objects in Fallout—and tell more interesting stories. Theoretically, at least, Heavy Rain’s characters and interactivity create a more successful storytelling device than Monkey Island. My concern is: as these aspects grow so quickly, is something else being eroded?
Kill Screen: Patrick Buckland Interview
The creator of Carmageddon, no less.
Kill Screen: A Numerological Approach to the Pains of Drop7
A review of the classic iOS puzzle game.
For Kill Screen, why FIFA is more like a war game than a sports simulation.
If you see superstar international soccer players like Didier Drogba and Demba Ba line up for their teams at the Africa Cup of Nations this month, it will be hard to imagine any connection to the sharp finger work of, say, a young Korean playing FIFA, staring calmly at a screen in a television studio in Seoul. The tournament, held this year in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon with a lot of help from Chinese investment into stadiums and infrastructure, has received a considerably smaller level of media coverage than both club and country tournaments in other parts of the world. Correctly or not, it’s considered a purer soccer experience: with less hype, the soccer can speak for itself. There’s less of the conservatism you might have found at the 2010 World Cup, and fans have yet to become the self-loathing cynics of many failing Western teams. The impoverished African host countries could hardly be more different than the competitive, technologically advanced economies of South Korea or Germany, two places where e-sport, that questionable moniker, has become popular.
A longish read, but it has another great illustration: http://killscreendaily.com/articles/essays/possession-ball/
Kill Screen Global Games: Brazil
A short article, part of Kill Screen’s Global Game Project, that describes a children’s game from another country.
The rules of this game are remarkably similar to our first Global Game Project entry, Zambia, but the flavor surrounding those rules—the song, the animal, the item used—are all completely different. Such similarity exemplifies the need to play that exists within all young people. The rules—a variation on Duck, Duck, Goose—must be fun and simple enough to appeal to diverse cultures on at least two different continents. The small details, although irrelevant to the rules, must have been adapted intentionally or gradually mutated to better fit the reference points of different children.
Cute rodent photography if you follow this link: http://killscreendaily.com/articles/columns/global-games-project-brazil/
An interview with the creator of Fez, Phil Fish, from the GameCity festival in Nottingham, England.
The way that you’re presenting your game isn’t particularly normal.
No, but it is the ideal way, though. The whole thing came from Ian Simons. He approached me and said, “Hey, do you want to do something with Fez?” I said I’d love to, but that I’d like to do something a bit different, because I don’t think Fez demos very well in five-minute bursts. You don’t have time to let it sink in; the game is a slow burn; it’s all about the atmosphere and getting lost into that world. And he said, “We have this lounge that’s in a theater we’re doing some stuff in.” And he sent me a picture and I saw the bowl chair, and it was perfect.
It only gets more personal and more interesting the further you scroll: http://killscreendaily.com/articles/why-cant-we-just-have-indie-games/
My second Kill Screen article. This time about VVVVVV and its name.
In the 1990s a small movement of musicians intentionally made their bands’ names hard to pronounce and hard to search for. This meant using only punctuation (!!!), a combination of letters and numbers (3OH!3), only symbols (Prince’s logo), or only consonants (MSTRKRFT). The deflective nature of these titles would conveniently backfire into useful publicity. It was DIY marketing through original band names and it now seems like a quaint past practice.
The article also has a beautiful illustration, so it’s totally worth clicking through: http://killscreendaily.com/articles/naming-rights/
My first Kill Screen article, a review of iOS title Forget-Me-Not.
A floral title like Forget-Me-Not hints at both romance and nostalgia. The latter first: the bulk of the game is a postmodern amalgamation of retro-gaming sources. Infinite, procedurally generated Pac-Man, yes, but influence comes from Commodore 64 cult classic Crossroads too, which also features enemies in conflict with each other as well as the player.
Read the rest here: http://killscreendaily.com/articles/reviews/review-forget-me-not/
AMEinfo #2
Another real estate article for AMEinfo.com, this time about Egypt.
Egypt’s property market inevitably lost value in the wake of the Arab Spring, with most estimates putting the figure around the 30% mark.
Add to this the fact that real estate value basks in security and runs from insecurity, and you would be forgiven for not holding out much hope for Egypt’s property market.
Read the rest here: http://www.ameinfo.com/290263.html
