The town is just out there in the near distance, a cluster of houses amid acres of flat scrubland. I can’t see any movement, there’s no sound except birdsong, but the buildings are a two minute run away. If I break cover and another player is nearby, I know they will shoot me. They will shoot me and loot my …
It’s hard as nails, it’s bug-ridden, and it has no tutorial – but online zombie adventure DayZ has now been downloaded 1m times, barely a month after its ‘alpha’ launch on PC gaming service Steam. Its creator, New Zealand-born game designer, Dean Hall, has become the latest independent developer to release a new project before it is finished, allowing gamers to …
There have been plenty of ridiculously ambitious Minecraft modelling projects over the past four years. Talented gamers have used Mojang’s Lego-like building sim to craft reproductions of everything from the Starship Enterprise to the Game of Thrones city of King’s Landing. But this is something rather special. Working with a small group of friends Alan Becker is creating a scale …
It’s the second instalment in our look at games that perhaps don’t invoke as much warmhearted nostalgia as they really ought to. Some of these were huge at the time, but have since been overlooked, other managed to slip completely under the radar. Many of these will be familiar to veteran gamers, though, so if you can think of some …
History is not always kind to great games. Titles once heralded as masterworks are often lost as console cycles turn. Alternatively, there are the offbeat outliers completely shunned during their own lifetimes, only to be quietly ransacked by later generations of designers. Here, we be remember 30 brilliant, idiosyncratic, challenging or just plain weird titles that have been erased from …
Alistair Aitcheson likes people to fight over his games. Literally, physically fight right over them. His first smartphone and tablet title, Greedy Bankers, had a multiplayer mode where participants could steal money from each other on screen. His second, Slamjet Stadium, was a futuristic sports sim, in which two opponents fought it out to score goals in a trap-filled arena. …
As obvious as it sounds to say so, in Thief you nick things. You nick a lot of things. Broaches, necklaces, wallets, candelabras – anything valuable that’s lying around, really – all disappear into lead character Garrett’s bottomless sack. You find some of these trinkets in the oddest of places. One would expect to find a golden bracelet or two …
The GameCity prize for 2013 has gone to SpaceTeam, a smartphone title described by its creators as, “a co-operative shouting game.” It was shortlisted against mainstream hits Fifa 14, The Last of Us and XCOM, as well as indie favourites Faster Than Light and Thomas Was Alone. And a daft and amusing game which involves yelling jargon at other participants …
In 2005, when my brother Euan was still a schoolboy, we used to play a lot of Tekken 5 together. If you’re new to this famed video game series, it’s a one-on-one martial arts simulation – a ferocious yet endearingly flamboyant experience in which kangaroos trade blows with Bruce Lee clones, and winged demons grapple with Mexican wrestlers. And I’m …
People often make the mistake of thinking that video games are a relentlessly forward-looking medium. It’s all about the next big release, the next console generation, the next PC graphics card technology. Except it isn’t really. Games are, like most other artforms these days, obsessively self-referential. They are constantly mining the past for successful ideas, merging old genres to create …
