As a word, tourist is often pejorative. Like jogger is to runner, tourist is to traveler. One implies lazy trend-following and a profoundly uncool lack of self-awareness, the other an adventurous outlook and a sense of dynamic movement. You’ll be as hard-pressed to find a self-professed jogger as yo
It was there, in the very first shot of Dishonored 2’s gameplay debut. Shown off by director Harvey Smith at publisher Bethesda’s E3 press conference earlier this week, the game’s first true appearance opened with slatted light falling across an unfinished sculpture, the chisel marks visible in the
The title might say it all: Battlefield 1’s choice of numeral suggests a process of looking backward, of turning to the past to find a way forward. In its appearance at the EA Play event yesterday, Battlefield 1 demonstrated this in what was a comprehensive display of force: British Mark IV tanks ch
“I like rusty spoons” whispers Salad Fingers, in his bizarre quavering voice, those ovular eyes pointed in precisely the opposite direction from each other. “I must find the perfect spoon.” Pleasingly creepy and unhinged, David Firth’s crudely-made web series appears, at this distance of a decade, a
The first time I saw the Barbican Estate in London I was entranced. The layered terraces of pitted concrete, the crisscrossing walkways, those monolithic towers that seemed—as with Petra or Al-Hijr—like they might have been carved out of natural stone. It is rare, especially in a city like London, a
It’s the trees; the twisted, whorled trees, their skeletal branches raking the belly of the looming sky. Those are Caspar David Friedrich trees, unmistakably corkscrewed and bent. They rise out of collapsing stonework just like Friedrich’s do, and are touched by the same fading light, decapitated by
It is rare that a piece of key art is worthy of comment. That ugly, industry-saturated term, “key art”, tells the whole story, bringing to mind images of focus testing promotional images usually of men with guns facing away, silhouetted in the light of an explosion. But this bit of key art, this is
This article is part of PS2 Week, a full week celebrating the 2000 PlayStation 2 console. To see other articles, go here. /// It’s hard to calculate the distance from the clifftop to the sea below. My body, my eyes, the trembling in my legs tells me it is far, too far. Yet I can make out the marblin
In the first few hours of The Division, you will be bombarded with phone recordings, resources and consumables, an overwhelming litany of damage numbers and weapon mods. It puts you in such a constant state of information overload that after a while it’s easier to ignore everything but the essential
I’ve been to my fair share of parties. I don’t mean the plastic-cup-and-pizza apartment hang-outs, or the police-baiting all-night warehouse raves—I mean vaulted ceilings, black tie dress code, and free champagne. Parties where I leant on neoclassical statues while distant arty bass droned on, where
Gravity Rush (2012) director Keiichiro Toyama didn’t choose horror, it chose him. His first game as director, Silent Hill (1999), was assigned to him by his bosses at Konami. A stranger to horror as well as a self-professed scaredy-cat, in order to find his feet Toyama turned away from schlock and g
It might have been the cruise missiles that triggered it. One of a string of upgrades nudged towards me by my commanding officer, charting the slow expansion of my carrier’s already formidable arsenal. It was the name— cruise missiles— that was so distant from science fiction, so connected to a side
“Why Is NASA Exploring Pluto? NASA sends spacecraft to other planets because exploring space is exciting.” NASA Educational Technology Services, 2015 The Sputnik Planum, Pluto It emerges out of the ancient, cratered highland of the Viking Terra like a great lake, rippled with vast waves and sectione
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. A month before the December 18 release of the seventh Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, fans can get their fix of light sabers, starfighters and wookies in a galaxy far, far away inside EA DICE’s online shooter game, Star Wars: Battlefront.
