There are two ways that writers on the internet announce career changes: either by tweeting about how they found out they got laid off, or by publishing a grandiloquent “farewell post.” You know the type: endlessly generous, ruminative, peppered with musings on the industry and hyperlinks to the wri
I am not much of a racing-game guy, unless it a) takes place in the future, b) has dinosaurs driving the cars, or c) has Forza in the title. The Forza series impresses, fundamentally, as a piece of craft. You just know that each of these cars was wheeled IRL into a room full of lasers to be scanned
We love Overwatch. So we assembled 22 of our best writers and set them to work—a writer to jump into the skin (or robotic shell) of each character. The result is 22 odes. You can use the “Overwatch odes” tag to leaf through them all, or use the handy list at the bottom of this post. /// I’ve been wa
You may never have heard of Diane Lederman, but that’s only because her work is, by design, invisible. As a production designer, she is responsible for making the worlds we see on TV and film look believable. She recreated mid-80s Americana for AMC’s Cold War thriller The Americans (2013), and on HB
It’s tempting to describe Absolver with an endless stream of references to other games—big ones, the type for which you see cardboard cutouts at GameStop. It’s an online multiplayer game riffing on the model of Destiny (2014) or Dark Souls (2011)—not, they clarify, an MMO—with players both friendly
It’d be foolhardy to make any big claims about The Last Guardian, Fumito Ueda’s massively long-in-development third game, after 45 minutes of playing it at E3. So I will start with what I know, which is that the big feathery chicken-cat, who is the ostensible star and raison d’etre of the videogame,
This article is part of PS2 Week, a full week celebrating the 2000 PlayStation 2 console. To see other articles, go here. /// The first time I played Final Fantasy XII (2006), I didn’t get it. I liked it, I think—there was something unusually elegant about the game’s stern, philosophical conversati
Released at the end of last year, Postcards from Home has the feel of a curio: a weighty tome assembled exclusively from images captured within Sony’s discontinued virtual world, Home (2008-2015). Its author, the Spanish photographer Roc Herms, has explored games before, whether making absurdist use
Yesterday, Kanye West debuted his new album, The Life of Pablo, at Madison Square Garden. The “listening event” is a long-standing power-move in the most entrenched corners of the record industry—a complementary-wine-and-shrimp sort of affair, where people stand around and maybe take notes on a reco
A videogame called Unravel will be released tomorrow. It may be a good game, and it is certainly a good-looking one, with a soft focus and hazy depth of field; tree leaves rustle convincingly and thick snowflakes pile up as the camera pans ever right-ward. It appears to make use of this tactile worl
I love Soulja Boy almost as much as Soulja Boy loves videogames. He was supposed to disappear after 2007’s “Crank That”—a misogynist dance anthem that was embraced, largely, sarcastically—but instead he hit the gas, beefing like crazy, flirting with major-label pop, and then dissolving in a haze of
I spent a lot of time this week listening to “Subterraneans,” the last song on 1977’s Low, by David Bowie. I didn’t know what else to do. Like a lot of other people, I had a feeling—this response to death we all have, with varying degrees of terror and/or sadness attached to it—combined with the use
Japanese culture and hip-hop have a long relationship, from the genre’s mid-90s kung-fu obsession to Kanye’s mid-oughts evocation of Japanese pop art up through its current commingling in the very production of Drake’s ubiquitous “Hotline Bling.” The Chicago emcee Sir Michael Rocks has always been a
The new No Man’s Sky trailer kicks off with a Blade Runner-esque “I’ve seen things…” monologue and concludes with a date. It’s not an exact release date, but it is something to look forward to: June 2016 on PC and PlayStation 4. On display in the video are the same bright galaxies and vibrant wildli
We were keen on Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, the Chinese Room’s spiritual successor to Dear Esther and a furious, beautiful audio-visual experience. The game is literate, subtle, and adult, all qualities missing from a lot of the games we come across, even those that aspire to such descriptors.
Life is a brutal slog. You spend the majority of your waking hours working, and spend the remainder recovering from the toxic effects of that work. Your body is constantly deteriorating, unless you are like a little kid, in which case, I have this to say: it is all downhill from here, bub. The plane
I get why someone might not love Eraserhead: it is largely without dialogue or plot and it costars an embalmed cow fetus. I can even concede that Eraserhead may not be David Lynch’s “best” movie, as his thematic and formal skillset came into greater focus in the following decade, and he somehow loop
There is a vocal contingent of the Kill Screen staff that does not like to even put their eyes upon Dropsy. They will not speak his name. The big, doughy clown, who stars in an upcoming, eponymous point-and-click adventure game, straddles an uncomfortable line of realistic heft and cartoonish, Gumby
File this one under “nexus of things about which only Clay gives a shit”: Drake vomited out three dope tracks over the weekend, one of which (“Cha Cha”) is a slinky, seven-minute ode to a romance gone sour. Its backing track may sound familiar to Mario completists; it’s the stage-select music from S
