Released in 2010 and bundled with the Xbox 360, the Kinect looked like the future for a brief moment, at least. A camera that could detect your gestures and replicate them on-screen in a game, the Kinect allowed players to control video games with their bodies. It was initially a sensation, selling 1m units in its first 10 days; it remains the fastest-selling gaming peripheral ever.However, a lack of games, unreliable performance and a motion-control market already monopolised by the Nintendo Wii caused enthusiasm for the Kinect to quickly cool. Microsoft released a new version of the Kinect with the Xbox One in 2013, only for it to become an embarrassing flop; the Kinect line was unceremoniously discontinued in 2017. The Guardian reached out to multiple people involved in the development of the peripheral, all of whom declined to comment or did not wish to go on record. Instead, the people keenest to discuss Microsofts motion-sensing camera never used it for gaming at all.Theo Watson is the co-founder of Design I/O, a creative studio specialising in interactive installations many of which use depth cameras, including the Kinect. When the Kinect came out, it really was like a dream situation, he recalls. We probably have 10+ installations around the world that have Kinects tracking people right now The gaming use of the Kinect was a blip.Assistants demonstrate the game Kinect Adventures for Xbox 360 during a media briefing in 2010. Photograph: Mario Anzuoni / Reuters/ReutersWatson speaks about the Kinect, which turns 15 this year, with rare relish. (I cannot stop talking about depth cameras, he adds. Its my passion.) As part of the collaborative effort OpenKinect, Watson contributed to making Microsofts gaming camera open-source, building on the work of Hector Marcan Martin. It quickly became apparent that the Kinect would not, as Microsoft had initially hoped, be the future of video games. Instead, it was a gamechanger in other ways: for artists, roboticists and ghost-hunters.The Kinect functions on a structured light system, meaning it creates depth data by projecting an infrared dot cloud and reads the deformations in that matrix to discern depth. From this data, its machine learning core was trained to see the human body. In games such as Kinect Sports, this allowed the camera to transform the body into a controller. For people making interactive artwork, meanwhile, it cut out much of the programming and busywork necessitated by more basic infrared cameras.The best analogy would be like going from black-and-white television to colour, says Watson. There was just this whole extra world that opened up for us. Though high-powered depth cameras had existed before, retailing at about $6,000 (4,740), Microsoft condensed that into a robust, lightweight device costing $150 (118).Robotocists were also grateful for an accessible sensor to grant their creations vision and movement. Before it, only planar 2D Lidar information was available to detect obstacles and map environments, says Walter Lucetti, a senior software engineer at Stereolabs, which is soon to release the latest version of its advanced depth-sensing cameras and software. The 2D Lidar detects objects by projecting a laser and measuring the time the light takes to reflect back; the Kinect, however, could create a detailed and accurate depth map that provided more information on what the obstaclemay be and how to navigate it. Before Kinect-like sensors, Lucetti says, a tuft of grass was not perceived differently from a rock, with all the consequences that entails for navigation.This type of depth camera now powers a host of autonomous robotics, including 2020s Perseverance Mars Rovers AutoNav system, and Apples facial identification tech. (Apple bought PrimeSense, the Israeli company behind the Kinects structured light system, in 2013.)Nasas Mars Perseverance Rover in 2020. Photograph: Nasa/UPI/REX/ShutterstockThe Kinects technology was soon eclipsed by freely available open-source sensors and more advanced motion-sensing devices. But since Microsoft ceased manufacture of the Kinect line in 2017, the little camera has enjoyed a spirited and not entirely un-troubled afterlife. It has watched over the Korean demilitarised zone and worked on topography and patient alignment in CT scanners; reports have emerged of it being used in airport baggage halls, as a security camera in Newark Liberty International airports Terminal C (United Airlines declined to comment on this), and even to gamify training for the US military. Its been attached to drones, rescue robots and even found a brief application in pornography.Im not sure anyone had a firm vision of what interactive sex involving the Kinect would be, says Kyle Machulis, founder of buttplug.io and another member of the OpenKinect team. The camera was deployed mostly as an over-complex controller for 3D sex games, fulfilling more of a futurist marketing role than anything of actual consumer use, Machulis says. In that role, it was successful: it attracted a flurry of attention, and threats from Microsoft to somehow ban porn involving Kinect. It was an interesting experiment, but it turned out that the addition of a novelty device was not a turn-on for many porn users. Besides, as Machulis says, when the camera malfunctions, it looks pretty horrible.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionUnreliability is of less concern for ghost hunters, who thrive on the ambiguity of ageing technology and who have rebranded the Kinect as the SLS (structured light sensor) camera. They deploy its body tracking to find figures the naked eye cannot see. Ghost hunters are thrilled by the Kinects habit of seeing bodies that arent really there, believing that these skeletal stick figures are representations of disembodied spirits.The paranormal investigation industry doesnt care much about false positives, so long as those false positives can be perceived as paranormal which is just as well, says Jon Wood, a freelance science performer who has a show devoted to examining ghost hunting technology. Its quite normal for ghost hunters to be filming themselves in the dark, with infrared cameras and torches. Youre bathing the scene with IR light, while using a sensor that measures a specific pattern of infrared dots, he says. Given that Kinect is designed specifically to recognise the human body in any data it receives, it would be stranger if the Kinect didnt pick up anomalous figures in this context.Theres a certain poetry in the Kinect living on among those searching for proof of life after death. In the right hands, the camera is still going strong. Theo Watson points me in the direction of Connected Worlds, an exhibition that has run in the New York Hall of Science since 2015. Of the many Kinect devices that power the installations, only two have had to be replaced in the decade since it opened and one of those was only a few weeks ago. Watson started stockpiling the device when Microsoft ceased production.Half the projects on our website wouldnt exist without the Kinect, he says. If we had this camera for another decade, we would still not run out of things to do with it.

The year 2025 is shaping up to be a corker, isnt it? Its all happening: bird flu is back, were getting tariffs on everything, Russia has twinned with the US, and it seems there are more Nazis around than there were last month. People are even turning on Ryan Reynolds, for crying out loud.But its going to be OK. Because Amazon now has creative control over James Bond.People are clutching their pearls pretty tightly over this: they fear that Amazon will take one of the greatest film properties ever and ruin it. Well get watered-down televisual tribulations with the most tenuous of connections to Bond. Prequels of prequels of prequels, spin-offs with villains getting their own movies and no doubt at some point a 22-part series featuring Bond as a baby.Now pay attention, 007. If you pull this Velcro strap the nappy will explode!But I will gladly swim through that cesspool of dross daily like Sisyphus pushing his boulder if it means that we may get a successor to GoldenEye 007 on the N64. Come on! Why not? Amazon makes games. Maybe Jeff Bezos will finally decide he wants to do some good for the world and give us a sequel to the greatest multiplayer game of the 90s. It was even better than Bomberman.I try to explain to my son how groundbreaking it was.It put four-player, first-person shooter action on the same screen in 1997, son. In 1997! Before Halo!That frame rate is janky as all hell, though.Janky? This was 1997 30 frames a second wasnt a thing. Everything was essentially stop-motion.Those graphics look wonky.THOSE GRAPHICS ARE ART!Its not as good as Call of Duty.You wouldnt even have Call of Duty if it wasnt for GoldenEye.Oh hang on, Dad, is that Sean Bean from Game of Thrones in it?I try to explain that this was not only the first game to ever feature a realistic-looking Bean, but also the first where you had a working telescopic sniper rifle, the first I can remember that not only featured headshot kills, but goons that reacted properly to being shot. The game was so forward thinking it tore a hole in the very fabric of time. Maybe thats what the Nazis used as a portal to invade 2025.Can you shoot hats off people in Halo, son? I scream, not realising he had gone back to college, which is a pity, because I hadnt even told him there was a multiplayer mode where you could run around slapping each other. It also had a cheat code that made the heads huge. We need a mod of these options that replaces everyones mug with that of Elon Musk, so that you can run around slapping his big face.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionN64s GoldenEye was elegant. It had style. It had wit. Not content with giving us big head mode, it also had paintball mode, which people exclusively used to draw penises on the walls, because this was the 90s. NOTHING is more 90s than a daubed knob.Its one of those games that no matter where you are in the world, if it comes up in conversation, peoples faces break out in the widest grin.The golden gun!The complex level with the proximity mines!Shooting guards when they are having a poo!The game always made you smile. It made you feel anything was possible with gaming, with entertainment, and with weekends. GoldenEye was responsible for some of my most ludicrously enjoyable Friday night multiplayer game sessions of the decade, and also my worst. Once, one of my friends turned up with a big bag of poppers, claiming it would make the game absolutely mental. All I knew about poppers back then was that they were something to do with the Suede song Animal Nitrate. But pop we did! It was awful. You know those camera moves you get in trendy arthouse movies where it zooms in really fast but only a part of the screen stays in focus? That was what it was like playing GoldenEye on poppers. For 60 seconds. That was how long the hit lasted. Then you got the most horrific headache. Stupid behaviour. If we get a GoldenEye sequel, I will be playing it mostly under the influence of antidepressants and thyroid medication.But this is 2025. And we cant have nice things. We wont get a GoldenEye sequel because the big game publishers keep closing all their studios and firing their staff after forcing them to work on ill-advised Fortnite or Overwatch knockoffs for years. So I expect we will just get a nightmare roster of Bond mobile games instead.Bond casino games. Rubbish Bondesque spins on Candy Crush. Infinite running James Bond games. All manner of deck-building tat and maybe a tower defence game featuring the MI5 building.Actually that last one could be quite cool hold my martini, Im off to call Bezos.

After riding through a desert storm on a feathered steed, dust and rain whipping around you, you arrive at a mountain pass where purple crystals frost the walls. The weather still rages outside, but its calm within the cavern that lies at the end of the path. You can tell, from the environment, what kind of creature lives here: the Rey Dau, a horned wyvern that commands the elements.Youve seen it before, when it appeared unexpectedly while you were out on another expedition, descending from lightning-streaked skies to sink its claws into an unfortunate pack of shaggy, lion-like creatures. You werent strong enough to face it then, but you are now. Hopefully.The fight that ensues is nail-biting. You have to pull out every trick you know to wear it down, trying to dive out of the path of powerful bolts of electricity, as well as the wyverns horns and teeth. You fire your grappling hook at a rocky outcrop hanging from the ceiling, bringing it down on the creature. You whistle for your mount, leaping from its back on to the dragons head, clinging on and stabbing with a dagger as it tries to smash you against the walls. You are sent flying, you are fried, you are stomped upon, but you cling on and keep fighting, chugging restorative potions at every opportunity.Watch the trailer for Monster Hunter Wilds.Then an even bigger predator appears from nowhere, takes the monster youve just fought desperately for 25 minutes in its jaws and tosses it around like a rag doll. Take a good look at it: thats what youll be fighting next.Monster Hunter Wilds 15-hour story is a series of escalating epic battles against ever bigger and more ferocious creatures. It does not let up for a second. Within a few hours, you will have fought an awful giant spider, a sinuous sand-dragon and a disgusting, overgrown oil-chicken. Later, you will face a furious fire-ape and a dragon that shoots lightning from its face, plus particularly nasty and dangerous versions of beasts from the previous 20 years worth of Monster Hunter games. Its quite literally all killer, no filler, a far cry from the slow and ponderous older games, in which you had to spend hours gathering mushrooms and fighting raptors before you got anywhere near a wyvern.The battles are relentlessly awesome; when a monster fell, I would let out a breath that I didnt even realise I had be holding in. No game has ever made me feel like Monster Hunter does, with the possible exception of Dark Souls and its brethren. The adrenaline of these fights, the peerless, perfectly balanced feel of the oversized weapons and the sheer viciousness and majesty of the creatures makes this game feel incomparably thrilling, even though I have been playing it in some form since I was a teenager. And it is just so much better-looking than it was back then: not just the monsters, but also their huge natural habitats, which ripple and teem with life.The monsters huge natural habitats teem with life. Photograph: CapcomI must admit that towards the end of Wilds story I felt some disappointment start to creep in. I had enjoyed nearly every one of these creature clashes, which are wrapped in dramatic, beautifully rendered cutscenes that spin a cool-looking if rather insubstantial story. But I hadnt had much of a challenge. Admittedly, I have a lot of experience with these games, but I am used to getting eaten or torn to bits a few times by a new monster before I conquer it; in the entirety of Wilds campaign, I was knocked out only twice.It turns out, however, that Wilds story is essentially a 15-hour interactive tutorial on what makes Monster Hunter awesome, a rollercoaster of fighting thrills presumably designed to sell newcomers on the concept and give veterans a taste of the scale and visual splendour that Capcoms modern game engine has brought to their favourite series. The real fun starts afterwards.After taking on the biggest, baddest creature I had ever seen, in the final quest of the story, I was dumped back into a base camp in the jungle and sent out to capture a small, fire-spitting raptor. I was immediately humbled; embarrassingly, it knocked me out, because I had become lazy.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionMonster Hunter isnt just about waving an enormous lance around; its also about studying your quarry, learning its weaknesses, scouring its environment for useful plants and materials used to make potions, tools and arrow-coatings that will give you an edge in a fight. Its about teaming up with other hunters, complementing each others play styles, as more experienced players help the rookies through. Being a friends Monster Hunter mentor is one of the most rewarding multiplayer gaming experiences out there.This game cant be reduced to a series of fights. It is a world, an ecosystem, a community of players. You are part hunter, part nature researcher. Wilds leans too far towards frictionless fun in its story, but once I was free to explore more I started to feel more connected to the habitat. Instead of being guided by the nose or by my ostrich-dino steed from battle to battle I was climbing up into the canopy and scouting for creatures, getting my binoculars out, discovering hidden corners for campsites and underwater caves full of useful materials. I found I had to switch weapons more frequently, upgrade my armour, reacquaint myself with the baffling array of jewels and doodads that gave my hunter useful extra skills.You could pick Wilds up as a newcomer and have a tremendous time playing through the story. You could stop there and it would still be worth the price of admission. But I will be playing it for a long time yet.

