Resistance: Burning Skies: The Kotaku Review 
Harley Quinn's Revenge Is Batman: Arkham City's Bad New Ending 
High Scores And Egos: There's Always A Bigger Doodle 
The Last Moments Of GAME 
How Bad User Interfaces Are Ruining Video Games And Other Wonderful Things 
She Tried To Make Good Video Games For Girls, Whatever That Meant The other day on Twitter, fellow Kotaku writer Kate Cox mentioned she had just finished Xenogears, Square’s classic PlayStation role-playing game. Since Xenogears is one of my favourite games, a classic up there with the best RPGs ever, I bugged her roughly 19,283,493,849,284,924 times to come chat about her experiences for Random Encounters. Eventually she said yes.
After finding out about The Legend of Alfur, a Japanese indy-made FPS for the PC, it struck me how weird it was to hear the words “Japanese-made” and “FPS” in the same sentence. While typically thought of as “overly violent games from the West” in Japan, they have recently grown in popularity here in Japan. Call of Duty: Black Ops and Modern Warfare 2 and 3 each sold a quite respectable 400k copies in Japan.
Mark wrote earlier this week about the sorry state of Black Mesa, the ambitious Half-Life remake mod for Half-Life 2. If you simply cannot wait, there’s another way to get a fresh lick of paint on everyone’s favourite particle science facility. And by “lick of paint” I mean “high-resolution texture pack”.
1999. That’s 13 years ago. While I was in year 10, struggling to keep my days absent below 20 (yes, I was crazy truant), Shigeru Miyamoto already had the legacies of Mario, Zelda and Star Fox on his mantle. He also delivered the keynote for that year’s Game Developers Conference, which you can now watch online and freely absorb the legendary designer’s wisdom.
Most everyone has some memory or another of 1943, the top-down aeroplane bullet-hell shooter to which we all lost a good deal of quarters.
Has it been a while since you last played Full Throttle? I’m guessing it has. Sit back, relax and watch the intro movie from the game.
It’s not that common that a video game character realises that he’s actually in a video game. And like any fourth-wall breaking shenanigans, it can be a tricky manoeuvre to pull off.
