Review
What Do We Fear in Our Bodies?
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.
Review
Review
Fight! Ow, Stop!
Where do we draw the line between reality and fantasy? Richard Clark argues it’s where the first punch connects with his face.
Review
The Untold Depths of Snake Eating
We can try to make sense of the sound and the fury of Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater 3D as it escalates and unravels. But maybe we don’t need to.
Review
The Mass Effect Is Not What You Thought
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.
Review
Can Martian Plants Teach Us How to Wait in Line?
Waking Mars, an iPhone game about researching and growing life on Mars, has lessons in patience and persistence for the earthbound.
Review
The Longest Hate Story Ever Told
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.
Review
Dear Esther, Where Do You Fit In?
The narrative experiment built on the bones of Half-Life strips away guns, glory, and even agency. What’s left?
Review
The Deadly Rhythm
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.
Review
Review: Don’t Play Sports With Justin Smith
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.
Review
Review: Homeless, Gaming’s Photo 101
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?
Review
Review: Soulcalibur V Needs to Embrace its Inner Sims
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.
Review
Review: Fishing Resort Casts a Deep Spell
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.