If we have come to expect choice in games, has the modern player forgotten about shared experiences? Drew Millard endures the latest Final Fantasy epic, a game that reaches for a free narrative but makes a bit of a stretch.
This game about helping a family find itself wants to be lovable—yet is frequently the opposite. Lana Polansky explains how a few small, but resounding, design oversights brought the author’s meaningful metaphors crashing down.
Do multiplayer games bring us closer together, or push us farther apart? Now on its seventh lap, the Mario Kart series introduces some bits and pieces of social networking to mix things up. Jon Irwin recalls furiously racing against friends after school in the original Mario Kart, and wonders what i
Can politics really be gamified? Should they really be gamified? Lana Polansky plays the new Flash game Fear is Vigilance and finds herself revisiting her apathy over meaningless causes.
A game about racing across the streets of America ought to be gripping and chaotic. That’s why Need for Speed: The Run does away with the rules and fairness of a real car race. So how does it end up feeling confined and joyless?
