“There comes a point where you start to wonder why you never gave it any serious thought before. You’re a smart guy and you could be making ten times what you do now. You’d have to break the law but really how big a deal is that in this country? You could do it without […]
“What happened to that nice young girl you brought home last year..?” “She was not a young girl mother, she was only two years younger than me.” “And you’re still my little girl. Now don’t avoid the question. She was lovely and she had a thing for you anyone could see that.” “… It wasn’t […]
“This is the kind of case that makes you want to believe in true evil, to believe that only someone who’s honest to God evil could do something like that. But that’s not how it is, is it? He’s not evil, being evil would make him special but there’s nothing special about him, he’s just […]
“It hits you like a shock wave; that moment when you realise exactly where your friendship ends. Sure you have disagreements, who doesn’t? But this is different. Worse is you see he doesn’t even realise what’s happened. This burning mark seared into you friendship and he can’t even see that it’s him holding the brand. […]
“… Rapture’s genius will be held within her new DNA, able to shift into desired patterns at will. A Utopian cannot be confined to a single throw of the genetic dice. When needed, she is a composer. A dancer. An engineer. She truly will be the People’s Daughter.” System Shock 2 is SHODAN’s story, your […]
Structurally Mass Effect 2 is built around the concept of recruiting a team to participate in a ‘suicide mission’. Each new character recruited has their own specific quest line, a part of their lives they feel compelled to resolve before committing fully to a task that may lead to their own demise. These loyalty quests […]
Having previously examined the possibly meanings that can be drawn from logical exploration, in the form of resource cycles in BioShock and Beyond Good & Evil, I’ve decided to take a step back and look more closely at the concept of exploration in a territorial sense. What meaning can this form of exploration impart? I […]
Stripped of all context there is a single ability true to all video games: amplification of input, the translation of a simple input into a complex output: I press this button and a whole new range of options become available to me; I pull this trigger and that car explodes. The idea is not to […]
The appeal of Nathan Drake is that he is a decisive character. He might be flawed, imperfect and not always able to make the best decisions yet he will always make a decision. He doesn’t hesitate, he acts, often with little understanding of the full consequences of his actions but still with an appreciation of […]
With each consecutive hardware generation it takes time to achieve what was possible at the end of the previous generation. New hardware requires new software techniques and often a return to first principles. The initial move from sprite based to polygon based games saw a marked increase in the spatial complexity of environments but was […]