Games
Sarah Kent
The best way to experience Ed Atkins’ exhibition at Tate Britain is to start at the end by watching Nurses Come and Go, But None For Me, a film he has just completed. It lasts nearly two hours but is worth the investment since it reveals what the rest of the work tries hard to avoid openly confronting – grief.Actor Toby Jones reads from a diary kept by Atkins’ father, Philip during the months before his death from cancer in 2009. With mordant humour, he titled it Sick Notes and, by turns, the entries are sad, funny, banal or full of pain and fury. Jones’ audience is a group of young Read more ...
Tom Fowler
Recently, having just shared the rehearsal draft of my current Royal Court play Hope has a Happy Meal with two close friends, I found myself slightly offended when one of them said, "you can tell you were playing the Nintendo Switch obsessively when writing this." They then proceeded to talk about the play and its structure in video game terms. The plot of my play [favourably reviewed last week on theartsdesk] revolves around a woman called Hope returning to the People’s Republic of Coca Cola to find the family she left behind 24 years ago. As my friend (rightly) pointed out, the play Read more ...
Jon Turney
Our everyday lives, if we’re fortunate, may be placid, even contented. A rewarding job, for some; good eats; warm home; happy family; entertainment on tap. Yet, even for the privileged, awareness of impending change – probably disaster – intrudes.Our entertainment is saturated with foreboding. In the Anthropocene, the hard-to-define era when the human collective has planet-wide effects that will endure for aeons, any new fictional world bears traces of the ways our real world is being made, or unmade.Mark Bould’s book explores how these reveal what he calls the Anthropocene unconscious, which Read more ...
Nick Hasted
An early trailer for this adaptation of the ‘90s games franchise caused Cats-like horror at its overly humanoid Hedgehog. Rather than the former film’s risky freak-show, though, this diligently redesigned Sonic is the most safely saccharine family movie imaginable.Given the basic premise of a fast blue anthropomorphic critter, a Road Runner-style animated chase movie would seem the obvious choice (one made by 1993’s Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon series). Instead, after a cynical origin story splicing Spider-Man and Bambi, in which Sonic’s slain mother-figure explains that great Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Reinventing the wheel is no easy task, yet EA, the powerhouse publisher behind the multi-decade long FIFA series, manages to pull the digital rabbit from the hat year after year. The majority of the on-pitch action hasn’t changed in iterations, and nor does it really need to; it’s a slick, great-looking and responsive playing experience. But if you plan to get casual gaming football fans to part with the best part of 50 quid every year, you need to do more than offer updated team-sheets and kit selection. We’re very much in the world of refinement, not revolution. We gain little touches Read more ...
Alfred Quantrill
Design/Play/Disrupt at the V&A covers a wide variety of games that are spearheading the gaming world at the moment. It takes a closer look at eight of the most innovative and different games that have changed the world of gaming in the last five years. Concept sketches and art show the games developing as they gradually take their final form. The exhibition also looks at how videogames could be more life-like and give a new perspective on the world.Some of the games cover topics never really seen before in games. Mafia 3 is set in 1968 USA, and addresses racism as an integral part of the Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Interactive stories are a tricky proposition. Make the on-screen action too passive and your audience feels like they’re watching a succession of cut-scenes. Tip the balance the other way and it’s just a game with pretensions of cinematic story telling. The idea that every decision you make in-game, whether it’s a dialogue choice or an action, will ultimately affect the outcome of the story is a bold ambition.How can you really tell if your choices actually make a difference to the narrative, apart from replaying the scene continuously? In the past, with two notable previous interactive Read more ...
Simon Munk
Most first-person games immediately stick a gun in the bottom part of your screen. Developers seem to believe that the only exciting agency a player has in virtual worlds is to destroy them and kill the people populating them. A Story About My Uncle joins a small, but growing band of first-person games that ditch the shooting, for the better.Alongside such titles as Portal and Antichamber, A Story About My Uncle is led by puzzles, by grasping the world with a hand, or traversing through it, rather than shooting at it. Told as a bedtime story (like Princess Read more ...
Simon Munk
On technical grounds, it's pretty hard as a gamer not to simply be amazed by Modern Combat 5 – it is, pretty much, a fully-functioned, first-person shooter to rival Call Of Duty and Battlefield, only on your phone rather than a dedicated home console.That's not just talking in terms of visuals – although they're the most immediately impressive thing about the game. As well as the graphics, there's the amount of single-player missions, the multi-player and the plethora of side-quests, weapons upgrades and loadout options available also.Unfortunately, visual and technical elements are not the Read more ...
Simon Munk
Sometimes virtual violence can simply be fun, even morally dubious violence. Sniper Elite III is pretty reprehensible and fairly morally indefensible. It gleefully glamorises violence. Yet throughout, it's fun. Really good fun.Sniper Elite's key selling point, the thing that defines the series above all else, is a repellent, yet hypnotic, slow-motion kill-cam. Improved for the latest game, it shows your long-range bullet entering through skin, muscle, sinew; shattering through bone; destroying internal organs before leaving your Nazi enemy writing in agony on the ground, before expiring in Read more ...
Simon Munk
A detective ghost story with virtually no violence – Murdered: Soul Suspect is an odd construction. It is part point-and-click adventure game, part interactive fiction and part stealth-adventure – none of which are massively successful elements.While investigating The Bell Killer, a serial killer working his way throughSalem,Massachusetts, your clichéd cop comes off the worse for an encounter. Thrown out of a high window, then shot, you come to as a ghost. Now, in order to be head off into the light, you must find out who your killer is.As a ghost, of course, you no longer have access to guns Read more ...
Simon Munk
Heralded as the first true "next-generation" videogame, Watch Dogs has either been hugely overhyped or the imaginative leap required for a true new generation of videogaming is entirely absent from mainstream games. Because this cyberpunk-inflected hacking action-adventure offers virtually nothing new.The original Deus Ex in 2000 remains the template for combining dystopian science fiction themes, multi-angled approaches to missions and cyberpunk human augmentation and hacking. This simply attempts to mix that formula with the huge open world and freeroaming chaos of Grand Theft Auto V and Read more ...