Breaking news! Toad isn’t actually a toad... street fighting doesn’t involve fireballs… guns rarely come with chainsaws attached… and a theoretical physicist has never spent his scientific career smashing zombie head crabs with a blood-soaked crowbar.
As we demonstrated last week, however, the real world would be a hell of a lot more interesting if any of the above was true.
Pac-Man and Mario owned the 1980s. Sonic, Lara and Snake took over for the 1990s. Their games are considered classics. Their names are timeless and iconic. Their images are burned into the memory of every gamer, even those who were born after the characters themselves.
Now we have another ten years worth of heroes, villains, sidekicks and love interests to occupy our imagination. Which, however, will remain there?
Most of us play games to escape reality. For a few brief moments, the trials of the material world trickle away and your only concern is how many goddamn gold coins you can collect in an hour. Then, out of nowhere, a friggin' Xbox 360 console shows up in the actual game and all your suspended disbelief goes right out the window. And it happens more often than you'd think. So often, in fact, that we had little trouble in amassing a large
It's everyone's favorite time of the year again, when thousands of overcaffeinated journalists descend upon E3 with their live-blogged, 2000-word diatribes on the most minor of details. The objects of their unending speculation? The biggest games of the show, which, oddly enough, have been known to the gaming press for months and will surprise literally no one.
That's why we're interested in games that haven't been seen, announced or
Contributors: Chris Antista, Charlie Barratt, Brett Elston, Matthew Keast, Shane Patterson, Mikel Reparaz
Hundreds of games are released every year, then played and forgotten by the next. Only a dozen or so will be remembered a decade from now, and only a few of those will have any lasting impact on the medium as a whole.
Which upcoming titles stand the best chance of leaving that meaningful mark?
“Guns don’t kill people, bullets do.” But do they have to? Not at all, and in fact, this is all the destructive power you’re going to get out of shooting bullets.
See if you can guess what game we’re talking about: in the war-torn near future, a supersolider - outfitted in skin-tight armor - wages battle against legions of aliens/other supersoldiers. To protect his scar-ridden face, he dons a nondescript, yet sleek helmet, thereby rendering him mute and indistinguishable from everything else on sale. Give up? It’s a trick question.
You might remember our feature on the
It's a huge month for warring gods, space marines, tomb raiders, and Pinkerton agents. See why you'll be spending most of March indoors in our rundown of this month's new releases...
On some level, roughly 95 percent of games have always been about assassination: go to point A and kill prominent entity B, fighting your way through goons C through Z to get there. Most games tend to come up with a morally justifiable pretext for all the violence, but more and more, we're seeing games that drop the act and let you be what you've secretly known yourself to be all along: a remorseless killing machine bent on destroying your targets.
Like petty school children bickering in a playground fight, gamers are obsessed with choosing sides. Never content to rate a game as simply “above average” or “slightly disappointing,” we allow internet hearsay, magazine previews, fanboy feuds and console preferences to push our views to ridiculous extremes. We can’t just like something… we have to deem it BEST EVER. We can’t just dislike something… we have to declare it EPIC FAIL.