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Bandersnatch and Free Will

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Black Mirror has come a long way from its edgy days on Channel 4. It feels as if Charlie Brooker’s modern day Twilight Zone has grown up an awful lot since 2011, when we watched the British Prime Minister screw a pig on national television, to displaying some of the most touching and terrifying critiques of our interconnected world. Now the show that delves into the darkest aspects and potential for technology has gone interactive with its latest episode, Bandersnatch . Its interactivity makes Bandersnatch a very different experience, meaning the viewer is now a player, which also means I can finally write about this amazing series. The whole episode revolves around the game development experience, following a young man called Stefan in 1984 as he completes a video game adaptation of his favourite choose-your-own-adventure book – the titular Bandersnatch . In perhaps an obvious choice for an interactive experience deriving from the choose-your-own-adventure genre, Bandersn
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Fallout 76: Beta Notes

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For the second time ever, war has changed. The Fallout 76 beta has given players the opportunity to explore the world of the Fallout universe in a new MMO setup. Now you can roam the wasteland with friends, or maybe make new ones. Or, more likely, brutally murder everyone you meet for their tasty, tasty gun-food. The beginning of the game is a very familiar experience to any fan of Fallout ; spending approximately a million years creating a perfect avatar of yourself in the character creator. After that, it’s finding your way out of the vault and then your feet. What may be less familiar, and even daunting for new players, is the permanently locked hardcore survival gameplay. Disease, hunger, and thirst meters take up a large amount of the player’s pre-occupation when wandering the wasteland, no longer simply just rads, HP, and AP. You masochists out there probably love this – real post-apocalyptic survival! But for newer players, or those who enjoyed the regular experienc
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Soma: Halloween Special

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Welcome, to the spoooOOOoookiest entry into the blog so far! This Halloween I’ve put on my big boy pants and actually played a horror game, and that is Soma , the other game that Friction Games developed after their cult hit Amnesia: the Dark Decent . In case you repressed those memories, Amnesia was a sensational survival horror game that came out at a time when all the major publishers were spouting the same line: that survival horror games just weren’t profitable enough to make. Frictional Games made sure that they knew that they were wrong. Amnesia scared the ever loving Buh-Jesus out of pretty much everyone who played it . One the downside it also made PewDiePie famous, proving that behind every silver lining there is a cloud. Soma is the studio's follow up, and still deals with Lovecraftian horror but via different narrative vehicles. The game centres on Simon, a man with a brain injury that is slowly killing him. After sitting down for an experimental treatmen
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Sex and Nudity in Games

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Obvious content warning is obvious. Cover your sweet, innocent eyes, children! “Why are there so many naked people in art?” This is a question a friend asked me not too long ago whilst wandering around an art gallery, looking at an exhibition on Japanese photorealism. It’s something that I’ve wondered myself, because nudity is everywhere in the art world, from fine art, to film, to the cynical “sex sells” moto of advertising. But the problem with nudity in art is that, like most things in art, it is subjective. Sure, the viewer may simply be stood staring at a still life study of the artist’s spouse, but it is up to the viewer if the nudity is a metaphor for something; purity, innocence, divinity, beauty, debauchery, vulnerability, or any other descriptive noun. Sometimes the meaning behind the nudity is more overt; it may be titillating, amusing, intimate, or even disturbing depending on the presentation. As I mentioned above, advertisers love to link sex to an inani
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Weekend with Indies: Strange Brigade

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We’re taking Weekend with Indies in a slightly different direction this week, looking at a AA game released independently by Rebellion: the quirky and peculiar, co-operative shooter-slash-puzzler  Strange Brigade . Rebellion isn’t a stranger to co-op shooters, from classics such as the Alien Vs Predator series to a pulpy spin-off to their acclaimed Sniper Elite series called Zombie Army Trilogy . Their latest self-published effort follows in the same pulp science fiction vein as ZAT , taking players on an adventure through 1930s Egypt in pursuit of the evil witch-queen Seteki and her hoards mummified minions, minotaurs, and even pirates. As I said above, there are plenty of puzzles to be found in the game that are worth solving, because the secondary objective of Strange Brigade is acquiring artefacts, diaries, blue crystal cat statues, and all the gold that the player can eat. But between the player and their reward are the undead hordes of Seteki, from Skeleton Warriors
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LA Noire: a Retrospective

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2011 was a stellar year for gaming, especially if you like action games. Batman: Arkham City received 10/10 ratings from numerous outlets; Skyrim released for the first time; Uncharted 3 , Gears 3 , Dead Space 2 , the list of critically acclaimed releases goes on and on. But there is one game that is missing from that previous paragraph, and I feel its exclusion is unjust, ironically. It’s a game that was praised for its ground breaking animation work, for bringing together such a wide range of game genres in such a stylish, atmospheric, and cohesive manner , and for its attention to detail. That game was L.A. Noire – a third person action adventure game set in the titular Californian city in the 1940s. The game comes from Team Bondi and Rockstar games, and like many of Rockstar’s other games, L.A. Noire is an open world affair. But instead of causing mayhem, the player is tasked with undoing it. They step into the shoes of Cole Phelps, an LAPD officer and former Marine, an
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Battlefield V: Beta Notes

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It was quite a novel idea for DICE to put out the Battlefield V beta last week, what with the 1 st of September being the 79 th Anniversary of the Invasion of Poland and all. Once again, consoles and PCs roar with the sounds of Panzers, Spitfires, and explosions as soldiers – well, nerds – scream out for a medic. It could almost make you nostalgic, which is what Battlefield V is all about! The devs have worked hard to make the game feel more like the older titles in the franchise in terms of gunplay and teamwork. But have their efforts succeeded? Well, let’s start with the weapons, which feel far more lethal at close range than they have done in a while. The time to kill is pretty quick up close, faster than even Battlefield 1 , but it makes the game feel far tenser. It actually encourages you to play a bit more cautiously, sneaking across the map and positioning yourself tactically instead of charging headlong into the hail of machinegun fire. At range things get a bit t
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