Opinion by Matt S. To get something out of the way from the outset; when I say I don’t like open world games, I don’t mean that I dislike every single game within the genre. I can happily spend hundreds of hours playing games like Yakuza, or The Witcher 3;…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. Overwatch has proven to be a rare beast indeed; an online-only, competitive multiplayer shooter that I can’t get out of my head… or, indeed, stop playing. The only other shooter that I’ve even continued playing after publishing a review of in quite some time was Splatoon,…
Read MoreGame theory by Matt S. Nope. It is actually quite brilliant. That would be a pretty short article if I left it at that, I guess, so I’ll elaborate. Back when it as first released, the strengths of Final Fantasy XIII were largely overlooked (and still are), while its weaknesses…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. Not long ago there was the unfortunate news that a Compile Heart game had been Refused Classification in Australia, effectively banning it. Not many people seemed to complain about this. Not that many outlets even really reported on it, beyond a very flat statement-of-fact. And on…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. This is a conversation that needs to happen. Hours after the recent horrific terror attack in America, E3 began, and E3 showed a lot of violence. A lot. This isn’t to say that there is a cause-and-effect here. I.e. No one is saying that video games…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sony’s E3 show was the most impressive this year. It wasn’t just for the quality of the games that it had to show off. It was the the sheer quantity as well. Where the other businesses putting on shows padded out the presentation with…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. One of the common points of view that I see out there about the arts, as a whole (and including games) is that they have to be created with commercial success in mind. If an art work isn’t profitable, the work is be default inferior or…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. No one would say that the Wii U was a commercial success. Actually, scratch that, no one aside from the most rabid fanboys would make such a claim. The console suffered from a complete dearth of support from third parties, sold in trickling numbers across the…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. In a highly commercial industry, such as what we have with video games, it can be very difficult to justify building a transgressive game. By its nature, transgressive art is polarising, and that means a couple of things which tend to scare away investors, which a…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. I am playing an Earth Defence Force game for the first time with Earth Defence Force 4.1 on the PlayStation 4. Yes, I know I probably should have played one of these games sooner because, yes, they fall right smack bang into the category of ‘games…
Read More