Posts By Charles Battersby

Usually the story in a video game uses the same techniques found in other mediums. Epic adventures that have clear beginnings and ends. No matter what sort of free-roaming choices there might be along the way, games tend to follow a linear series of events that lead the protagonist to The End.

The elusive career path of “Playing video games for a living” has tantalized an entire generation of gamers. The obvious route of beta testing is a grueling chore that pits players against buggy code for endless hours each week, and the path of a game journalist is only for those whose love of games is surpassed by their love of freeze-dried noodles. Yet there is a handful of exceptional players who gain wealth, fame and glory from their gaming skills alone.

Artsy-smartsy games like Bioshock and Spec Ops: The Line have ruined video games. Nowadays players can't just sit back and enjoy a game. Now they're expected to look for symbolism and all that other tweedy intellectual stuff. LocoCycle is a game about a talking motorcycle that blows stuff up - or it might be an insightful deconstruction of the linear nature of video game narratives. The fine line between stupid and clever gets finer and finerer every year.

Old-timey PC gamers might recall a game from the 80's called Shufflepuck Cafe, a science-fiction air-hockey sim with overt influences from Star Wars. The new PC game Shufflepuck Cantina Deluxe takes the same concept and allows modern gamers to experience the exotic thrills of Air Hockey... IN SPAAAAAACE!

In Race The Sun players control a fast-moving hovercaft that speeds through an endless landscape of abstract geometric objects. Enormous cubes, cones, and walls fill the world as the player hurtles ever forwards towards a setting sun. The ship is unable to stop, only steer from side to side until the player makes an inevitable mistake and crashes in a shower of flaming pixels.

Metal Gear Rising Revengeance sent up some red flags when it was announced; it didn't have Snake as a playable character, it wasn't part of the main Metal Gear storyline, and it was an action game with very little of Metal Gear's genre-defining stealth gameplay. However it was developed by Platinum Games, the studio behind Bayonetta, so it wasn't such a surprise that Revengeance turned out to among the best action games of 2013. Alas, it was only available for ...

Vinyl enthusiasts like to point out that an acoustic recording is a physical document of an actual event; the grooves in a record represent the movements in the air during a live recording session, while MP3's and digital files only capture the sounds that the software engineers chose to record in order to make the files smaller.

Mad Catz made a splash with their R.A.T. series of highly-customizable gaming mice years ago, and the line has continued with several new models and even a wireless version of this monster peripheral. A new version of the R.A.T. is out; a smaller, wireless subspecies intended for gaming on the go. We spent some time with the R.A.T. M and here are our thoughts.

The keyboard that came with a Dell might be good enough for a civilian, but Space Marines, Dovakiin, and Zombie Hunters need a little more out of their primary input device. Mad Catz makes some very elaborate gaming keyboards that sport integrated touch screens, modular design and dozens of programable keys, but their S.T.R.I.K.E 3 is a less expensive gaming keyboard that keeps many of the features that gamers want, but with a smaller price tag.

Twas two weeks 'fore Christmas, the calendar did say, And nerds wanted new video games to play. Their hard drives were packed with ancient DLC Like Battlefield maps and Burial at Sea. They craved new content, with more missions to do.

Dennis is having a bit of a bad day. The world has been frozen over, he's all alone, he has nothing but a creaky bicycle to make his way through the frozen hellscape and, on top of all that, some video game player keeps dressing him up in silly clothes. Dennis is the unfortunate fellow who stars in Icycle: On Thin Ice, and over the course of the game he will be crushed, impaled, exploded, and forced to suffer the indignities of being treated like a Barbie doll ...

The problem with Dungeons & Dragons was that it could only be played with a group. Desktop PCs in the 80s had a few text adventure games that mimicked the D&D experience as a single-player adventure, but PC's were rare and pricey back then. A cheap, portable alternative were Gamebooks that used printed text and images to replace a live dungeon master. They also had simplified D&D style rules to govern variable and give players choice over how their adventure ...

“Too crazy for Saint's Row.” That's how the developers at Volition describe the new DLC pack Enter The Dominatrix. Or rather that's how the characters in the game describe their new adventure. Fans of the series know that parts of Saint's Row IV were originally intended to be a DLC pack for Saint's Row III, but there were still a few missions and characters that never made it into SRIV. These scattered missions and incomplete cutscenes have been released in ...

Batman has been adapted into dozens of games, but the one franchise that has made players feel like they ARE Batman is the Arkham series. The first title in the series, Arkham Asylum, dropped players into a fully realized Gotham continuity. That game wasn't intended to cash in on the latest film or TV show, it was its own world. No origin story either; it assumed that the Player was already a bat-fan before they even picked up the controller.

If Minecraft-style sandbox games have taught gamers anything, it's "Build a shelter quickly!" In Darkout, players control an unfortunate astronaut who crashes on a hostile planet full of shadowy creatures, forcing players to build a primitive shelter fast, then begin scrounging for resources to survive on the hostile world. They'll mine minerals, chop lumber, harvest plants and then use all of these resources to craft the tools and equipment they need to thrive ...