When we think of Nintendo we picture serene and cosy cartoon adventures filled with cute creatures and lovable Italian stereotypes. But while there is plenty of Mario on the Switch, the console offers a diverse range of delights for newcomers and longtime gaming veterans. Here are the 15 essentials.Animal Crossing: New HorizonsA virtual paradise Animal Crossing: New Horizons screenshot. Photograph: NintendoThe cosy life sim returned with new characters, chill activities, and endless knick-knacks with which to decorate your own virtual paradise. Create a dream island and then invite friends over for tea.Why we love it: Animal Crossing is everything I have been craving: it is gentle, soothing, social and creative. Read the full review.Fire Emblem: Three HousesEngrossing Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Photograph: NintendoLead your feisty war-students on to the battlefield in this engrossing, complex and endearingly melodramatic tactical role-playing adventure from Intelligent Systems.Why we love it: By turns grandiose and silly, but always engrossing, this bubbling school soap opera is a game to spend a summer with. Read the full review.HadesRogue-like dungeon crawler Hades. Photograph: Supergiant GamesAn award-winning rogue-like dungeon crawler in which your many attempts to slay all the monsters in the underworld are wonderfully interrupted by suggestive conversations with horny gods.Why we love it: Interesting things happen all the time, in conversations and chance encounters as well as in battles, and no matter how long I spend with Hades I feel like I am only just getting acquainted with it. Read the full review.Hollow KnightAtmospheric Hollow Knight. Photograph: Team CherryAn eerie, atmospheric blend of platforming, tense fighting and exploration, set in an obtuse subterranean world of prowling beasties and expressionistic vistas. Dark Souls meets Metroid but full of insects.Why we love it: A game that worms its way into your subconscious the excellent sound design and animation are noteworthy, too.Kirby and the Forgotten LandZingy appeal Kirby and the Forgotten Land. Photograph: NintendoNintendos beloved pink blob has a 3D adventure in the cutest ever postapocalyptic world. Weird new abilities and a decent co-op mode add to the zingy appeal.Why we love it: Has surprisingly cinematic flair, and many of the levels are broken up by impressively slick cutscenes. A rip-roaring orchestral soundtrack also helps elevate this adorable heros outing. Read the full review.Legend of Zelda: Breath of the WildUtterly ingenious Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Photograph: NintendoLink returns to a drastically reimagined Hyrule in order to save Zelda from naughty tyrant Ganon. An utterly ingenious take on the open-world adventure, crammed with charming ideas. Its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, is also a brilliant follow-up.Why we love it: A game that marries the best bits of the franchises long history with the best bits of the rest of the gaming world, and produces something even greater than the sum of its parts. Read the full review.Mario Kart 8 DeluxeBrilliant Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Photograph: NintendoThe greatest cartoon racing game in history, lusciously updated to include 48 circuits and a vast array of drivers. The brilliant multiplayer makes it a mandatory purchase for Switch owners.Why we love it: Mario Kart is a vehicle for fun with all your friends and family, no matter their individual skill, and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the best, most versatile version of that yet. Read the full review.Pokmon Legends: ArceusTruly explorable Pokmon Legends: Arceus. Photograph: NintendoA complete reinvention of the classic Pokmon adventure, with a more challenging capture system and a truly explorable open-world environment. One for Pokmon veterans who are tired of the same old formula newcomers should go for Pokmon Sword and Shield instead.Why we love it: This ambitious reboot sets Pokmon on an exciting new trajectory, finally recapturing a lost sense of adventure That gleeful sense of excitement is back. Read the full review.Sea of StarsEpic Sea of Stars. Photograph: Sabotage StudioA gorgeous, heartfelt tribute to the classic Japanese role-playing games of the 1990s, with a typically epic story of magic and adventure, and tense turn-based battles.Why we love it: Attention to detail is what makes the game such a fabulous way to while away evenings Sea of Stars is no shallow mirror of RPGs past. Its depth and sparkle make it a modern classic in its own right. Read the full review.Splatoon 3Multiplayer mayhem Splatoon 3. Photograph: NintendoAnother round of paint-splattered multiplayer mayhem for people who like the idea of online shooters but cant deal with the guns, gore and glorification of military hardware.Why we love it: Splatoon 3 doesnt offer something different, it offers more: more fashions, more modes, more ways to spend time in its messy, chaotic universe, alone or together. It is delightful to be back. Read the full review.Stardew ValleyThe cosiest of cosy games Stardew Valley. Photograph: ConcernedApeA beautiful homage to the Harvest Moon series, in which you farm, explore and socialise to your hearts content. The cosiest of cosy games.Why we love it: Part farming sim, part role-playing adventure, Stardew Valley was the surprise indie hit of the year, offering charm, wit and a beautiful little world.Super Mario OdysseyUtterly delightful Super Mario Odyssey. Photograph: NintendoWhen predatory Bowser kidnaps Princess Peach yet again, Mario takes his sentient hat across the galaxy, from deserts to the big city, to track her down with utterly delightful results.Why we love it: A truly joyful, fizzily creative game that revels in the pleasures of movement and surreal humour. Read the full review.Super Mario Bros WonderA modern family classic Super Mario Bros Wonder. Photograph: NintendoMario returns to his side-scrolling roots in this 2023 adventure which is rich, not only in nostalgia, but in inventive and vaguely hallucinogenic new ideas. A modern family classic.Why we love it: This is a wonderful introduction to the fizzy creativity and attention to detail that has made Mario a family staple for nearly 40 years. Read the full review.Super Smash Bros UltimateUnconventional brawler Super Smash Bros Ultimate. Photograph: Patrick Lum/NintendoNintendos unconventional multiplayer brawler returns with a diverse cast of pugilists from Pac-Man to Solid Snake. A staple competitive game that has been at the centre of countless housemate rivalries.Why we love it: A palpable love of video games infuses everything, and references to their colourful history are omnipresent, from iconic and world-famous series to esoteric games that you thought nobody else even remembered. Read the full review.Tetris 99Legendary Tetris 99. Photograph: NintendoThe legendary falling-block puzzler somehow returns as a battle royale multiplayer face-off and once you get over how weird that is, you find you cant stop playing.Why we love it: Im pathetically unable to stop playing it twice, while writing these words, I had to stop and play another round. Like all battle royale games, your every sweet taste of almost-success makes you hungry for more. Read more here.

When Netflix first started adding video games to its huge catalogue of streaming TV shows and films, it did so quietly. In 2021, after releasing an impressive experiment with the idea of interactive film in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch in 2018 and a free Stranger Things game in 2019, Netflix began expanding more fully into interactive entertainment.The streamers gaming offering, for a long time, was its best-kept secret. Whoever was running it really had an eye for quality: award-winningly brilliant and relatively little-known indie games comprised the majority of its catalogue, alongside decent licensed games based on everything from The Queens Gambit to the reality dating show Too Hot to Handle. Subscribers could play games such as Before Your Eyes, a brief and touching story about a life cut short; Spiritfarer, about guiding lost souls to rest and Into the Breach, a superb sci-fi strategy game with robots v aliens. The company bought or invested in several game studios known for making critically acclaimed work, including London-based Ustwo games (which was behind Monument Valley). It also established a studio in California to work on blockbuster games, staffed by veteran developers.But it seems things are changing. That blockbuster studio has been closed, as first reported by Game File, before it could ever release a game. Its latest tie-in game, Squid Game Unleashed, absolutely sucks its constructed around the celebration of slapstick violence, making it a terrible fit for a satirically violent show about capitalist exploitation. Funding a bunch of indie darlings and hiring big-name talent from the likes of Blizzard and Bungie for its game studio gave the impression that Netflix really was keen on becoming a part of the gaming industry, and doing it properly. Now that is very much in question.The company has made layoffs across its gaming divisions, including at Night Studio makers of weird-fiction supernatural teen horror series Oxenfree. It has cancelled plans for several forthcoming games that were due to join the service, including indie hits Thirsty Suitors and Dont Starve Together, and promising-looking hobbit game Tales of the Shire. Whats going on?Netflix has laid off staff across its gaming divisions, including those behind the teen horror series Oxenfree. Photograph: Netflix/NightSchoolThere have been several changes of leadership. Christopher Lee, a former EA executive who was made the companys first head of games in 2016, left to join Xbox in 2022. Mike Verdu, another former executive at EA and Oculus, became head of game development in 2021 but has since been replaced by Alain Tuscan, hired from Epic (the makers of Fortnite). Meanwhile, the firms head of developer relations Leanne Loombe who presumably has excellent taste, having brought so many wonderful indie games to the service since joining in 2021 left earlier this year.These significant strategic changes have happened in the past six months since Tuscan took over. Current co-CEO Greg Peters said in an earnings call early this year that Netflix was refocusing its gaming efforts. Based on all our learnings and under the leadership of Alain Tuscan we are refining our strategy. Peters described how the streamer would focus on narrative games based on Netflix intellectual property such as party and couch co-op games, saying: We think of this as a successor to family board game night, or an evolution of what the TV game show used to be games for kids, no ads, no payments and more recognisable mainstream titles.None of that looks great for any of the studios Netflix has bought over the past few years, all of which were lauded for their original, creative and unusual games.The inevitable conclusion is that Netflix is retreating to a safe, predictable gaming strategy, which is immensely disappointing for anyone who hoped that the streaming giant might be a much-needed source of investment in gaming creativity. In the earnings call, Peters kept reiterating how successful that Squid Game tie-in had been: depressingly, it is the companys most successful game, despite being as thin and transparent as a piece of wet tissue. It looks as if we can expect much more of that in future.I had once worried that, like Google before it, Netflix would simply exit the gaming space as soon as it became evident that it is a really expensive, unpredictable and difficult business to break into. It seems that the streaming giant is keen on sticking around, but no longer so keen on investing in creativity and quality. I would urge whoever takes up the $1.3m job as Netflixs next face of games to remember that these things are not mutually exclusive. By investing in originality alongside those nailed-on licensed games and big names, you will ensure that Netflix has a real future in games. One can fund the other, and the one eternal truth of the games business is that quality really, really matters and gamers know when theyre being condescended to.What to playDramatic and exciting Monster Hunter Wilds. Photograph: CapcomThe latest in Capcoms superb action series, Monster Hunter Wilds, is out this week. Ive played these games for almost 20 years, and about 12 of those were spent trying to convince people that they do get good eventually, after you get past the initial boring gathering quests and steep learning curve. Monster Hunter World, from 2018, made the series a lot friendlier, though, and Wilds makes it friendlier still: its 15-hour single-player story is full of dramatic and exciting fights against awe-inspiring, intimidating creatures.Its like an extended tutorial on what makes Monster Hunter brilliant. After the first couple of quests you will need no further convincing, even if youve never played one of these games before.Available on: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X Estimated playtime: skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionWhat to readMicrosoft used the game Bleeding Edge to train a new generative AI model called Muse. Photograph: MicrosoftMicrosoft has unveiled a new generative AI model, Muse, that can create gameplay footage. They call it a World and Human Action Model (WHAM). It was trained on a Ninja Theory game, Bleeding Edge, seemingly without its players knowledge. Wired quotes many game developers who hate this entire idea, but that hasnt stopped Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella from enthusing about the possibility of a whole game catalogue made by AI.The publisher of the ludicrously compulsive card game Balatro won a victory recently, persuading PEGI to downgrade the games age rating from an 18-plus to 12-plus. (It is not a gambling game, but it does feature playing cards and a version of poker rules, hence the adult-only rating.) This is a good step from PEGI bringing nuance to their ratings criteria, said the games developer. I hope this change will allow developers to create without being unfairly punished.Assassins Creed Shadows has leaked after retailers broke its street date, meaning players have been streaming the game from their physical disc copies. If youre looking forward to it, beware the internet for spoilers.NetEase, a Chinese company that has invested hugely in western and Japanese game development recently, is reportedly scaling back its interest in video games, putting more than a dozen studios at risk. Bloomberg reports that hundreds of jobs and several games have already been canned.Warner Bros Discovery has cancelled its Wonder Woman game and is closing three of its video game development studios, reports Reuters. The company joins Microsofts Xbox and Sony, who closed offices last year to reduce costs.What to clickQuestion BlockNintendo Labos Toy-Con Piano. Photograph: NintendoReader Michael asks:My sister has rigid screen-time restrictions for her 10-year old son, who isnt allowed a Switch but is obsessed with video games. As his uncle, and as a game designer, I want to fuel his passion, but I respect her boundaries. Unfortunately, his limited game time is largely spent playing dopamine-fuelled, hyper-casual games on a web browser. Ive been advocating for a Switch so he can play something more nutritious. She has cautiously asked me to recommend some appropriate games. Top of my list are Mario, Zelda and Animal Crossing. Since youre a mother and a gamer, are there any in particular youd recommend?You cant go far wrong with Nintendos games in terms of safety and child appropriateness. (I also appreciate that the Switch doesnt have a YouTube app, or an easily accessible web browser.) For a 10-year-old, its going to come down to what hes interested in: is he into adventure stories? If so, Zelda is the thing (BOTW is a 12 but if your sister is strict about that, Links Awakening is 7-plus). My animal and dinosaur-obsessed boy loved Pokmon passionately (Sword and Shield are the best Switch picks). Mario is a huge hit in my house with both my kids. Despite their very different personalities, they both adore Mario Party Jamboree I think as adults we often dismiss these casual-ish party games but theres tremendous variety and creativity in the 100+ different minigames. Minecraft (offline!) is also obviously a mainstay for that age group, too. Nintendo Labo is also a parent-pleasing option due to all the cardboard crafting, if your sister is coming around from a belief that video games are inherently bad.Ive had many versions of this conversation with other parents who arent enmeshed in gaming themselves. It has reminded me that when parents try to ban something, we often create problems that were not aware of. Your nephew is fascinated by video games, but hes playing the least nourishing versions of them possible through the only means he has. My parents restricted my own game-playing time to weekends only when I was wee, hoping to put the brakes on my passion for them. (That worked out brilliantly.) Where possible, I think were often better off engaging with the things our kids enjoy, while also helping them moderate themselves and keep to our boundaries. Its time-intensive, but worthwhile.If youve got a question for Question Block or anything else to say about the newsletter hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.

