AGES ago, I reviewed for PC Gamer Ubisoft’s standalone offshoot of Far Cry 3. Blood Dragon is an odd game, engineered to achieve multiple aims: to get the internet LOLing at its 80s action game stylings; to reuse as much of FC3’s graphical assets as possible; and to somehow fit into Far Cry’s Heart of Darkness-y pondering of the nature of masculinity and unfettered violence. It kind of works! At least in the sense that chops away anything that gets in the way of running, leaping, driving and firing guns. But the screenshot I took above kind of epitomises my thoughts about it.

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I wrote my first piece for Eurogamer on a fantastic puzzle game called Sokobond a couple of weeks ago. I don’t actually like puzzle games very much. Their typically stringent demands and lack of flexibility to explore their mechanics bores me. Sokobond is completely different.

To me, the best puzzle games feel like they’ve been discovered, not designed. Like they’ve always been there, waiting for someone to come along and uncover them. In the world of puzzle games, developers like Drop7 co-creator Frank Lantz are scientists or explorers, unearthing perfect gems which shine with a complexity that unfurls from a set of simple rules which, once you’ve grasped them, feel like natural laws. Sokobond is one of these puzzle games - and fittingly, when you start playing it, it feels like a game you’ve discovered, too.
→ Read in full at Eurogamer

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I find the concept of Valve making a gaming PC for the living room fascinating for many reasons. There’s the drama in a software company trying to come to grips with making hardware. There’s Valve’s determination to also introduce a new controller paradigm, which could be amazing. And there’s the chance to witness in a public forum Valve grapple with the choices between making something sufficiently cheap, quiet, small and powerful, each factor jostling against the other. Oh, also, it might spur Sony and Microsoft to adjust the very nature of the console if Valve gets it right.

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I wrote about finding the beauty in GTAV through its details, cos the details are what I’ve always loved GTA for. And then I took selfie photos of them, just because it seemed fitting.

I wish I could’ve invested about an extra week of time into finding these details, but I kept getting into scrapes while I explored. There’s so much more to find – and love – in the margins of this incredible game.

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A while back I built on a post I wrote here about Crusader Kings II for Edge. It’s a game I can never seem to find enough time to play, but it certainly deserves it.

Crusader Kings II isn’t a standard PC strategy game. Sure, it’s played from a map view and there are tables of stats to lose yourself in, there’s gold, Piety and Prestige to be collected, and tech upgrades to build. But actually, what you’re playing is The Godfather: The Game. It’s Dallas. It’s Game Of Thrones (there is, to prove the point, a Crusader Kings II mod that models the entirety of the Western Kingdoms). It’s human drama generated from the game’s tangle of family trees, geography of alliances and individuals’ traits and attributes. → Read in full at Edge

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In full grump mode, for Edge I moaned about the current focus on reviving 1990s games and properties. Obviously it got the usual accusations of being joyless, but c’mon. Do we really want to be playing Superfrog HD?

…the 90s revivalism of which Knightmare is part is everywhere today. There’s The Bitmap Brothers’ evidently meticulous upcoming remake of The Chaos Engine. There’s Wayforward’s evidently meticulous upcoming remake of DuckTales. There’s the rising spectre of The Pickford Brothers’ Plok, too, which has just re-emerged as a webcomic that surely means it’s about to return full-formed as a brand old game. I admit I’d entirely forgotten the mid-90s SNES original. Team 17 released Superfrog HD on PSN yesterday, another remake which seems to have proven that fondly remembered platformers rarely stand up in modern hands. The less said about Dizzy the better (and not just because it was an 80s game).
→ Read in full at Edge

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I’m a proud, if slightly occasional, member of Tom Francis’ Spelunky Explorers Club, a cadre of Daily Challenge players who commit their deeds to YouTube. I recently wrote about the revelation of becoming a member for Edge.

Everyone says they’re awful at Spelunky. Even the best. At least that’s what I tell myself as I die on level 1-2 from an arrow trap I’d noticed but instantly forgotten, or a bat I mistakenly thought my motor skills could defeat. But when good players crash out of Spelunky and curse their awfulness, they’re in the Ice Caves or Temple, or probably even further, frustrated that they messed up getting into the City Of Gold or Hell. Not the Mines, the first set of levels. My home and my nemesis. I really am awful at Spelunky. But I didn’t really know how bad until it came out on PC last week.
→ Read in full at Edge

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Having really been enjoying the stereoscopic 3D in 3DS Steamworld Dig, Etrian Odyssey IV and Fire Emblem: Awakening, I wrote about the sad demise of the technology for Edge. The whole stereoscopic 3D thing was always kind of crazy, and yeah, its story is a curious one of corporate hubris and desperation. But you have to admit a nice stereoscopic 3D menu design is super sweet.

Perhaps it’s finally time to raise a glass to stereoscopic 3D. Once a proud part of E3 press conferences and the core selling point of entire consoles, it seems to be quietly being shelved. It’s “not a focus” for Sony with PS4, which, if rumours are to be believed, seems likely to be graced with an Oculus Rift-style headset. And following a steady deemphasising of 3D in its 3DS marketing spiel, Nintendo’s gone and removed it completely for its new budget version, 2DS.

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I finished Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian last week. A story that follows the bloody trail of a gang of scalphunters as they murder their way across Texas and northern Mexico in the mid-1800s, it’s at once monumental and biblical, harrowing and graphically violent. It’s really stuck with me.

One of the many things I admire is its vision of the American (and Mexican) West as an ancient land, with a long history of people having come and gone before Glanton’s gang ranges across it. It helps to set base action – slaughter, rape, torture, disease, poverty, decay, hunger, greed, destruction – in the realm of something more timeless and fundamental: an examination of man and nature stripped of civilisation. But it’s still remarkably immediate. I didn’t realise until after I finished that the Glanton gang is based on a real one, which used the bounties on scalps made by various Mexican townships under attack by marauding Apaches as an excuse to go on the rampage for gold and blood.

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There’s something something I failed to explain properly in my post about Nintendo as an iOS game developer – about the relationship between business and craft. But this story kind of gets to it, told by Robert Krulwich, the more down-to-earth and substance-concerned part of Radiolab.

He’s describing seeing a former colleague at CBS and traditional newspaperman, Charles Kuralt, being upset upon learning that CBS had hired a new boss for him, a man who had raised his previous station’s audience share from 6% to 50% by getting new, young and beautiful newscasters to report from the beach wearing beachwear “where they got kind of wet, showing off their extra beautiful parts”.

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