DS Features

Whether they’ve advanced menacingly toward our camera lenses, hidden their faces when we look at them or just sort of hovered aimlessly, ghosts have been a semi-constant threat in videogames almost since the medium was invented. One of the great things about games, however, is that they’re a way to explore unusual viewpoints – and every once in a while, they give us a chance to see through the eyes of these undead phantoms, and find out what it’s like to flit insubstantially through an earthly plane that’s perpetually, almost comically afraid of us.

Only a handful of games have actually offered a chance to see things from the proverbial Other Side, but these are our favorites...

July is a bit dry in terms of new-stuff quantity, but we’re really looking forward to the majority of its releases. We have a healthy amount of oddball gems, sequels and re-releases to look forward to. It’s as much a month to experiment on weird stuff as it is to catch up on stuff you may have missed a year (or five) ago. What’s particularly exciting is that we’re seeing a solid number of awesome-looking downloadable games. If you’d rather not spend $60 on bananas-bullshit like Catherine (which we’re way into, by the way), put that money toward a few XBLA games instead. You’ve got slimmer pickin’s than usual, but them pickin’s look good...

There’s something very special about the process of old-fashioned, frame-by-frame, 2D animation. In the old days, the only way to get your animated character to wave his or her arm was to spend hours upon hours painstakingly crafting each frame and constantly readjusting your work to make sure everything flowed correctly. Now you just set a couple of keyframes and let a computer do it all for you.

Over the years we've enjoyed steering some of the animal kingdom's most awesome specimens through some pretty awesome games. Banjo the bear. Donkey Kong the ape. Amaterasu the wolf. We've loved them all. But it's not always nature's most magnificent beasts that game makers deem suitable for the role of hero. Some creatures that have made the jump from wildlife to virtual life are little more than food chain filler. And this is those pathetic

There’s something very special about the process of old-fashioned, frame-by-frame, 2D animation. In the old days, the only way to get your animated character to wave his or her arm was to spend hours upon hours painstakingly crafting each frame and constantly readjusting your work to make sure everything flowed correctly. Now you just set a couple of keyframes and let a computer do it all for you.

When it comes to comedy, no other medium is quite as hit-or-miss as videogames. It’s rare to see a game that’s genuinely funny (on purpose, at least), and most of the games that try range from passably entertaining to insultingly awful. Chalk it up to games and humor being subjective art forms, one man’s culture being another man’s trash, et cetera.

They might not look all that, but give them the wrong look and the following group of surprising badasses will kill the hell out of you. Wimpy either in appearance, profession or nature it doesn’t stop these secretly Chuck Norris hard characters from saving the world and giving evil the bird, while murdering hundreds of baddies in the process.

Somehow, though, we’re just not buying their unexplained ass-kicking

The whole point of E3 is for publishers and developers to show off their new games under controlled conditions. You know, to let them show them in the way they want them to be seen without journos choosing to show the flaws.

AND YET. We still get sent screenshots that look like someone deliberately picked them to make the game look bad. Look at these amazing examples of fail from this year's show

July is a bit dry in terms of new-stuff quantity, but we’re really looking forward to the majority of its releases. We have a healthy amount of oddball gems, sequels and re-releases to look forward to. It’s as much a month to experiment on weird stuff as it is to catch up on stuff you may have missed a year (or five) ago. What’s particularly exciting is that we’re seeing a solid number of awesome-looking downloadable games. If you’d rather not spend $60 on bananas-bullshit like Catherine (which we’re way into, by the way), put that money toward a few XBLA games instead. You’ve got slimmer pickin’s than usual, but them pickin’s look good...