Warner Bros Discovery is shutting down three of its video game development studios in a move aimed at boosting profitability for its gaming division amid a sluggish recovery in the market, a spokesperson for the companys games unit said on Tuesday.The studios to be closed are Player First Games, WB Games San Diego and Monolith Productions. Development on Monoliths Wonder Woman game will also halt, following the shuttering. Our hope was to give players and fans the highest quality experience possible for the iconic character, and unfortunately this is no longer possible within our strategic priorities, the spokesperson said.The decision to close the studios reflects wider challenges in the video game industry as gamers cut back on new purchases and instead opt for proven titles amid inflation squeezing discretionary spending budgets. Last month the company announced the departure of David Haddad, the former chief of the interactive entertainment unit, after a 12-year tenure.Warner Bros joins the ranks of other major players such as Microsofts Xbox and Sony that closed offices last year in a bid to reduce costs.The media giant will structure its development studios and investments to focus on core franchises such as Harry Potter, Mortal Kombat, DC and Game of Thrones, mirroring CEO David Zaslavs comments in November about focusing on four really powerful games.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to TechScapeFree weekly newsletterA weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our livesPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionThe companys big bet on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League last year fell short of expectations, with weak sales and poor reviews leading to the end of game updates in January.

As any adult who loves video games knows, there are simply too many of them 19,000 games were released in 2024 on PC games storefront Steam alone, not counting all the playable delights on consoles and smartphones. Most of us have backlogs of unplayed classics that make us feel guilty about buying newer games. Finding things that are actually good, meanwhile, can feel totally impossible. At least 50% of the questions people send in for this newsletter are a variant of Help, what should I play?We do our best to help, but even though its my job to know about games, I still dont have infinite time to play them. Streamers play games all day, but even they usually specialise in particular games or genres and rarely stray outside them. Trying to Google recommendations these days leads you down a rabbit hole of hard-to-parse Reddit threads and misleading AI slop.Enter Ludocene, a new app launching on Kickstarter this week that hopes to solve this problem. It is described as Tinder for video games. When you load it up youll see a bunch of cards with game names, details and screenshots on them, as well as links to trailers, and you can sort them into yes/no piles. Based on what you say you like, itll show you new cards for games you may like to play. If you like the look of a game you can add it to your deck, so you remember to check it out later. You can easily see which games connect to each other, so its transparent where the recommendations come from.You can also select a particular expert quite a few streamers, critics and other games media people have signed up already to see their recommendations. Experts have their own cards too, showing a photo and a brief description of their background. The apps recommendation engine is powered only by human recommendations, not by an algorithm that relies on player data, genre tags or AI. Its based on a dataset put together over five years by the team behind Family Gaming Database, a recommendation site for parents.Amazing games are so often buried in the mass, says longtime games writer Andy Robertson, whos leading the project. I wanted a way to follow experts with similar tastes to mine so I could find the games Im missing. The system needed to be flexible and simple, and not take itself too seriously The combination of matching with games like you do on a dating app, and building a hand of favourite games like in a deck builder, was perfect. My hope is that this makes game discovery fun and effective again, and pays experts for their expertise.Ludocene experts. Composite: Courtesy of Andy RobertsonIf it hits its Kickstarter goal, Ludocene will be free to use in its basic form, with no ads therell be a cheap subscription model down the line to unlock extra features, for no more than 3 a month.We dont make any assumptions about how much knowledge you have, Robertson says. If youve only played Mario Kart and Minecraft you can dive in and start picking games. The system learns your tastes as you go and presents you with appropriate options. It really comes into its own when you pick more specific games for your deck. Whether thats Elden Ring, Balatro, A Short Hike or Shadow of the Colossus, the system learns your taste and throws up ever more specific and niche suggestions.Im someone who loves a specific and niche suggestion. The current if you like this, you might like that game recommendation engines that you see on Steam and other storefronts are deeply lacking in the human touch that makes a recommendation meaningful. Ludocene caters to people who want a recommendation from an expert rather than a robot.Another splendid resource for discovering games Ive recently come across is the Thinky Games website a database and reviews site for puzzle lovers. It has a huge selection of games that you can search for by genre and platform, from phones to Nintendo Switch. Each games description is written by an actual human who has played the game rather than scraped from store data.I guess I would say this, as a games critic of nearly 20 years, but I truly believe in the value of person-to-person game recommendations, especially in this era of AI-driven outsourcing of the soul. (I havent signed up as a Ludocene expert, by the way, but I may well do so in future.) If you like the look of it, you can check out its Kickstarter page.What to playKeep Driving. Photograph: YCJY GamesRemember The Oregon Trail, that classic educational game where you had to ride your wagon across 19th century North America while avoiding the ultimate end-of-level boss: dysentery? Well, Keep Driving is that, but set in the early 2000s and with fewer intestinal infections. Youve just bought your first car and now youre driving it across the country to a music festival. As you cruise, procedurally generated pixel landscapes drift by and hitchhikers thumb lifts, then tell you stories. Its effectively a management role-playing game where you repair and feed your gas guzzler while managing your own need for food and sleep. You can finish in four hours, but there are multiple endings to discover on subsequent playthroughs. A fun concept, beautifully realised.Available on: PC Estimated playtime: skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionWhat to readDiablo IV. Photograph: BlizzardFor years, Maciej Groobo Maselewski stood as the undisputed champion of Diablo speedrunning. Thus begins Ars Technicas intriguing story of possible corruption in the shadowy world of the speed run i.e. finishing games really quickly. A squad of modern-day speedrunning sleuths have been unable to replicate Grobos success even with state-of-the-art software tools. Expect a Netflix expos soon.Grapefuit Games, the independent studio co-founded by artist and game creator Robert Yang, has written A Sports-Like Manifesto, which you can read on its website. It defines a sports-like game as one that features elements of a sport without attempting to simulate the whole universe around it in intricate detail. Frankly, mainstream sports sims are beginning to resemble humourless chimera, more concerned with licensing deals and player likenesses than gameplay, so I hope more developers take Yangs approach.Keith is writing about this soon, but just a heads-up: a new memoir by veteran games writer Julian Jaz Rignall has just launched via Bitmap Books. The Games of A Lifetime is a look back at Rignalls long career writing for magazines such as Zzap! 64, Computer & Video Games and Mean Machines, focusing on the games that stuck with him through the years. A fascinating read for veteran games mag aficionados.What to clickQuestion BlockConkers Bad Fur Day. Photograph: RareThis one comes from JohnnyBiscuits on BlueSky who asked:Nightreign looks like a huge departure in format from Elden Ring and for FromSoft in general too [Im] interested in other examples where developers have got out on a limb like this, particularly with a well loved IP.Ooh, good question, and its got me searching through my memory banks. As a Sega fan the first thoughts I had were of Virtua Fighter Kids, a strange comedy spin-off from Virtua Fighter 2 where all the combatants are children but with adult characteristics like facial hair, and Typing of the Dead, which turns horror shooter House of the Dead 2 into a typing sim. Or theres Namcos 16bit console title Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, which reimagines the arcade maze game as a point-and-click adventure. I think, however, that the grandest about-turn in games history was Conkers Bad Fur Day from Rare, which took the visual style of harmless family games such as Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong Country, and applied them to a wildly scatological, adult-orientated booze-n-swears fest. Surely the biggest image change since John Travoltas machine gun-wielding assassin in Pulp Fiction.If youve got a question for Question Block or anything else to say about the newsletter hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.

