XCOM: Enemy Unknown is filled with death, no matter how carefully you plan or hard you try. Sometimes you make mistakes and other times it’s simply out of your control. XCOM‘s Facebook pages immortalizes the fallen. One of the achievements of the game is the pang of guilt when one of your soldiers d
Ever wonder what kind of internal insight your favorite NES games reveal? John Peck at McSweeney’s will tell you: Metroid: You have killed a mosquito with hairspray. Duck Tales: You have spelled out “BOOBS” with Alpha-Bits. Contra: You have wet the bed exactly twice: once as a child, once as an adul
Next Tuesday marks a quarter century since the release of the first Final Fantasy game in Japan. To put this amount of time in perspetive – the Final Fantasy era – if you travel back an equivalent amount of time before Final Fantasy existed, to 1962, John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were sti
Hotline Miami doesn’t seem like an easy sell. True, the first postmodern game is my favorite of the year, and its Drive-meets-Scarface-meets-Smash TV aesthetic scratches an itch for a lot of weird dudes like me. But come on: it’s a top-down, grotesque kill fest with a meta-meta plot and it’s only av
Despite an ambivalent intial reception, Metro 2033, the cult-favorite Russian shooter set in a postapocalyptic Moscow subway system, received 2010 game of the year discussion from no less an authority than Tom Bissell. THQ’s financial misfortune – which has already led to that publisher’s great humb
In an interview with Wired, Ken Levine explained the box art of Bioshock Infinite as a means of courting the untapped segments of the market. Specifically: “We went and did a tour… around to a bunch of, like, frathouses and places like that. People who were gamers. Not people who read IGN. And [we]
Though many games develop themes of environmental preservation (and in fact, in one of the most beloved games of all time, Final Fantasy VII, you actually begin the game as an environmental terrorist. How weird is that??? Ok.), the crossover between gaming and the environmental movmenet isn’t notabl
Photo: Agence France-Presse The Syrian rebels, deep into the second year of their struggle against the repressive Assad regime, don’t have the resources of a national armed forces; they have to improvise. This AFP piece gives the layout of the homemmade Shams II armored vehicle, which is a: fully-en