Just over a month ago, I had the privilege of watching Tetsuya Mizuguchi play entire stages of Rez and Child of Eden on a stage at ACMI during Melbourne’s Freeplay festival. It was fascinating to watch a developer engage with his own game. Seeing the specific way Mizuguchi played his own work felt like an insight into the creative process that made these games; he played the way he envisioned they would be played. (more…)
Pocket Treasures is a column about the iPhone games you might have missed – the small. The absurd. The disposable. The too-popular. The implausible. (more…)
The following is the latest in a series of journal entries chronicling the author’s descent into next-gen gaming degeneracy and assorted geekery – from getting his first television in years to trying to figure out why the @$@$&@@ you need two goddamn directional pads just to walk down an effing hallway. (more…)
Pocket Treasures is a column about the iPhone games you might have missed – the small. The absurd. The disposable. The too-popular. The implausible. (more…)
Most iOS games have a straightforward relationship between the player’s input and the game’s output: pulling a bird-loaded slingshot, flicking a piece of paper, throttling a jetpack. Even Ziggurat’s metonymic sliding the thumb horizontally to adjust vertical elevation still has a one-to-one ratio to its precision where what goes in is what comes out. Dime Studio’s Tasty Fish differs. A specific tap or slide of the finger will not create a perfectly predictable action but instead pass on an order which itself may or may not go as planned.
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Instagram, the app that takes your cell phone camera with its advanced optics and turns it into a Polaroid from the early 1980s, released its long-awaited and long-hyped Android app this week. Within hours, Twitter had blown up not only with new Android Instagrammers (the app surpassed a million downloads within a day), but with a number of iOS Instagram users expressing serious dismay and anger that one of their apps was now being somehow sullied by the presence of Android. (more…)
At first, Eliss seems kind of like a guy who smiles at you while he puts out a cigarette on your knuckle. Its lightheartedness and flippancy seem to hide a frantic, unforgiving and soul-destroyingly hard game. But as frustrating as it is, you just can’t stay mad at it. (more…)