Kenji Kanno, director of Segas legendary driving game Crazy Taxi, remembers the exact moment he knew the game had made a seismic impression. I was going to Las Vegas for promotional work, he says. I got into the taxi and the driver drove me very fast, arriving at my destination quickly. At the end, he laughed and said: I am the real Crazy Taxi! It was a strange experience.Initially released in arcades, the zany, pop-punk drive-em-up celebrates its 25th anniversary this month. Crazy Taxi was an addictive coin-swallowing thrill ride, the games eccentric cabbies continually yelling Ready to have some fun? and Time to make some crazy money! in the faces of perturbed-looking normies who simply wish to be chauffeured over to Pizza Hut. Driving green-haired Axels yellow 1960 Cadillac Eldorado so fast that its front bumper smashed into sunny San Franciscos concrete hills was a memorable experience for all who played. (The Ford Mustang-driving Gena was my mums character of choice.)I remember losing an entire summer trying to master the crazy dash technique that allowed you to boost faster around corners on the critically acclaimed Sega Dreamcast version of the game (released in 2000 and running at an impressively fluid 60 frames-per-second), instead of going outside to play with my friends. Subsequent ports on the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox 360 drove sales of Crazy Taxi into the millions, creating a hit for Sega at a time where things werent easy, as the formerly dominant Japanese console manufacturer was on the edge of exiting that business.A memorable experience for all who played Crazy Taxi. Photograph: SegaRock band the Offspring provided turbo-charged guitar riffs for Crazy Taxis soundtrack, but thats not the only thing that makes it feel like a time capsule from the turn of the millennium. This game captured the carefree hyperactivity of late 90s/early 00s pre-9/11 America; an era where many young peoples biggest worry was whether beer-swilling Stone Cold Steve Austin might retain the WWE world title.Despite its crossover success, Crazy Taxi had a lot of early detractors, Kanno remembers. At the beginning of development, more than half of the project members were strongly opposed to the idea of a game about taxi drivers, he recalls.The way Hollywood had historically framed cabbies made the concept of Crazy Taxi a tough sell for Segas executives. In the words of Marcello Di Cintio, the author of Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers: Cabbies in pop culture have often been characters on the margins. The stereotype, then and now, is that cabbies had a window on the seedy side of urban life, and were part of a nocturnal world the rest of us dont see. Drugs. Alcohol. Sex What I wanted to express the most in Crazy Taxi was the dynamism of movie car chases. Photograph: SegaKanno, though, was much more interested in the less sinister taxi drivers present in Luc Bessons 1998 action-comedy film Taxi, as well as the challenge of turning the guy behind the steering wheel into someone more lovable. Crazy Taxis drivers are decidedly un-sinister, a bunch of grinning, colourfully dressed thrill-seekers who are the furthest thing from mundane. Kanno wanted the game to do for taxi drivers what Paperboy had done for, well, paperboys. I told the team: I think it is the job of games creators to make regular jobs look more cool! Even if this is a vision that no one has ever had before, then we should do it.Growing up, Kanno found taxis somewhat magical, he says. In Japan, taxi doors open automatically. As a child, I wondered why taxi doors opened as you approached them, but my familys car door stayed shut? This was so mind-blowing to me that I came to see taxis as these magical things. When he got older, Kanno was obsessed with old Hollywood movies, and wanted to capture that same giddy tension and glamour presented in the iconic driving sequences in classics such as The Italian Job and The French Connection. A location such as San Francisco was perfect. What I wanted to express the most in Crazy Taxi was the dynamism of movie car chases. I chose San Francisco because it is a city with so many undulations that you can constantly express that kind of action.Unlike most racing games, Crazy Taxi makes you think on your feet rather than learn its tracks. (Echoes of this chaotic approach can be seen in The Simpsons: Road Rage, which basically took the Crazy Taxi concept over to Springfield.) This is a game where players make split-second decisions in constantly changing situations, Kanno says. Thats why I made the other vehicles into obstacles. The design is not about memorising every course and taking the best line, but about the player navigating a constantly changing path.A planned multiplayer mode was cut due to the technical limitations of the time. But the leaderboards still allowed for competitive, wait-your-turn battles between friends. For those who still struggle to last more than two minutes while playing Crazy Taxi (FYI: one rooftop shortcut is a gamechanger), is there any chance of a modern, multiplayer-enabled sequel? I cant say much, replies Kanno. But Crazy Taxi will make you smile again soon!

My favourite thing about Monster Hunter is that despite the name, you often feel more like the prey than the predator. Even armed with a sword several times your own size and weight, you are often outmatched by the incredible creatures in this action game. In Monster Hunter Wilds, out next week, you are also frequently outmatched by the weather. A routine hunt for some relatively unthreatening creature can go awry as storm clouds gather, bringing with them some terrifying lightning-dragon that will eat you for breakfast. Monsters entangle with each other, tearing with teeth and claws as you turn tail and head for the hills.Over the past couple of weekends, players have been able to get hands-on with Wilds in beta tests, trying out the exquisite character creator and a couple of hunts against a horrid lion (Doshaguma) and an overgrown poisonous chicken (Gypceros). As someone old enough to have played these games on the PlayStation 2, and then later with my fingers contorted uncomfortably around a PlayStation Portable during a student year abroad in Japan, I am amazed and delighted by what Monster Hunter has become. What was once a stiff and densely complex game that hid all its thrills behind a barricade of mushroom-gathering quests is now a fluid, inviting and globally popular spectacle of a thing. Monster Hunter World, 2018s entry, broke Capcom records and reached 23m sales.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionRyozo Tsujimoto, the series producer and son of Capcoms founder Kenzo Tsujimoto, has been with Monster Hunter since the early 00s, when he was a designer for Capcoms online games. Evidently it still excites him; hes been front and centre on a lot of Wilds promotion. Its really energising for our team to watch so many people play the game at the same time, he told me at the most recent Tokyo Game Show, where over 250,000 people turned up to try out forthcoming games. Theres a lot of things we can only discover by watching players pick up the game and try it out, things we dont ever get to see in our own testing. Weve got a few of the dev team undercover on the booth so they can watch how players are responding.Ryozo Tsujimoto takes players through the Monster Hunter Wilds beta testThe main innovation in Wilds is how the monsters interact with each other. Previously herbivores would potter about grazing in herds, but its only with the additional power of the current generation of consoles that the team had been able to create a seamless ecosystem where theyll come across each other and get into turf wars. Having creatures travel together in a realistic way is challenging in terms of making it look plausible, says Yuya Tokuda, Wilds director. If they all moved in perfect sync it would be a bit uncanny and unconvincing as a pack animal behaviour. But if each individual monster was a complete wildcard, like they were before, it would be untenable to keep it all together. Striking that balance between herd and pack behaviours while having individuality for each creature that was a lot of work, and we had to get it going from nothing.I think its finally let us make the humans be part of the same ecosystem as everything else in the game, adds Kaname Fujioka, the art director. The depiction of a totally seamless ecosystem where theres not even a loading screen between the base and the map itself is something that has only been possible on this generation.Monster Hunters creators have traditionally done their natural-behaviour research out in the real world on a kind of global team safari, getting a feel for different natural surroundings and recording ambient soundscapes that would later appear in the games. Theyve been to Argentina, Chile and Patagonia, places so remote that they had to subscribe to a satellite phone service because their phones wouldnt work. This time around, Covid restrictions kicked in right around the time that they would have been out on these research expeditions, so they had to make do with watching a lot of nature documentaries except Tokuda, who has what he describes as a significant number of pet lizards. He has created a special environment at home for them to roam around.Monster Hunter Wilds. Photograph: CapcomExpectations are high for Wilds. Its publisher Capcom is on a run at the moment, having had several more big hits since the last Monster Hunter game in 2018, including popular remakes of its older Resident Evil horror titles but Monster Hunter remains its makers very biggest game. In fact its now one of the worlds biggest. At one point during its first open beta test last November, more than 460,000 people were playing Wilds at the same time.Tsujimoto is confident that Worlds can hold its own among gamings apex predators. Any big blockbuster game is our competition now, says Tsujimoto. Thats the turf weve chosen.Monster Hunter Wilds is out 28 February

Digging up treasures from the past is an exciting business. So exciting, in fact, its kept players coming back to the Tomb Raider series for nearly three decades. The original trilogy was successfully remastered and rereleased last year. Now a new collection has been recovered from the attic and put on show, like a family heirloom on the Antiques Roadshow. But will this turn out to be the gaming equivalent of a priceless Ming vase? Or a commemorative ashtray from when Prince Andrew married Fergie?A lot will depend on your personal history with Lara Croft. Those of us who wasted entire English Literature degrees watching her fall off things will thrill at the sight of every rusty key and sinister spike pit. My 13-year-old son, however, took one look at the blocky visuals, asked if I definitely had the enhanced graphics turned on, and walked out of the room shaking his head in pity. Bloody kids.There are three games in this collection. The standout title is Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation. First released in 1999, it is set in the ruins of ancient Egypt, which feels equally long ago. Like all the best games in the series, it combines expansive, atmospheric environments with smart puzzles that are satisfying to solve. There are some lovely moments of Lara lore, like the scene that explains how she got her iconic leather backpack. (Although not how its able to contain six guns, eight medipacks, countless keys, the Amulet of Horus, a grenade launcher and a kayak.)Egypt reveals its treasures in Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered. Photograph: AspyrAt the time of launch, Last Revelation was criticised for lacking innovation. But looking back, and at what came next, maybe we didnt know how good we had it. Bloody kids.Chronicles was the fifth Tomb Raider game released in five years. The team at Derby-based studio Core Design was burned out, by all accounts, and fed up with being forced to deliver yet another instalment in time for Christmas. The result is a game that is technically serviceable, but feels flat and soulless. The locations are uninspired and devoid of atmosphere. The visuals are bland and gloomy. It feels like Lara is just going through the motions. She can walk a tightrope now, and theres a bit of stealth, as was the fashion at the time. But these are tedious tricks, and they arent enough to distract from the fact that the magic is gone.However, its the final offering which marks the low point of this collection, and the entire series. The Angel of Darkness was the first Tomb Raider outing for PS2. It was released in 2003, which you can tell just by looking at it. The game opens on a rainy evening in Paris, apparently; the dismal industrial buildings and empty warehouses make it feel like a damp night in Croydon. Lara is a vision in double denim, complete with the obligatory cropped jacket and hiphugging bootcut jeans of the era. It feels like youre on a quest to find out what happened to the other members of B*Witched.Stealthily does it Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered. Photograph: AspyrMaybe the tightness of the clothes have restricted Laras ability to navigate environments with her usual grace and dexterity. Her movements are sluggish and clunky in this game, her jumps awkward. She is weaker than shes ever been; a new stamina meter limits her ability to hang off ledges, and you have to build up her strength by pushing crates around before she can handle more physically taxing tasks. This is as dull and annoying as it sounds.Lara has a new love interest, Kurtis, who is incredibly irritating and looks like he plays bass for Linkin Park. (Maybe they met at the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party.) Theres more stealth nonsense, which involves Lara crouching slightly as though shes suffering from digestive issues, and a badly executed attempt to introduce some open world elements. The whole thing is messy, frustrating and depressing.Its also intriguing if youre interested in the history of video games and how theyre made. Yes, theres a clear failure to maintain what made Tomb Raider so special in the first place: Laras agility and autonomy, clever puzzles, actual tombs. This game is too busy trying to keep up with the Joneses; or rather, the Metal Gear Solids and Grand Theft Autos that were so popular at the time. But there are also hints at ideas that series such as Assassins Creed and Uncharted would go on to execute brilliantly.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionSo what stopped Core from pulling it off? Perhaps it was the limitations of the technology at the time. Maybe it was poor team management, or the pressure to hit shareholder deadlines before the game was ready. Probably a combination of all these things. In any case, while The Angel of Darkness is tiresome to play, its interesting to look at as a historical artefact.The same is true of Chronicles, as an example of what happens when you try to produce creative work in a sweatshop. But The Last Revelation is vintage Tomb Raider. So for 25 you get a well-crafted, enjoyable game, a strange curio, and a flawed but fascinating piece of gaming history. Not quite as valuable as a Ming vase, but good value, and a lot more fun.

