Becoming What You Fear the Most: The Vicious Cycle Within League of Legends

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April 21, 2013 Features / General / PC
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you fear the most

To me League of Legends represents a paradox of conflicting emotions that lie at extreme ends of the gaming experience.

On the one hand, it is an incredibly good video game. Some of my finest mouse-clicking memories have been created in it. It’s addictive, satisfying even when you’re losing and there’s always more to learn. Despite the fact that every game involves fiddling with an everlasting procession of guys that bundle down one of three lanes to their demise, it manages extraordinary depth. Continue reading …

I Have Played: BioShock Infinite

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April 8, 2013 Console / General / PC / Reviews
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Bioshock Columbia

Jake played BioShock Infinite and has now sat down to write most of the things that he could think to say about it. This isn’t a review. There will be spoilers in this article.
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Another World: The Art and Games of Eric Chahi

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January 30, 2013 Features
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AnotherWorld header

If, like me, you are a desiccated old fossil of a human, limping from one day of bone-creaking agony to another, you’ll no doubt remember both the Commodore C64 and the Commodore Amiga. These were ostensibly some of the first widely available “personal computers” for the average human being, and as such they also inevitably spawned thriving gaming communities.

The Amiga in particular holds a special place in my heart. The games were relatively cheap, and I knew a lot of other kids who had Amigas. Not to mention the relative ease with which Amiga games could be copied, if you were so inclined. Ahem. Thus my friends and I found ourselves almost swallowed up by a tsunami of pixellated joy one summer. I think I may have gone without seeing natural light for a week at one point in that frenzied formative headrush of gaming.

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I Have Played: Little Inferno

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January 26, 2013 Indie / PC / Reviews
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burn us

What exactly is Little Inferno? Is it a fourth-wall-breaking analysis of modern throwaway consumerism, set against the all too familiar backdrop of a tempestuous environmental mutation? Perhaps it’s an existential commentary, an experiment laboured with the task of projecting the developer’s qualms regarding a detached and insular society onto an increasingly distant audience? Maybe it’s an attempt by Tomorrow Corporation to redefine meta-gaming as we know it into something tangential, something more self-aware, cynical and utterly satirical.

It’s certainly about burning things.
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Kentucky Route Zero: A Game, A Play, A Poem

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January 24, 2013 Indie / PC / Reviews
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equus oils

Kentucky Route Zero, an unsettling point-and-click-plus-text-adventure starts with a wide shot, Edward Hopper style, of an old American gas station complete with a man-sitting-watching-world-go-by gatekeeper. It’s an unmistakably American scene, and a strangely constructed-feeling one. But we’ll come back to that…

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Linear is Not a Dirty Word

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January 16, 2013 Features / General
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Sickeningly Linear?

I was watching one of those popular YouTube commentators the other day, playing through a game that he was reviewing and he said something that struck me. He described a game as “sickeningly linear” and wrote it off there and then as a “Bad Game” because of this.

But I say no! Too long have linear games been vilified and derided. So let’s look at why some people like to poo all over them, while others like to give them cuddles (keep these two activities separate).

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The Best Things We Played This Year: A List – Part Four

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December 30, 2012 Features / Indie
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proteus 2012

Here’s (probably) our last post about our favourite games of 2012. Unless you want to write one. Seriously, go on. What did you play this year? Click the ‘contribute and contact’ button up there on the right.
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