The Talos Principle, Croteam’s philosophical puzzler about artificial intelligence, the existence of God, and moving laser beams around in ancient-seeming spaces to open force fields, was one of my top three games of last year. OK, it was exactly No. 3, if you must know, followed in ascending order by South Park: The Stick of…
On the most recent episode of Shall We Play a Game?, my podcast with former NPR producer and correspondent JJ Sutherland, we review The Magic Circle, a game with a whole lot of BioShock alums in the credits: The Magic Circle’s lead designer, Jordan Thomas, was the creative director of BioShock 2, and he also…
Like the delightful and oppressive mobile-game galaxy that it summoned, Tetris is both seductive and dispiriting. Alexey Pajitnov’s falling-block puzzler captures the pleasure and the vacuousness of virtual labor. Each game of Tetris contains an interactive “Ozymandias,” a fruitless quest to build something that will outlast the lone and level sands. Look on my tetrominoes,…
On the most recent episode of Shall We Play a Game?, my podcast with former NPR producer and correspondent JJ Sutherland, we review Lifeline, a game designed for the Apple Watch, and Fallout Shelter. I also talk to Cara Ellison, a game designer and critic, about working on Grand Theft Auto IV and Dishonored 2…
On the most recent episode of Shall We Play a Game?, my podcast with former NPR producer and correspondent JJ Sutherland, we review Sam Barlow’s Her Story as well as Sunset, a game from Tale of Tales about being a housekeeper during a South American revolution. You can listen to it here. Spoiler: JJ really…
Of all the strange things that come with writing about video games for a living, raising kids while doing so might be the strangest. We have daughters, who are now 3 and (almost) 5. They are old enough to know that when Dad is holed up in his office over the garage, there’s a very…
On the most recent episode of Shall We Play a Game?, my podcast with former NPR producer and correspondent JJ Sutherland, we review Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Knight. We also talk to Salon literary critic Laura Miller about Don’t Starve, her video game obsession. You can listen to it here. Subscribe on iTunes, Android, or the…
I didn’t love Batman: Arkham Knight, but I did like it. Just not at first. For at least a few hours, I worried that I was going to give the game a “No” under Kotaku’s binary rating system. I ended up getting to 95 percent completion—falling one tank battle and a couple hundred Riddler trophies…
You’re looking at a screenshot I took of a video game that I just finished playing on Steam. Here is a clip from another game I played on my PC this week: Earlier this year, I played a game on my PlayStation 4 that looked like this: Movies these days—or action movies, at least—are a…
Warren Spector says virtual reality will be a fad, “at best a minor part of gaming’s future.” Far be it from me to question the director of Deus Ex on, well, anything. But I’m not sure it matters whether VR is a fad. Motion controls were a fad, yet that fad drove the sales of…
If you are so into the Arkham games that you are going to be wounded by learning anything at all about Batman: Arkham Knight—what characters may or may not be in it, for example—please don’t read this review. Go play the game! You will like it, mostly. The spoilers in this review are minor, in…
I played 59 video games, demos and prototypes at this year’s E3, a mere 16 of them on the expo’s third and final day. Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst or Just Cause 3 would have made it an even 60, but EA took close to 90 minutes of my two-hour booth tour to get me through Star…
I played 30 video games on Wednesday at E3, including at events that were held before and after the show floor was open. These were my favorites, in order of preference. 1. What Remains of Edith Finch. Giant Sparrow’s The Unfinished Swan was both a first-rate children’s fable and one of the better games of…
At its worst, E3 is like a restaurant where the chef makes you watch a video of the meal he intends to make and then asks you to come back next year when it’s ready. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, the chef will prepare a sample of the food and then let you watch him eat…
There’s a World Video Game Hall of Fame now, and the first class of inductees was announced yesterday. Pong, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., Tetris, Doom, and World of Warcraft are to video games what Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth, and Honus Wagner are to baseball Canonball—the process of assembling a canon—is one…
Quitting, I was raised to believe, is a moral failing. You should stay on the Little League team through the end of the summer, even if you’re not having any fun. You should stick it out as an altar server at church until the end of the eighth grade, whether you like it or not.…
Last fall, a producer for CBS This Morning called me to talk about the video game Hatred. I had been on CBS a year earlier to teach co-anchor Gayle King how to play Grand Theft Auto V, the biggest entertainment property in the human-discovered universe. This time, instead of talking about a game made by…
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