Giant scorpions
One teenage boy’s perspective on the world he inhabits…
If I could live in any game, I’d want to be in RuneScape*, an online game where I can do anything I want.    I can hunt, fish, cook, make fire. It is the greatest, low-graphic fantasy game there is. The only thing that stops me from playing […]

Spray to win
Catch a train to just about any inner-city destination and you can’t miss the handiwork of the graf artist. It’s big, it’s bold, it’s mired in a history of criminal activity and artistic expression, and more than a little of it is undeniably incredible.     Set the task of translating an entire culture into […]

Silver ball thrill
Videogames may have put the tilt into the very machines that gave life to them, but for the pinball faithful at Melbourne’s Bumper Action Amusements, the party goes on.
Caught in a riot of lights and fairground noise—out of my depth, and nearly my mind—I go into battle with The Sopranos for the fifth […]

End of the world
Gaming’s ‘invisible wall’ might not be the dead end that we think it is.
Cast your mind back to the very first time you laid hands on a 3D platformer. For most, it was probably Super Mario 64. Remember looking up and seeing the castle? All you wanted to do was go to […]

Enough about the morons
This is Farah.       Even if you’ve never heard of the Prince of Persia series, there’s something about this svelte huntress that makes you look again.     Okay, she’s sexy—difficult to miss! That’s not it, though; try again. Lara Croft is sexy. But once you get over those Barbie-doll proportions, well… she’s just […]

JumpButton: a manifesto*
"Gaming was in the news again today.
VIDEOGAMES TO BLAME, they wrote. FOR MURDER. FOR SEX. FOR TRAIN SURFING. FOR GENDER IMBALANCE.
FOR GRAFFITTI and VANDALISM, they said; their voice-over scripted to a b-roll video of choreographed hysteria. Or bemusement. Or outrage. (Quick. Cue the stereotypes. Cue the anti-social adolescents. Cue technologically inept parents with […]

Sleeping around
Like some people I know, music and videogames have fallen into bed together
So, here it is: I have a friend named Sonia*. She’s a psychology major, Asian, likes to go out. You can usually find her knocking back breakfast beers at the local cafe come 5 a.m. most weekends. With her designer fringe, shitty […]

Stupid dog
I know this is a dog I'm patting. A Labrador. A VR puppy that rolls over when I draw circles with my stylus. But I can't stop thinking about my dead cat Nikita.
She went missing one night.     She was naughty like that, always wanting to stay out after dark. But this time she […]

Write of passage
From the very moment that French writer/director David Cage appears in-game to explain his unique control system, it’s evident that the ‘interactive drama’ Fahrenheit is going to be a completely different experience­—not to mention a monumental gamble.
// This is not your usual action/adventure game. In fact, forget almost everything you know about the […]

Crease fighter
Leg spins on six buttons…
I’ve never liked fighting games. Once, in my youth, I spent a whole 20 minutes playing the arcade version of classic beat-’em-up Double Dragon. Then, when the PS2 came out, I won a copy of Tekken Tag Tournament, which I immediately traded for EA Cricket 2002. So you can […]