Opinion by Matt S. Sony has announced that former Sony Europe president, Jim Ryan, is being promoted to the top role as CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, replacing John Kodera, as the company looks to push its successful PlayStation Network platform even further. As a report in Polygon notes: “[CEO…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. It’s expected that Sony and Microsoft will announce a new generation of consoles this year. That, of course, means that conversations about those successor consoles will dominate discussion in the media and gaming circles. On the one hand, the idea of hardware is viscerally exciting; a…
Read MoreFeature by Harvard L. The Tales series is by many regards Bandai Namco’s answer to Square Enix’s Final Fantasy. It’s a JRPG series with epic scope and a long line of mainstream titles connected more by common elements than plot or character, which is beloved by its hardcore Japanese fans,…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. It’s still early enough in 2019 that I can recommend some New Year’s resolutions, right? I’m doing it anyway, so here we go: The video game industry is showing a remarkable capacity to modernise and mature at times. Just today there was the news that Blizzard…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. Late last year, news emerged that a man in Japan had held a wedding for himself and Hatsune Miku – as in, the vocaloid-cum-digital superstar that we all know well in video games thanks to the sublime Project Diva series. Because this story fed the “weird…
Read MoreOpinion by Harvard L. Yesterday, in my Smash Bros. burnout, I decided to revisit Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles on the Switch because I thought it would be one that could relax me. Unfortunately, stepping back into Yonder after a break was confusing at first – I dropped into the…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. It’s a little over a week until Super Smash Bros. Ultimate lands on people’s Nintendo Switches, and, inevitably for such a high profile title, that means some people have already got the game. There’s always one retailer or another that sees a commercial opportunity in releasing…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. Sony is, of course, a Japanese company. However, the company’s behaviour over the last couple of years towards Japanese games, and indeed, Japanese storytelling and culture, has been something that has started to concern me, because it seems like Sony, in its continued push to remain…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. “Serious gamers need serious performance. Get ready for a new standard in gaming.” This ad on Twitter, by Intel, announcing some new hardware or other that it had developed, reminded me to get these long overdue thoughts down on the virtual paper: this idea that improvements…
Read MoreOpinion by Nick H. At the very heart of sports is a sense of competition. The idea is that we compete against ourselves and we compete against our opponents. Competition innately brings out the best in us, because we are being pushed internally and externally to get better than we…
Read More