There arent many video game developers as outspoken as Hazelights Josef Fares. Infamous for his expletive-laden viral rants at livestreamed awards shows, Fares is a refreshingly firy and unpredictable voice in an all too corporate industry. As he puts it, It doesnt matter where I work or what I do, I will always say what I want. People say to me that thats refreshing but isnt it weird that you cannot say what you think in interviews? Do we live in a fucking communist country? Obviously, you have got to respect certain boundaries, but to not even be able to express what you think personally about stuff? People are too afraid!Yet while gamers know him as a grinning chaos merchant and passionate ambassador of co-op gameplay, in Fares adopted homeland of Sweden, he is best known as an award-winning film director. His goofy 2000 comedy Jalla! Jalla! was a domestic box office success, while his 2005 drama Zozo was a more introspective work about his childhood experience of fleeing the Lebanese civil war.Twenty years, five feature films and three video games later, Zozo was just one of many cathartic endeavours for Fares. Ive always been a storyteller, he says. When I was young, Id draw my own comics. The first time I got a camera I borrowed it from a friends father, and that was that. With no formal training, he learned by doing. I started to make my own movies in the early 90s and I just kept creating. I made 50 short movies until I did my first feature. So there was a lot of trial and error just doing, doing, doing, doing until I got it right.There was a lot of trial and error just doing, doing, doing until I got it right Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Photograph: 505 GamesIts this DIY, inquisitive approach that guided Fares towards game-making, his pivot into interactive entertainment born from that same unflappable curiosity. Ive always been a huge gamer, Fares says. I was lucky. I had the first [console] in Lebanon, an Atari. I played Pong and I was like, wow! I was just utterly fascinated with it. Games have always been my first love.Once Fares finished work on his fifth feature film, a friend encouraged him to pursue his love of games, and convinced him to participate in a student-led game jam. I was so excited! I came up with the concept of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons the same night Fares says. I couldnt sleep that night because I was like, I want to do this! I came up with how you control the two brothers, how it feels to play, everything. All in that same night. He soon took his evolving prototype to a respected game studio in Stockholm Starbreeze. They were like, Well, maybe you can do this as a kind of test project. But Im like, fuck a test, Im going to do the whole thing!That passion fuelled a year and a half of intense work, with Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons being released in 2013. The co-op adventure about siblings embarking on a dangerous journey to find a cure for their sick father has now sold over 10m copies. Despite its success, many in Sweden were baffled by his artistic pivot, a transition for Fares that felt natural. With movies, I came to a point where I felt that the passion really wasnt there. Passion lead me to video games. It was very challenging being new in the industry and coming in with a different approach wanting to create new mechanics. Today its different because [people] listen to me, but it was very hard in the beginning.It was very challenging being new in the industry It Takes Two.After Brothers success, Fares started his own gaming studio, Hazelight a team focused on making story-driven co-op games, a surprisingly rare proposition in our online age. Hazelight started because me and a friend tried and failed to find a game where its not just drop-in, drop-out [co-op] but something that you can play together and share a story experience. We couldnt believe that no one was doing this. Its why we dont just make games with a split-screen element at Hazelight all our games are designed and written right from the beginning to be co-op.Much like Hideo Kojima, Fares cant code, but instead assumes the role of writer and director on his games, laying out the vision for the story and gameplay mechanics, entrusting his talented team to bring his vision to life.Fast forward 12 years, and a new Hazelight game is now a massive event. Fares most recent release was the colourful co-op platformer It Takes Two, about two parents who find themselves magically miniaturised and must fight through their home to reach their young daughter. Highly acclaimed by critics, it won game of the year at the 2021 Game Awards. Now Fares is previewing his latest co-op extravaganza, Split Fiction. Much like Hazelights previous work, its a thrill ride of exhilarating successive set pieces. As dual protagonists Mio and Zoe battle their way across hostile re-creations of their own sci-fi and fantasy novels, each level throws new ideas at the player with Nintendo-esque abandon.Its way harder to make games Split Fiction. Photograph: Electronic ArtsVariation and pacing how things shift all the time, I think that comes from my movie background, Fares says. Other people say, If you have this crazy scene, why do you only use it for 10 minutes? Because if you have a cool scene in a movie, you dont repeat it just because its cool and costs a lot of money!Despite his undeniable talent for storytelling, Fares says he finds interactive narratives far more difficult to construct than their Hollywood counterparts. Its way harder to make games, because games are interactive and movies are passive. Movies spend much longer in production, writing, everything too they just have more time for you to figure it all out. I always joke that if I want to go on vacation, Im going to make a movie.I believe that were still figuring out how to actually tell a story in games, he continues. But thats the fun part! Even the movie industry is now realising that great shit is happening in video games.What Fares finds less fun, however, is the direction in which the games industry has been heading in recent years. I dont like live service games I think that theyre bad for the industry, he says. I understand that money is important, and that we live in a capitalist society, but creativity and money have to meet somewhere in the middle. It cant be either too much creativity or too much money. We should focus on pushing our medium forward: no micro transactions, no bullshit, just pure gaming love because, ultimately, great games will do well.

Ten years ago, Parisian studio Dont Nod effectively introduced a new sub-genre of narrative adventure with its teen mystery Life Is Strange. Part thriller, part relationship drama, it used music, art and relatable characters to create a touching paean to unshakeable friendship. After a series of sequels, Dont Nods Montreal studio has crafted a new tale about teenage relationships, split into two episodes, or Tapes, the first of which will doubtless have fans on tenterhooks for the concluding part.Its 1995 and introverted teen Swann is facing a final quiet summer alone in the rural town of Velvet Cove, Michigan, before her family moves to Vancouver. But in the parking lot of the local video store, she meets fellow 16-year-olds Nora, Autumn and Kat, and the four girls bond over their boredom and frustration with small-town life. Soon, they are inseparable, spending their days hiking in the nearby forests, making camp fires, confessing their secrets until they discover a spooky shack hidden out among the trees and decide to make it their base. Here, they form riot grrrl band Bloom & Rage, channelling their dreams, desires and fears into fantasies of fame and revenge on shitty boys and repressive parents. But when their swirling emotions seem to awaken a supernatural presence in the woods, something terrible happens and the girls swear each other to a lifelong secret.A quiet summer, then Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. Photograph: Dont NodNow, 27 years later, the group are meeting again in a rough bar on the outskirts of town that holds special relevance to their story. Autumn has received a sinister package addressed to their band. Whatevers in the box may well be the dreadful result of that tumultuous summer.In a style typical of Dont Nod, the game intercuts compelling cinematic sequences with interactive scenes, giving you control over conversations that subtly shape your relationships and the direction of the story. The narrative swaps back and forth between two timelines the adult characters reminiscing in 2022 and their pivotal summer together in 1995 and your actions in one affects outcomes in the other. At times, decisions you make as 43-year-old Swann at the bar are then retrofitted into her youthful experiences, creating fascinating ambiguities of causality and memory.As much about the way we edit memories as what actually happens Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. Photograph: Dont NodIndeed, this game is as much about the way we craft and edit memories as it is about what actually happens to the girls. Swann is a keen film-maker and her 1990s camcorder is with you throughout the game; at any point you can hit the right trigger to view the world through the camcorder lens. In the main story, youre using it to film a music video for the band, but youre free to record whenever you want. This feature is incentivised by a bunch of themed checklists record 10 different birds, or five ruined playground rides, or snatches of graffiti. But you can also capture your own scenes from the town and its environs, or discreetly record your friends, building themed sequences that you can then store and edit. Although the interface recalls games such as No Mans Sky and Marvels Spider-Man, where filming objects is a practical gameplay component, here the camcorder is also a metaphor for recollection and nostalgia how trustworthy are these recorded artefacts? At the same time, the players role as both gamer and cinematographer asks interesting questions about how we relate to the protagonists we embody in games.Its not the only clever trick the game plays with format and convention. The dialogue system, for example, is specifically designed to capture the energy and chaos of the excitable-group dynamic. Options and responses change depending on who youre looking at as you talk, characters shout over each other, and comments get lost in the noise. At times, you can simply allow the dialogue options to time-out and choose not to say anything. In several wonderful moments this mechanic perfectly captures the desperate improvisational nature of teen relationships, the way a whole day can teeter on a single comment, or a fleeting moment of eye-contact.There are times when the dialogue feels stilted and over-earnest, and the sense of authenticity gets stretched. Those whove played Life Is Strange will also see many parallels with that game, especially between Swann and Max Caulfield, both shy photographers using the lens as an emotional security blanket.But like its predecessor, Lost Records wonderfully captures how, in young adulthood, seemingly insignificant moments can be charged with meaning. Theres a picnic by a lake and later a game of truth or dare that absolutely crackle with intensity. The 90s setting is also well-supported, with spot-on contemporary references, from grunge band mix tapes to video players and troll dolls its fun to just pick up objects in the environment and reminisce, like wandering about some themed pop culture museum.In the background, the mystery at the heart of the game is subtly introduced and theres much to anticipate from the second part. Mostly though, its the characters and their brittle relationships that stick with you. Three days after finishing the game Im still thinking about them, worrying about them, inhabiting that old shack with them. Unless you simply refuse to indulge in emotional young adult drama, you will be right there, too.

Mass Effect is some of the best science fiction ever made. That may sound like a grandiose comment, but its true. As a trilogy, the original games from 2007-2013 effortlessly plucked the most cerebral ideas from the sci-fi genre and slotted them into a memorable military role-playing game that had players invested from beginning to controversial end.Whether you prefer the hopeful, optimistic outlook of Asimov, the dark and reflective commentary of Shelley, the accessible thought experiments of Star Trek, or the arch melodrama of Battlestar Galactica, Mass Effect has it all. The trilogy is as happy grazing on the western-inspired tropes of Star Wars as the hard sci-fi of Iain M Banks, blending all its moods and micro-stories into a compelling, believable galaxy that somehow walks a line between breathless optimism and suffocating bleakness.Mass Effect is special. And like any successful video game series, the achievement of the franchise rests on the shoulders of a huge assembly of developers. BioWare project director Casey Hudson and the studios co-founders, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, get a lot of the credit, but so much of its soul comes from BioWares other creatives, too. The writing of Drew Karpyshyn, the art direction of Derek Watts, the vision of lead designer Preston Watamaniuk and the soaring, cinematic music of Jack Wall.Every second you play you can feel the suffocating inevitability of sacrifice closing in around you. It needed music to matchI had made a soundtrack for Jade Empire very successfully with BioWare before Mass Effect, Wall tells me, when I ask how he became part of the team working on the original title. Then, they put out an audition process for what the team was calling SFX, the codename for Mass Effect. It was a blind audition, and BioWare got the files back from a number of composers. The team would listen to all those different things and decide who nailed it the most for the tone or the feeling they were picturing. And I won that audition blind.Almost immediately, Casey Hudson got to work on giving Wall the brief. His mandate was I want this to sound like 80s sci-fi music. No Star Wars, nothing like that, more like Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, Blade Runner. Those were the main ideas. Hudson specifically wanted to channel that vintage analogue synth sound that defined the science fiction of the era (especially in movies) and imagined the multilayered, multitextured approach from Tangerine Dream as the perfect accompaniment to the dense and complex Mass Effect universe.Wall explains that BioWare played him a piece of music written by another composer called Sam Hulick, who had also auditioned for the project. While Hulick wasnt chosen to be the lead composer (because he was considered to be too junior for the job), Wall gave him equal credit on the soundtrack, thanks to his incredibly important contributions to key themes in the first game.It wasnt until Mass Effect 2 that the music really came into its own, becoming integral to the whole experience. Where Mass Effect has this almost utopian outlook, channelling the optimism of mid-20th century sci-fi to establish its universe, the sequel is darker. The end of everything is nigh. From the off, youre told the final act is a Suicide Mission, and to get your affairs in order before you reach the point of no return. Theres a pervasive pessimism, and every second you play you can feel the suffocating inevitability of sacrifice closing in around you. It needed music to match.Right at the beginning of the development, Casey Hudson came in and said Id love to write the ending now, Wall says, because everythings going to culminate there. I want that to be the main moment that everyone remembers. He gave me some guidance, and talked me through what he wanted [players] to feel which is always the best way to work with a director.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionThe team would decide who nailed it the most Jack Wall.This track, aptly named Suicide Mission, may be the most important across the whole trilogy. It has a more orchestral bias than anything from the first game, and reflects the serious overall tone. It shows how rapidly Mass Effect matured from one game to the next.It had to be epic, it had to feel cinematic, it had to feel one man against everything, says Wall. You needed to feel like you were saving the world, saving the galaxy, whatever. I came up with that main theme, and [Hudson] liked it pretty much immediately.But before Wall and Hudson could start fitting the pieces together, there was some maintenance to be done. BioWare and Wall were unimpressed by how the music in the first game had been patched into the final product. The transitions were terrible, Wall says when I ask for examples, and it just didnt do justice to the music.So, what we decided is that in Mass Effect 2, I would do all the implementation, which was something Id never done before, he continues. I had an amazing assistant called Brian DiDomenico who worked with me in my studio every day; he sat in my vocal booth with a desk and a PC, and I would send him my tracks, he would implement them into the game, and I would do a play test there and then. And we would tweak it until it was really good BioWare was known for only putting out a game when it was ready, and so things got delayed a lot, but fans were super happy when they got it.Wall remembers finishing the game, noting that the whole ending sequence came through in little tiny pieces of video that were spewed out by the game engine. He took the files and fed them into a movie editor on his Mac, pieced the ending together, and edited Suicide Mission into it. He then wrote different endings to the track, reflecting the choices of the player.The end of everything is nigh Mass Effect 2. Photograph: EAIt was the biggest mind-fucking thing Ive ever done in my entire life, he laughs. And there was no one available to walk me through it, because they were all freaking out trying to finish the game. I handed it in, and they had to do a lot of massaging on their end in order to get it to work, but they did it and the result is still one of the best ending sequences to a game that Ive ever played. It was worth all that effort.Wall did not return to score Mass Effect 3, the least well-received game in the trilogy. Casey was not particularly happy with me at the end, he says. But Im so proud of that score. It got nominated for a Bafta, and it did really well [even if] it didnt go as well as Casey wanted. Talking to Wall, I sensing an almost Fleetwood Mac level of creative tension between him and Hudson; the duo made something amazing that would live in the hearts of sci-fi and RPG lovers for ever, but at the cost of some relationships.Fallouts like that happen, its just part of the deal, he says. Its one of the few times in my career thats happened, and it was a tough time, but it is what it is.Mass Effect 2s final mission can be survived. If you make all the right choices, and execute the plan with absolute lucidity and determination, you can save your main character and all of the crew as they stare certain death in the eye. But the much more likely result, at least for most players, is that you lose at least one member of the team. This ragtag bunch of heroes becomes splintered, and limps into the climax of the series wounded, demoralised and desperate. To me, its a reflection of the brutal reality that good sci-fi reveals a dramatic, honest look at the best and worst of human nature.

