PS2 Features

You may be familiar with Andy Riley's superb book The Bunny Suicides. We liked it so much, we thought we'd create an homage to it, using everyone's favourite flower-headed people.

These Pikmin burned too bright for this world. Rest in pieces

Unless you're the main character, the comic relief or Lan Di, most jobs in games are monumentally shit. Oh sure, Jimmy Saves the Girl might get to shoot aliens and bed busty chicks between the hours of nine to five, but what about all the other poor schmoes that aren't lucky enough to land the limelight? They end up in dead-end positions that the average gamer will never appreciate, that's what.

We're not even talking minimum wage stuff here. More like fatal 'you probably won't survive your first day in the job' work situations. So if you see any wanted ads for Burger Shot, Willamette Mall's food court or a mystery gig selling guns to a government agent, take our advice: keep the hell looking.

Thanks a bunch, Christopher Nolan. Ever since Batman Begins took the universally-reviled cinematic bastardization of a cool character and redrew it in the drab colors and long shadows of The Dark Knight Returns, the “gritty reboot” has been back in fashion. In Hollywood-speak, the term's a nice way of saying “we've screwed this up, can we have a do-over?” Of course, games being a forward-looking sort of medium, players have been wise to this trick for years now – and we're still suckers for it.

Whether it's a deeper-'n-darker sequel or restarting from scratch, rejigging your series with a darker palette and more distorted guitars is a great way to draw attention to what might otherwise be just more sequel-abuse. But how well does it work? From a player's perspective, a gray coat of paint is hardly going to turn gameplay upside down... but from a “cataloguing the tricks they'll pull to sell a new installment” standpoint, dark reboots are just gravy...

Film and television quotes are so entangled with our language that their origins have become irrelevant to most speakers. We use Seinfeld-popularized neologisms and phrases constantly without considering who popularized them (“shrinkage,” “yadda yadda yadda,” “close-talker,” “not that there's anything wrong with that”). But games are a younger medium, and for a time were thought to be the...