Once famously justified by Freud, pop culture’s fixation on human excrement is a strange phenomenon. Yannick LeJacq looks at Postal III and wonders why this has never transferred successfully to videogames.
Everything looks wrong at first about BioWare’s final space opera. It turns out the makers gutted Mass Effect 3 to make it right. Here are their conclusions about humanity.
Christine Love’s visual novel Analogue: A Hate Story points the way to a new literature, and a better world, while dwelling on the shortcomings on the past and present.
Jamin Warren on the myth of the dying music game. Two new games, Rhythm Heaven Fever and Beat Sneak Bandit, show that less is more—and that music games need not be about music at all.
Want to feel the sand between your toes and the ocean spray in your face, to hear the crowds ooh and ahh over your pirouettes in the sky? Justin Smith’s Realistic Summer Sports Simulator is not your game.
Filipe Salgado on the independent game Homeless, which attempts to express the plight of the homeless with repeated presses of the A button. Questions remain: Why does the homeless man think he deserves to be homeless? And how did he get X-ray vision?
Fighting games are not exactly known for their stories, but when does a lack of a reasonable narrative become disruptive? Jordan Mammo reviews Soulcalibur V and talks about how the potentially redeeming Character Creation mode misses the mark.
Sonic the Hedgehog creator Yuji Naka continues to defy expectations with Fishing Resort, a Wii game that moves at the pace of nothing. Jon Irwin explains why watching the water poses a deeper challenge than the average game.
The ever-popular genre of medieval role-playing continues its downward march with Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, a collaboration between game-design heavyweight Ken Rolston, fantasy luminary R.A. Salvatore, and comics auteur Todd McFarlane. Michael Thomsen finds the results less than uninspiring; th
Regardless of one’s familiarity of the game, some sports games just fall flat. Filipe Salgado paints a picture of why NFL Blitz won’t have Madden worrying about competition anytime soon.
A collaboration between two of gaming’s most esoteric creators, Terry Cavanagh and Stephen Lavelle, deals with child abuse, rejection, and death. But it’s more broadly a short story about irreversibility. Lana Polansky explains how the game gets its hook in you in a matter of minutes.
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?
Chances are you’ve heard of The Sims, Will Wright’s mega-hit about living, having feelings, and dying. What happens when that dollhouse game meets Facebook, a social experiment of a very different character? Filipe Salgado argues it’s a match made in hell.
In this double review on updated franchises, Jason Johnson writes on how Aliens: Infestation happily conjures the memory of watching his first R-rated movie, while Filipe Salgado suggests that Space Marines conjures nothing at all.
The return of Rayman turns the simplicity of moving left and right into a platform for ornate, surreal—and very French—beauty. Jon Irwin finds the game cause for celebration.