Every time I have to switch between fantasy realms I feel a little like the workers in Severance. Who am I again? What am I here to do? Who are all these people? Its been a golden time for fantasy lately and having inhaled Dragons Dogma 2, Metaphor: ReFantazio, both seasons of House of the Dragon and all of Rebecca Yarross Fourth Wing novels in less than a year, Im starting to blur the finer details of one kingdom with another.Avoweds fantasy universe comes ready-made, from developer Obsidians other Pillars of Eternity games. The lore is dense, the in-game text plentiful and characters verbose, but thankfully The Lands Between is fascinating to look at and the realm of Eora full of political tension and cool monsters. I remember precious few names or historical details, but I will remember several of my experiences in this game the view from the rickety path hugging the walls of an underground cavern big enough for a mad priest to have built as gigantic automaton inside, and the skin-crawling secret I discovered in the basement of a companions family home. The look is Annihilation-meets-Oblivion, with fungal and floral detail embroidering the structures and peoples you encounter, and and ever-present tension between the organic and the corruptive.The Lands Between is being ravaged by a disturbing plague that sends people mad, before they are consumed by mushroom-like growths. You, an envoy from a distant centre of empire, have been sent to investigate. You are a godlike, touched by the immortals, and you are guided through this strange place by a divine voice in your head and a range of native companions, whose chatter I found genuinely edifying. Theres a lot of choice and self-direction in Avowed, and its a game that always respects your intelligence. Characters are interestingly (if densely) written and there are plenty of ways to respond to them. Its a lot less patronising than the cringeworthily Whedon-esque good guy/bad guy/joker responses that other games force out of you.I expected a brisk 20-hour adventure in the vein of Obsidians sci-fi comedy The Outer Worlds, but reader, this is not that. This game is immense. I took my time in the opening area of Dawnshore, having a fine old time probing into spider-webbed caverns (there are lots of those, this is not a game for the arachnophobic) and combing through ornate, abandoned ruins and climbing lighthouses looking for loot. (This was partly because I stalled on the main quest, having forgotten a vital piece of information that popped up once in a text tutorial for about five seconds.) Only after 15 hours in this pleasant coastal land did I meet one of the central antagonists, an impressively frightening warlord in intricate armour and a mask with smouldering eyes. I then found myself in a dense and rotting jungle-swamp full of surprisingly cheerful necromancers, and it was even bigger than Dawnshore. When I arrived at a third new location after around 30 hours I realised that I very much did not have the measure of this world at all.Unfortunately Avowed would be better if it were 20 hours long. I always had fun striking out from town and getting lost, coming across interesting things to do exactly as you would in Skyrim or Fallout. But there are two sticky problems that suck the fun out of it over time. The first is common to a lot of open-world games: when you arrive in a new place, all the quests and fights are a little too hard. After a few hours questing, exploring and upgrading your weapons and armour, it hits a brief sweet spot where everything feels challenging but conquerable. Then you empower yourself to such an extent everything gets too easy, and it starts to feel like a box-ticking exercise. This pattern repeated itself over my time with the game, eroding my patience.The second issue is that Avoweds combat just isnt as fun as it thinks it is, and theres so much of it. There are an impressive number of weapons and techniques available to you grimoires and wands for spells, giant two-handed axes, bows and pistols, maces and shields. No matter what you choose, though, it feels imprecise and tedious, and your chances of success are determined by invisible numbers rather than skill. Try to take on enemies above your level and it will barely matter how well you dodge out of the path of a greatsword or how cleverly you combine your magic effects to freeze and shatter undead skeletons. What matters is the quality of your gear, which must be continually and laboriously upgraded with a warehouses worth of random materials that you find in every chest and lockbox. I got very sick of smashing R2 to fire magic projectiles or hack away at tree-monsters with my sword, chipping away determinedly at their hit points. My companions never felt especially helpful in battles, either.All the variety and texture that can be found in the fiction here is lacking in the combat and the loot. There are unique swords and trinkets at the ends of the most interesting quests, but the fun of exploring is tempered by the realisation that outside of the views and the characters, youll rarely find anything that interesting. If you come across a powerful enemy, you may well be underpowered for the fight. If you find a tantalising glowing chest in a cavern, theres a strong chance itll be full of pennies, chunks of iron and a few pelts.Avowed started out as Obsidians answer to Bethesdas Elder Scrolls series, and it did remind me a lot of Oblivion and Skyrim in the exciting moments where I stumbled across something unexpected in the wilds. But it also shares those games tendency towards repetition, and the weightless feel of their fighting. My first 15 or so hours in The Lands Between felt rich with potential, but I got fed up with it long before the end.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionAvowed is released on 18 February; 59.99

It is said that every 100 years, a small fishing village on the southern coast of an unknown fantasy realm holds a magical artisanal cheese festival. As an adventurer and fan of ethically produced dairy products, you are determined to attend the fabled event, arriving at the dock on a small boat with only a few gold coins and a dream. This is the backdrop to the worst role-playing adventure I have ever experienced and, entirely coincidentally, the only one I have ever designed.The game creation package RPG Maker has been around since 1992, the first version launching on the Japanese PC-98 computer. Since then, development has been passed from veteran software publisher ASCII to Enterbrain and then Chiyoda-based Gotcha Gotcha Games, and dozens of instalments have appeared. Although it has become increasingly complex over the years, RPG Maker remains a remarkably intuitive way to make adventure games with no development experience at all.The package comes with thousands of pre-made maps, buildings, characters and items, which creators can use and modify; but you can also start from scratch, crafting your own assets to make unique games. Your projects can be shared with the RPG Maker community and several acclaimed indie games have been built with the program, including To The Moon, Corpse Party and Omori. I can tell you that Artisan Cheese Quest will not be joining them.An exclusive screenshot of Artisan Cheese Quest on RPG Maker. Photograph: NIS AmericaTo be fair, the game only took me and my 19-year-old son Zac about two hours to make, using the PlayStation 5 version of RPG Maker (launching on 21 February). At first we chose the Swamp location from the huge variety of pre-made maps, which mostly offer traditional fantasy and sci-fi options. Then we selected a character a cute little anime-style warrior. From here you start the actual process of making a game that offers challenging things to do. Everything that takes place in the world is called an Event, and to create one you need to construct a set of conditions using a very simple visual programming language.If youve ever tried Scratch, the popular coding tool used in schools throughout the world, youll be right at home. Say you want to hide a magic key in a treasure chest: you place the chest on the map, then use the menu system to place a key inside it. Add a locked door then place a condition on that door: if the player has the key, the door opens, if they dont, they get a fail message.With the same system, you can add branching dialogue with characters, plan enemy patrol paths and eventually craft a combat system everything is controlled via a series of if/then commands. During lockdown, Zac and I used Scratch to make a very simple maze game where you guided a mouse towards a block of cheese, so we decided to stick with our established game design expertise here. We built a tavern, attached the tavern interior to a building on the main landscape map, added characters to provide hints and hid an artisan cheese festival pass in a treasure chest on a small island. We didnt use any original assets but we did write all the dialogue and the story i.e. find the pass, open the tavern door, eat cheese. Please keep us in mind for this years Bafta games award for best narrative.RPG Maker on PlayStation 5. Photograph: NIS AmericaMost importantly, the process was enormous fun. Youre able to select background music and sound effects, and going for wildly inappropriate options had us crying with laughter: we put very dramatic combat music in the most innocuous areas; our treasure chest screamed when you opened it; villagers randomly barked and growled. And however basic the final result is, you still get that thrill at having made something that functions and looks a lot like an actual game. As you get used to the system, your ambitions grow: we later added a zombie who wanders around the map complaining about his lactose intolerance.Im not going to lie although the system is intuitive, it gets extremely demanding when you start thinking about creating multi-stage boss encounters or designing a levelling up system for your character. If youre not used to working with lengthy routines and sub-routines and game mechanics that all mess with each other, youve a long road ahead. True, any time we werent sure how to make something work, the games online community helped: there are hundreds of videos on YouTube and lots of helpful people on Reddit. But I feel were some way from making anything even slightly resembling a commercial game.Perhaps at some point in the future, Artisan Cheese Quest will be one of the finest fromage-based fantasy role-playing adventures available on PlayStation 5. For now, were just going to keep adding stupid sound effects until it stops being funny. Honestly, dont hold your breath.

