Time trials have seen something of a resurgence in modern game design—Hyper Demon, Neon White, and Mullet Madjack just to name a few. I’m sure there’s some bleak academic link one could draw between the attention economy and the need to get as much gameplay injected into a person’s eyeballs as fast as possible, but I don’t really care about that. Sometimes, people realise that it’s just cool to do something stylish against the threat of a ticking clock. Anger Foot, the latest first-person shooter from Broforce developer Free Lives, realises this too. https://youtu.be/7kJo0miz08g You play Anger Foot, a balaclava-wearing…
Author: Keith Milburn
Remakes can be a fraught proposition, but Nintendo deftly elevates one of their all-time classics with Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.
Run. Jump. Slide. Dash. Familiar verbs in any game, but Phantom Abyss valorises them in a way very few do.
Everyone has a Guy. I don’t mean that in a platonic or romantic sense; franchises today are fixated on creating as many Guys as possible, so people can point at one of them on screen and loudly exclaim to their peers “That’s my Guy!” While comics first brought the idea of The Guy to the masses, Mortal Kombat refined it, calcified it in the collective unconscious: are you yellow ninja Guy, or blue ninja Guy? No, definitely red ninja Guy. https://youtu.be/UZ6eFEjFfJ0 Mortal Kombat 1, the latest entry in the blood-spattered fighter franchise, firmly prescribes to the philosophy of The Guy.…
Can developer WB Montreal step out from Batman’s shadow, or are these caped crusaders trapped in the dark?