John Lennon once said that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Take a look at the current gaming charts and you could draw the conclusion that music games are now more popular than The Beatles. Obviously, music games themselves aren’t a new phenomenon, but their current popularity, and specifically that of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, certainly is. ...

“We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is? When will we get to the cowboy level?”

– Professor Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

Time travel and videogames are a perfect fit. ...

The internet is often thought of as a well of information, but that’s a flawed metaphor. It’s much more like a worldwide network of networks, if you follow my logic. And as the internet ages, it’s becoming littered with servers, and those servers are becoming littered with old data. ...

People get pissy when stuff they consider holy is depicted profanely in videogames. Take Manchester Cathedral’s depiction in Resistance or lyrics cribbed from the Quran in LittleBigPlanet. Gamers react with their usual jaded cynicism, belittling others for daring to hold something sacred in this fast-forward age of materialistic gluttony. ...

Thanks to two films - Chinatown and Blade Runner - every action game is practically required to have a Chinatown level. It’s not the Chinatown you see in real-life - a thriving community and marketplace established over a unique hybrid of  Western and Chinese culture – no, it’s all neon signs and gangsters, dragon statues and tile roofs. A lot of tile roofs. And it's usually in the future or ...

Japan has a well-earned reputation for daft, brilliant and disturbingly odd TV game commercials, but it took a long (sometimes painful) evolution along a course signposted by geeky TV celebs in bad jumpers during the 1980s and PlayStation-sophistication in the 1990s, for that rep to be won and maintained.

Back at the end of the 1970s, Japanese gamecorps started trying to convince their public that games were not something to be afraid ...

Sam Fisher’s gone through some midlife crisis-sized changes over the past couple of years. One minute he’s a tortured emo agent on the run, with as little respect for the law as he does for kept facial hair. The next he’s a malicious murderer, who makes Jack Bauer look like Jack Osborne.

Above: From badly groomed to just plain bad

The Conviction of 2007 has heavy influences from ...

Our eyeballs have been sullied by hateful Western game ads for too long now. Our retinas simply can’t stand anymore of this…

Want us to buy your titles giant corporations? Show us middle-aged businessman fighting for survival in the wilderness, wronged women attacking men with bouquets or a couple in gold body paint hugging on public transport. It sounds like madness, but it’s clearly a sound business strategy. ...