Back in 2013, having bought the series from Eidos, Square Enix released a reboot of the hit 1990s action game Tomb Raider starring a significantly less objectified Lara Croft. I loved that game, despite a quasi-assault scene near the beginning that I would later come to view as a bit icky, and I wasnt the only one it was extremely well received, selling 3.4m copies in its first month alone. Then Square Enix came out and called it a disappointment.Sales did not meet the publishers expectations, apparently, which raises the question: what were the expectations? Was it supposed to sell 5m in one month? If a book sells 10,000 copies in a week its considered a bestseller. Even at the height of its popularity in the 90s, no Tomb Raider game ever sold more than a few million. Square Enixs expectations were clearly unrealistic. It wouldnt be the last time; in a 2016 interview with Hajime Tabata, Final Fantasy XVs director, he told me that game needed to sell 10m to succeed.Last week in an earnings call, EAs executives had to explain a shortfall in profits. It was driven mostly by EA FC, the ubiquitous football series whose revenue was down on the previous year, but CEO Andrew Wilson also singled out the long-awaited RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which came out last October. Dragon Age had a high-quality launch and was well reviewed by critics and those who played. However, it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market, he said.Dragon Age has reached 1.5 million players in the months since launch, which presumably includes people paying via subscription services as well as direct sales. If 3.4m was a disappointment for Square Enix in 2013, you can only imagine that 1.5m was a disaster for EA in 2024, when games cost multiples more to make.However, as Polygons Maddy Myers points out in a detailed analysis of comparable games, 1.5m is more than Metaphor: ReFantazio (1m), and not much less than the second part of the Final Fantasy VII remake (2m) over comparable time periods. Dragons Dogma, the genres breakout hit last year, sold 3.3m over six months.A breakout hit Dragons Dogma 2. Photograph: CapcomIn those terms, Dragon Age was certainly not a flop. I can only come to the same conclusion as Myers: EAs expectations were unrealistic. The company was expecting an instant mega-hit from a game in a series that had sat dormant for 10 years. The Veilguard had been rebooted and reworked several times over a tortuous development period, during which time BioWare struggled enormously. Having previously made standard-setting role-playing games in Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Star Wars: The Old Republic, its only releases since 2014 were Mass Effect: Andromeda (disappointing) and mech shooter Anthem (broken). Meanwhile, a different developer had an enormous hit with a series that BioWare itself established: Baldurs Gate, which sold 15m.The developers at BioWare have suffered the fallout from this. The studio is now down to a relatively bare bones staff of 100, and it seems EA will not be giving it the chance to build on what it achieved with The Veilguard. Its a miracle that game exists at all.Ive written a lot in this newsletter about the ridiculously high stakes of modern video game development; its clear that a more sustainable path needs to be forged. But in 2025 as in 2013, short-termism and unrealistic expectations on a corporate level stand in the way. That Tomb Raider reboot ended up selling more than 14m over time, more than any other game in the series. First-quarter sales cannot be used as the first and final measure of a games success. Nintendos principle of selling the same games for literally decades has meant that plenty of mid-selling titles have become million-sellers over time.There was also a point in EAs history indeed in most publishers history where the portfolio was more important than each individual games profitability. The likes of EA FC and Call of Duty were the bankable successes that could fund the rest of the slate, allowing those publishers to make room for the next surprise success. Not every game released in a year by a given company was expected to be a mega-hit. As long as the overall slate was profitable, there was space for the critically acclaimed or fan-pleasing games that didnt break out of their niche.The space for those games now appears to be confined to independent developers and the smaller publishers that overtly support them. Mike Laidlaw, the director of the first three Dragon Age games, left BioWare in 2017 and formed a new studio in 2020; its first game, Eternal Strands, came out last month and is picking up great word-of-mouth buzz. By all accounts its a banger and its team havent had to labour under the expectation of instant success.What to playWhy are we waiting While Waitings gameplay. Photograph: Optillusion Games/SteamWhile Waiting came out a few days ago, an unusual game that feels like a playable version of those slice-of-life newspaper cartoons. You play through the life of an incredibly regular guy, from birth through waiting for exam results through all the banal moments of his existence at the doctors surgery, crossing the road, waiting for new software updates to finally finish their endless install cycles. You can do absolutely nothing, or mess around in each scene to amuse yourself. Its an interactive version of the adage that life is what happens when youre busy making other plans, a small celebration of embracing the mundane.Available on: PC, Nintendo Switch Estimated playtime: skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionWhat to readThe PlayStation Network outage: something for us to all tell our therapists about. Photograph: Thiago Prudencio/SOPA Images/REX/ShutterstockPlayStation Network went down for almost a whole day at the weekend, prompting an tsunami of complaints from disappointed gamers looking forward to their weekend multiplayer sessions. Sony called it an operational issue and apologised by giving PlayStation Plus subscribers five extra days of play.A Bloomberg report () digs into the absolute state of things at Warner Bros game division, whose CEO recently departed after a string of underperforming titles, culminating in last years Suicide Squad. Even ongoing sales of mega-hit Hogwarts Legacy couldnt save it from a $300m loss last year.Two pieces of consumer-rights-related news: Steam has quietly added warning labels to early access games that have been abandoned by their developers (ie, theyve had no updates for many months); and the UK government has responded to a petition urging it to prohibit game developers from shutting down their live games, thus rendering them unplayable.What to clickQuestion BlockWhat Remains of Edith Finch not a lot, judging by this. Photograph: Annapurna InteractiveLoads of you recommended your favourite video game stories for last weeks questioner, Natalie. There are so many banger recommendations that Ive been shouting YES! at my inbox all week. Thanks to Lawal, Emma, Jude, Toby and Phill for these picks:The Forgotten City (branching narrative indie mystery game), Mass Effect 2 (perilous science-fiction), 80 Days (globetrotting illustrated text adventure), Her Story (wonderfully clever detective game), Kathy Rain: A Detective is Born (well acted 90s-style point-and-click adventure), We Happy Few (dodgy gameplay but characters that really stay in your head), Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader (nails its worldbuilding), Xenogears (a weird and iconic classic), Breath of Fire III (poignant retro RPG), Red Dead Redemption II (long-winded but peerless western), Eliza (sparsely written and well acted), The Witcher trilogy (grimy dark fantasy, 3 is my fave), Half-Life and its sequel (the ultimate first-person story), What Remains of Edith Finch (anthology style magical realist tragedy), and Everybodys Gone to the Rapture (uneasy pastoral English supernatural mystery).Ill tackle a fresh question next week. If youve one to send in or anything else to say about the newsletter hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.

When Harrison Ford spoke to the Wall Street Journal last week, praising the performance of voice actor Troy Baker in the recent video game Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, he was doing much more than recognising a great impression of himself. You dont need artificial intelligence to steal my soul, he told the paper. You can already do it for nickels and dimes with good ideas and talent. [Baker] did a brilliant job, and it didnt take AI to do it.Video game performers in the SAG-AFTRA union have been on strike since July, the major issue being the use of generative AI in the games industry. The union wants members to be compensated when AI performances are generated from their work, and demands consent and transparency around Gen AI technology. Major video game publishers such as Activision Blizzard, Disney, Warner Bros and Electronic Arts are involved in the dispute, and several recent titles including Destiny 2: Heresy and Genshin Impact have been affected, with English-language voice performances missing. AI voice synthesis is being touted as a means of cutting costs in an industry where game budgets are spiralling, but such technologies imperil actors livelihoods while relying on their work to seed virtual performances. Plus, the budgetary benefits of the tech are still in question.Experienced voice actor Sarah Elmaleh, who has appeared in games such as Fortnite, Halo Infinite and Gears 5, is chairing the SAG-AFTRA committee negotiating with the game industry. She sees in Fords statement a key underlying message: What I hear is Mr Ford rightly pointing out that it is both more creatively valuable and more financially viable and efficient, especially for the whole of a major performance like this, to direct a talented human than to wrestle with an AI replica and its interface. The human-to-human interface of creating games performance can already be shockingly fast, when game actor and director are talented and experienced.Many video game developers are willing to meet the unions demands. According to Elmaleh more than 160 video game productions have signed interim or independent agreements with AI protections in place, ensuring that voice and motion capture work cannot be used to seed synthesised AI actors without permission. But major publishers are still holding out: a representative for the companies recently told Polygon that they had put forward a proposal that includes industry-leading terms of use for AI digital replicas in-game and additional compensation for the use of an actors performance in other games.However, in a document sent to members, SAG-AFTRA claims that the companies are seeking a variety of loopholes, including the classification of motion capture work as data rather than performance, and limiting protections only to performance work carried out after a new deal has been ratified. It turns out the employers would like to be able to use all past game performances, and any external material, without consent or compensation, says Elmaleh. That means anything else youve performed in, TV or film-wise, anything youve put on social media, any interviews, anything they can ingest thats already out there on the internet all of that could be fair game. This fight certainly affects all actors, no matter the category If we dont right now reject the assertion that performance as a concept can be flattened and dissolved into data, then the environment will be all the richer for abuse and exploitation across the board. Can you imagine telling Charlie Chaplin he wasnt giving a performance that he was just [creating] film, the material he was captured on? It sounds absurd in that context, but because digital tools and language are novel and abstract and often mysterious to people, bosses will say such things with an absolutely straight face.Fords intervention has at least put the spotlight on the actors who arent household names, but whose onscreen video game characters definitely are. No company in their right mind would tangle with Mr Fords team, or the bad optics of replicating him without any consent or compensation, says Elmaleh. But thats what the bargaining group is trying to get away with for workaday actors.

When I was growing up, the genre-defining dollhouse sim The Sims was the ultimate escape. Id build dream homes, cultivate a neighbourhood of weird and wonderful friends and live out a fantasy adult life.So when EA surprise-dropped a rerelease of The Sims 1 and 2 last weekend to celebrate the series 25th anniversary, with all expansions included (my nine-year-old selfs dream) naturally I was compelled to return to my happy place, revisiting my 10-hour pyjama-clad marathon sessions micromanaging the lives of the Newbies, Roomies, and the Goths, and occasionally removing their pool ladders when they were taking a little swim, and only taking a necessary pause for mums roast dinner.While the familiar chaos of breezy music, tragic pool accidents, and my own personal french maid delivered a powerful dose of nostalgia, there is something else lurking beneath this games quirky and cheerful exterior, something that I wasnt conscious of when I was a kid. To my surprise, the game now feels less like a chance to live out your dream life, and more like a struggle simulator. (I also forgot how much time my Sims spent playing chess.) Like a Lynchian picket-fence town, I realised, theres a darkness lurking under suburban sheen.The original Sims games were more dystopian than todays perky, brightly coloured The Sims 4. The Sims 1 instead offers a desaturated daily grind. The contrast isnt just the aesthetic 20 years ago, Sims had no dreams or ambitions. Your virtual families worked long hours for expensive lives, where death and some of the most gut-wrenching music in game history lurked behind even mundane everyday tasks.Forget personality, aspirations and tastes. The Sims 1 is a capitalist nightmare where survival trumps self-actualisation.Mind the spontaneously combusting ovens! Sims 1 + 2.I forgot how much time the original Sims actually spend working. They do boring, dull jobs for little pay, out of your sight making the simple message that you get when they are promoted (or passed over) strangely impactful. Put that meagre wage packet towards the cheapest oven on offer, and itll probably catch fire and kill you. This is a game that punishes you for being poor. It means that the rich, like the iconic Goth family, in their still-stunning graveyard-edged stone mansion stay, rich while the poor stay poor. Social mobility in The Sims 1, I learned, is near impossible.And having a social life? Forget it, at least when youre on the bottom rung of your random career ladder. Theres simply no time to make friends, something I didnt remember from my days as a Sims-obsessed tween. I now realise that my neighbourhoods messy EastEnders-level entanglements were largely scripted in my head. Instead, you must chip away at ++ and relationship scores until you can finally, anticlimactically Play in bed, thanks to the Livin it Up expansion pack that provided the worlds most basic sex education to a generation of 11-year-olds. Theres nothing dark about that expansions heart-shaped bed. I still want it in real life.Even these moments with the most meaningful loves of my Sims lives seemed to offer them nothing they were transactional, serving nothing more than to unlock new interactions. They are performing for my enjoyment, not theirs.Friendship is also bleakly transactional here: you need a certain number of them to climb the ranks at work. Stay lonely, and youll stay poor, and probably die from having a cheap, spontaneously combusting microwave. Its an especially sad existence for single Sims who live alone. Exhausted from work, if you dont find time to call your friends on the phone for hours or they decline to come over your relationships decay rapidly. Like Black Mirrors award-winning Nosedive episode, losing social credibility quickly sees things spiral quickly downhill for your Sims.And nothing flips a millennials stomach as quick as the music that heralds a terrifying, sudden burglary. Its still horrifying 25 years later, so just hope that you had the foresight to spend your meagre savings on a burglar alarm. Thats before we even get into visits from the Grim Reaper, and creepy prank calls. These unexpected callers frighten me just as much now as they did then.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionA capitalist nightmare, but still an escape Sims 1 + 2 rereleases.Perhaps my new darker perspective on the game comes from the world we live in now. Im finally living my fantasy adult life I just didnt realise it would be less lounging in gothic-mansion dream homes, and more feeling overworked, underpaid and on the verge of a spiralling breakdown. In 2025, an era of economic anxiety and burnout, the grind of The Sims feels brutal.For all its existential dread, The Sims 1 is still an escape. Sure, it presents a kind of capitalist nightmare. But, it is a capitalist nightmare you can control. No matter how hard the daily slog got, you can always type in a cheat code and wipe away financial stress with a click the ultimate fantasy. Its also weirdly accurate: just like in real life, external advantages (and cheating the system) are way more likely to lead to success than grinding away and following the rules.Yes, The Sims 1 was and remains a dystopian suburban treadmill, but it also makes room for humour. Its a world where chaos is funny, failure is temporary, and the worst tragedies could be undone with the click of a mouse.

The PlayStation Network (PSN) is down, depriving online gamers around the world from accessing weekend events.The PSN is the service that Sonys PlayStation console owners use to access its online gaming network. It allows players to connect with other gamers around the world.The outage began in the UK at about midnight on Friday.About 71,000 gamers reported the outage to PlayStations website. Many users can no longer access online gaming lobbies, the PlayStation Store or their online accounts.The PSN runs a model that costs 13.49 a month, 39.99 for three months or 119.99 for 12 months for its premium subscription. Many gamers have pointed to these costs when complaining to Sony.The weekend is when certain games host special tournaments and online events. FC 25, Electronic Arts popular football simulator, hosts Championship matches, known colloquially as weekend league, on its Ultimate Team platform. Gamers spend hundreds of hours and often hundreds of pounds investing in their Ultimate Team squads.The outage also means Call of Duty fans will be unable to play during its promotional weekend and will not benefit from double XP (experience points) in Black Ops 6 and Warzone.Thousands of angry PlayStation users have expressed their frustration with the outage on social media in memes, jokes and rants.Lets be real; everyone deserves this months PS Plus for free. Paying monthly for the network to be down on a weekend is belligerent. Did someone fall asleep during their night shift? Heading into hour 5, one X user wrote.I work a 9 to 5 and come home just to see the PlayStation servers are down on a Friday, another posted.PlayStation network down, time to get to know my wife of 5 years, joked another.Sony responded to confirm the problems with its digital service. On its support webpage, PlayStation said it was aware of the issue and that it was working to resolve it as soon as possible.The Guardian has contacted PlayStation, FC25 developer Electronic Arts, and Call of Duty publisher Activision Blizzard for comment.

