The Orange Box

Thought you were sick of all these raved-up retro remakes? Think Geometry Wars has a lot to answer for? Already played Space Invaders Extreme, Taito's previous remake? Well none of that matters. Space Invaders: Infinity Gene is still going to kick you up the arse so hard that you'll be choking on your own pelvis two minutes after you start playing it. And right now it's going for 50% off on the EU PSN. You have no excuses.

Now that the veneer of freshness is drying off of our copies of Modern Warfare 2, we can fully devote ourselves to complaining about the lack of dedicated servers, and just how much the maps suck because our piss poor ranking certainly isn’t due to a lack of practice and the statistical disadvantage of playing against millions of people, no! Which got us thinking: What multiplayer maps reign over all others?

Yes, your boss is evil. The fritzy coffee machine and the copier are evil. The guy in your department who says, “long lunch today?” is pure evil. There’s probably a sub-cavern in hell with extra bubbly lava reserved for people who say “taskforce,” “mindshare,” “workflow,” “ping,” “team player,” “value add” or “pro-active.”

When the hero's mistakes end the world instead of saving it.

For too long, political correctness has choked expression much like smoking might choke someone’s lungs. Back in the good old days, it was common for prominent pillars of society to be seen smoking: baseball players, gangsters, Popeye. Now it’s incredibly frowned upon, because “smoking may slowly kill you,” if you believe “proven medical facts.”

People like to see good triumph over evil. It's the reason Superman always wins despite getting stabbed in the face with shards of Kryptonite. Why John McClane beats a skyscraper full of heavily-armed terrorists with nothing but a string vest. And why those pesky S.T.A.R.S. agents always get the better of the T-virus. Sometimes, though, there are games brave enough to spit in the face of convention and let their no gooders go

The secrets of their success in their own words.

We are all guilty of taking game development for granted. Yes, even you, the guy who plays Call of Duty 4 and wonders why co-op wasn’t implemented. As most of us know, development is less magical and more rigorous – terrible deadlines, limited resources and limited manpower – all factor in to creating what we play for the holiday season.