With the Zelda series increasingly concerned with curation, it’s left to Mario to provide the focal point for pure creativity in Nintendo’s universe. Link’s ever-repeating adventures are never particularly short of invention, but his dungeon masters seem to have trouble letting go, turning even incidental rifts into ongoing lore. Mario, on the other hand, spares relatively little thought for history, and will shred good ideas with no obvious remorse – often after a single outing.
Microsoft has insisted it remains committed to the Japanese market despite Xbox 360's struggles, but admitted: "It's a challenging market."
Intricate and often intimate, room escapes make up one of the most pleasing genres in modern videogames. They’re the very close sibling of the literary world’s locked room mysteries, and they serve a similar purpose - as a sub-category aimed at connoisseurs who are looking for something extremely focused and specific.
“Swipe a bow across a cello in just the right way, and I'm assaulting the beach on the Silent Cartographer level in Halo: Combat Evolved. I even know where all the rocks are.”
Bitmob’s Rus McLaughlin considers the power of music in games to immortalise a moment just as easily as it can destroy one.
Markus "Notch" Persson admits he may have made a mistake in his choice of Quake 3 as a means of settling his trademark dispute with Bethesda, but describes the publisher's claim as "bogus" and says he is prepared to go to court and "fight for as long as it takes."
After spending six of the last seven weeks at number one, FIFA 11 has finally been unseated at the top of the Nordic chart, which collates sales data from Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark. And it's another EA game, The Sims 3, that replaces it.
The Sims is clearly a popular series in the Nordic territories: expansion Town Life Stuff is at number five and another, Generations, is at number 15. Looking at the charts for individual formats, the entire top four, and seven of the top ten PC games, are Sims titles.
In the run up to the 2009 public beta for Quake Live, I met with the game’s executive producer, Marty Stratton. One topic of discussion was the tremendous sense of ownership that longtime Quake III Arena players felt towards the game, and what a challenge it could be to deal with some of those fans when they were up in arms. For a variety of reasons, tweaks and changes were made to maps and weapons, but there was a contingent that simply wouldn’t be satisfied unless Quake Live was exactly like Quake III Arena had been.
Gabe Newell has for the first time spoken about the recent removal of EA games from Valve's download service, Steam, saying: "We want EA's games on Steam and we have to show them that’s a smart thing to do."