Opinion by Matt S.Note: This article will have some light spoilers, so please don’t read on if such things matter to you. I’m about 20 hours into Mass Effect: Andromeda now, and while that’s not far enough to form definitive opinions on the game (hence this is not a review),…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. Just as “RPG” was the hot trend through a couple of decades ago, and “FPS” was the big thing over the last decade or so, now it’s the “open world” genre’s turn to be the genre. Every major game developer at the moment seems to want…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. Two years ago when I was in Japan, I went to a gallery that was holding a special exhibition to commemorate 60 years from the day that Japan surrendered in World War 2. I vividly remember this gallery because the exhibition was focused exclusively on the…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt C. Horizon: Zero Dawn is a game that does a few things really well. It’s a technical marvel, showing a beautiful vision of a post-apocalyptic that just begs to be explored. It’s a fun game, in that open-world checklist-a-thon style popularized by Ubisoft and Rockstar. It has…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. Once developers were able to start working with polygons and creating full 3D worlds, something quite substantial happened to the aesthetics of game art. Where once, inhibited by the technology available to them, game developers were forced into highly-stylised abstractions, such as pixel art, suddenly the…
Read MoreArticle by Farida Y. Something less than a home console yet more than a portable, the Nintendo Switch doesn’t bring to mind any vivid images of a “best use case.” The console is unprecedented in its potential, by virtue of design, to intersect the markets for dedicated game systems and…
Read MoreGame Theory by Matt S. Final Fantasy isn’t a game that people generally cite as an example of philosophical depth. Indeed, most people don’t see it as much of anything; it’s rarely considered a “great” Final Fantasy game, and very rarely played except by the purists and franchise historians. And…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. One of the things that regularly confounds and frustrates me about games is just how limited the conversations around them are. Here we have an emergent art form – one that has proven over and over again that, yes, it is an art form; and yet,…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. “There’s a huge amount of academic research internationally that tells us what we see in entertainment content does influence our attitudes and values, and from there, our behaviours.” This is a quote from New Zealand’s Chief Censor, Andrew Jack, in response to the latest controversy around…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. This week something quite special happened on Steam. Christine Love’s sexually explicit Ladykiller in a Bind was allowed onto Valve’s platform without requiring edits. In other words, on a platform that had previously denied erotic games, an erotic game was finally available to players. Ladykiller in…
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