Like most Brits, I have a deep and abiding love of David Attenborough’s nature documentaries that stretches back to my earliest memories of watching lions and tigers padding around the savannah on TV with my family. More recently, the Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and Life series have provided a quiet backdrop to…

I remember the first time I went shoplifting. The sun was shining, Marin was singing, and I needed a shovel.

E3’s press conferences are great for showcasing all those fancy-pantsy new games but, more importantly, they’re also an invaluable source of the most glorious corporate folly: a place to revel in poorly-conceived skits, mirthless misfires and moments of such inexplicable lunacy that its impossible to see how anyone…

Over at Kotaku UK, Keza MacDonald reported on how Fable Legends took down Lionhead. It’s an in-depth look at why Lionhead was both an innovative studio and one Microsoft was willing to risk. Give it a read!

As I arrive at the Virtuality booth at Play Expo Blackpool, things aren’t going too well. The booth has just opened, and the first members of the public to arrive are having a go on Dactyl Nightmare, one of the earliest VR games. But the viewing screen shows that the game world in the right-hand VR pod is being tilted…

One of Minecraft’s more remarkable side-effects is how it gave rise to (or, indeed, popularised) an entirely new genre: the survival game. Steam is absolutely packed with survival games, many of them unfinished and a surprising number of them pretty damn good regardless. Tough and uncompromising wilderness survival…

The new Doom, really, is rather like the old Doom. You fight swarms of hulking demons. You never stop moving for fear of being swamped in laser fire, missiles, and pile-driving hell knights. Your screen is permanently suffused with explosions, blood, and chunks of bodies. You, the Doom Marine, are what stands between…

Two weeks ago, at EVE Fanfest, a convention for players of space MMO EVE Online, I began hearing odd snatches of conversation: “Dude, the pope’s in our hotel”, “Did you kiss the ring?”. This is at the same time as the real pope is out in Greece meeting with refugees, so, clearly, we’re talking about a different pope.

You must have heard by now. Word on the grapevine is that God of War is swapping out a loin cloth for hide trousers, sandals for boots, and the Blades of Chaos for axes, and heading north to desecrate the world of Norse mythology.

There’s something uniquely horrid about the prospect of biological warfare. There’s the obvious: diseases like ebola are strong candidates for the very worst way a person can die. Then there’s the careless, wanton nature of the destruction: unlike other weapons, you can’t ‘aim’ a plague.

How many games do you know that manage to combine Jungian psychology, Japanese school-life and urban legends? Just like me, the Persona series isn’t as popular in the West as Final Fantasy, but it’s been around just as long (since 1987), and is arguably much more interesting.

These days we’re spoiled for cooperative games. From Halo to Left4Dead and most recently The Division, the modern player’s choices for playing together with friends are abundant. Wind the clock back a decade and a half, however, and the situation was very different.

There’s been a whoooole lot of VR at GDC last week. Every third developer session was about making things for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and/or PlayStation VR. Of the many major questions about these headsets’ comfort and viability, the one I kept hearing is: can I really wear this thing over normal glasses?

Whether it’s an RPG that tells a story over dozens of hours, or a strategy game that takes months to master, games are often a considerable time investment. For many people this is central to gaming’s appeal: nowhere else in art can you find such complete worlds to lose yourself in or such stern challenges to overcome.

Video games are amazing, because you can be anyone or anything in the universe: a blue hedgehog! A ghost! A unicorn with rocket launchers! About 80% of the time, though, you get to be a brooding white guy. There are so many of them that it’s hard to keep track. And they all seem to have dead wives.

Unravel, which stars a little red knitted character called Yarny, is unusually personal. It is an intimate game, tied to a certain place and time, and it very obviously means something to the people who made it.