Life was tough in 16th-century Bohemia, and so it is here, in its virtual counterpart. The first 10 hours of this game were thoroughly miserable. Stepping into the mud-soaked boots of Henry, a humble blacksmith-turned-knight, I am sent to deliver a message across a war-ravaged region. Yet before Henry can fulfil his duty, he falls victim to a deadly ambush, leaving himself and his Lord, Hans Capon, stranded without a penny or sword to their name.As a stranger arriving in tattered rags, bloodsoaked and desperate, no one believes that you are a nobleman, or has the time to listen to your increasingly urgent pleas. Townsfolk comment on your odour and refuse to let you into various establishments. Its a truly humbling gaming experience, creating a soberingly bleak recreation of what its like to be among medieval societys downtrodden.The main story eventually whisks you away on increasingly impressive exploits, but in the early game, merely surviving the day is an adventure in itself. In this harsh feudal fantasy, you can save your progress only two ways: sleeping in your own bed, or drinking a bottle of saviour schnapps. When you cant afford a night at an inn and Henry doesnt even have a horse each new map-spanning journey is risky. Some of those early deaths cost me hours of progress.Arduous Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Photograph: Warhorse Studios/Deep SilverOnce you manage to work and thieve your way into a few Groschen, your fortunes begin to change. Keeping up appearances is imperative in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, with your clothes and hygiene influencing your charisma stat, feeding into your wider reputation. Townsfolk notice your wounds and blood-splattered clothes. Innkeepers are less likely to take you for a thieving vagabond if youve bathed. The wealthier you become, the easier life becomes; dressing well even helps to convince guards of your innocence when youre caught red-handed.Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is filled with the kind of friction that most modern games actively avoid. I became utterly immersed in this brutally believable simulation even when it was kicking my arse. This is a role-playing game where even the simple act of making a potion is a struggle, where food can rot and poison you, and not even fast travel is safe. Word to the wise dont accidentally clamber into the wrong bed. Itll end in a night spent being pelted in the stocks.Like in Bethesdas Skyrim, you learn by doing. Want to get better at running? Sprint while wearing the heaviest armour you can find. Fancy commanding conversations? Devote half an in-game day to reading a book. The original games first-person duelling makes a welcome return, locking players into a lethal game of bluffing, blocking and reading your opponents stance. Its a deadly dance that feels like nothing else in games, but if swordplay isnt for you, you can hone your marksmanship, double down on stealth or even opt to make your tongue your sharpest weapon.In conversations, you can roleplay Henry as you see fit, leaning into intimidation, intellect, charm or outright violence. However you play, the writing is consistently compelling, the characters as unyieldingly consistent as the gameplay. Despite the misery baked into it, Kingdom Come 2 has a comedic spirit. From a demented miller who has you collecting sediment from corpses, to settling your differences with soldiers via raucous drinking games, theres humour in even the most inane of interactions. Developer Warhorse Studios is wise to keep players smiling, even while theyre cursing the game under their breath.Comedic spirit Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Photograph: Warhorse Studios/Deep SilverWatching Henry slowly transform from an inept nobody into a fearsome presence feels immensely rewarding, and once youve pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, this country-spanning jaunt sees you infiltrate noble weddings, plan a prison break and even defend a besieged castle. While Kingdom Come 2s world inevitably features the kind of bugs youd expect from a sprawling RPG, it helps that it is a very handsome game. The grass sways in the wind and villages and towns teem with life.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionIf there was ever a game that adopted the tough love approach, its this. The early hours feel like the playable equivalent of being sent to military school, and demand saintly patience but its an investment that pays off. Much like in Red Dead Redemption 2 before it, I happily lose hours wandering around this vast simulation, curious to see what wonder and depravity I might stumble on. Its telling that despite spending more than 115 hours in Bohemia, I have yet to roll credits on the main quest line. If youre uninspired by the prospect of roaming yet another frictionless open world where everything comes easy, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a breath of fresh air scented with just a hint of dung.Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is out now; 49.99

For months now I have been in the thrall of Pokmon Trading Card Pocket. Its a devilishly slick blend of card-collecting and pared-down battling that has had me obediently opening the app on my phone at least twice a day since it launched. The virtual cards are beautifully done; the rare art cards especially, with their pastoral scenes of Pokmon in their natural habitats. I have spent many hours on the battles, too, honing decks and chasing win streaks to earn myself victory emblems. I got most of my friends into it, anticipating the day when its makers at DeNa would finally enable trading so I could fill the last couple of holes in my collection.The Guardians journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link.Learn more.This week, on the day that the trading went live and an expansion full of pretty new cards was introduced, I quit. I made a couple of trades for the Venosaur Ex and Machamp Ex that had evaded my grasp despite opening hundreds of packs, took a screenshot of the collection complete screen, and I havent opened it since. Im done.I didnt quit in protest at the fiddly, expensive nature of the new trading feature, or because the new cards mostly feature monsters from an era of Pokmon that holds no nostalgic power for me. Ive just suddenly had enough. I was enjoying every minute I spent with the game until I wasnt. Usually, you know youre done with a game when youve finished it, but in this era of the forever game, we have to choose when to quit. Sometimes this happens overnight for me. One day Im enjoying a game, the next day Im sick of it.Inconveniently, I realise it about 75% of the way through a games campaign. Especially with open-world titles, the best hours are the ones in the middle, where youve played enough to understand a games unique ideas and systems but not enough to have totally mastered them; there comes a point where you know youre nearing the endgame. Suddenly, the friction between me and the game world the stickiness, as game designers refer to it is gone, and everything feels smooth and easy, and I lose interest. (This is why I love FromSoftwares games so much: from Dark Souls to Elden Ring they never get easy or predictable.)Enough is enough Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Photograph: Games PressHere is a small selection of games from the past year that I abandoned in this way, not long before the end: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle; Dragons Dogma 2; Paper Mario: the Thousand-Year Door; Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom; Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. I could sit down with any of these for a couple of evenings and polish them off some of them I already have, months after leaving them unfinished but it always feels like a chore. Meanwhile, Ive played Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders, Balatro and Hades long past their completion points, because the stickiness is still there.I often get readers writing to ask when its OK to quit a game. For me, the answer is whenever you stop having fun. I rarely quit because I get stuck; instead I quit when I stop getting stuck, when I sense Ive seen everything meaningful that a game has to offer. I think its easy to keep playing something thats lost its appeal out of a sense of obligation.Studies of trophy and achievement stats over the years have found that only between 15-35% of players (pdf) actually complete any given game. I feel for the developers making hours of content that people might never see, but there is just so much entertainment available to everyone that you can hardly blame people for not finding the time for all of it. Some players take pride in finishing every game that they start, but for the rest of us? Its OK to stop.I felt briefly bereft when I was done with Pokmon Trading Card Game, the same feeling I get when I finish a good novel. Part of me also felt relieved to be freed of the daily habit. Its opened a little space in my day for something new and something new is always what Im looking for when I pick up a video game.What to playLife ruiningly compulsive Civilization VII. Photograph: 2K GamesTwo enormous, time-eating historical games are out this week: Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, a pitilessly challenging simulation of 16th-century Bohemia that really rubs your face into the horse dung at the start, and Civilization VII, the next in the venerable, life-ruiningly compulsive strategy series that challenges you to rerun human history from the start. (The latter might seem especially appealing right now, as we appear to have made an almighty mess of it.)Available on: PC, Xbox, PlayStation 5 Estimated playtime: What to readReaching new box-office heights Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Photograph: Paramount/Sega of AmericaThe third Sonic movie has just become the second highest-grossing video game movie ever, behind 2023s Mario film, bringing in $462.5m. (I swallowed my 90s Nintendo kid pride and took my kids to see it over Christmas. Its fine.) Its also on track to overtake Bruce Almighty as Jim Carreys highest-grossing movie; if that happens, itll make a great pub quiz question.At IGN, Rebekah Valentine investigates the phenomenon of copycat slop games that have been appearing in droves on console digital stores, and gets this incredible quote: Once Im in the door, I could make Fart Fart Boobie Fart: The Game and maybe it would eventually get taken down.Among the higher-profile winners at the Grammys was a video game soundtrack: interestingly, this years award went to composer Winifred Phillips for the soundtrack to Wizardry, an RPG from 1981. Polygon has an explainer about how a decades-old game ended up getting remade and winning a Grammy.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionWhat to clickQuestion BlockGod of War: Ragnark, one of the best video game stories of recent years. Photograph: Sony Santa MonicaThis weeks question comes from Natalie:Its taken me many games played and unfinished before Ive realised what all of my favourites have had in common: a compelling narrative. Can you recommend me some of the best storytelling of all video-gaming time?Video game stories come in so many forms that this is a tough question to answer: many of the best stories in games are the ones we find for ourselves. That said, games correspondent Keith Stuart and I have recently been updating our best-of lists for games on all of the current consoles, so my favourite narratives of recent years are fresh in my mind. The authored stories that I remember best from the current gaming generation are: The Last of Us Parts I and II; God of War and its sequel; Immortality; and Alan Wake 2 (mostly for the way its told). Great shorter stories that you can play on a Nintendo Switch include: Oxenfree; Wandersong; To the Moon; Night in the Woods; A Space for the Unbound and Rki. You might also want to try Citizen Sleeper if you like sci-fi. As for the all-timers: Undertale, Chrono Trigger, Portal and its sequel, What Remains of Edith Finch and Fallout New Vegas are up there for me.What would be your top three? Please do email in to tell me on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com and ask me more questions. I apply myself to serious and silly video game questions with equal rigour.

The makers of Football Manager have cancelled the 2025 release of the game after a series of delays.Sports Interactive (SI) announced that FM25 had been scrapped, with the games makers turning their attention to future games, with the next release usually due in November. SI, which is owned by the gaming company Sega, apologised to fans after making the difficult decision to cancel the game after a number of technical hitches.We know this will come as a huge disappointment, especially given that the release date has already moved twice, and [fans] have been eagerly anticipating the first gameplay reveal, a statement said.The games makers said they had planned to create the biggest technical and visual advancement in the series for a generation but that had proven impossible.They said: While many areas of the game have hit our targets, the overarching player experience and interface is not where we need it to be. We could have pressed on, released FM25 in its current state, and fixed things down the line but thats not the right thing to do. We were also unwilling to go beyond a March release as it would be too late in the football season to expect players to then buy another game later in the year.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionSI will not update the 2024 version of the game with 2025s squad and transfer information, but said it would provide full refunds to fans who ordered FM25.

If youre just discovering PlayStation 5 a few years after its debut, youve arrived at a great time. Sonys in-house studios have produced some of their best work in this generation, exploiting the technical prowess of the console while crafting vast narratives and interesting characters. Meanwhile, both major third-party studios and tiny indie developers have exploited the machine and its innovative controller to astounding effect.Astro BotLuscious Astro Bot. Photograph: Sony/Team AsobiSonys luscious 3D platformer sees the eponymous space robot stranded on a distant planet with his hundreds of adorable companions. All the parts of his mothership are guarded by a colourful array of bosses, and you must put it back together.Why we love it: Its one of the best platformers Ive ever played and, as a child of the 90s, I truly have played a ton of them. Read the full review.Baldurs Gate 3One of the greatest role-playing fantasy games of the modern era Baldurs Gate 3. Photograph: Larian StudiosOne of the greatest role-playing fantasy games of the modern era, providing players with almost as much narrative and imaginative freedom as a table-top D&D adventure as they face off against the mighty mind-flayers.Why we love it: Its a towering landmark of an RPG. Bustling with life, brimming with scope, and bursting with imagination. Read the full review.CocoonThe game the world didnt know it needed Cocoon. Photograph: Geometric Interactive/AnnapurnaThe world didnt know it needed a video game about a beetle that can traverse distant worlds in order to solve intergalactic puzzles but it turns out we did. A beautiful, strange, gloopily organic mystery tour.Why we love it: Self-assured, understated, impactful sound and visuals support the most quietly brilliant puzzle game to emerge in years.Death StrandingUnlike anything else Death Stranding. Photograph: Sony Computer EntertainmentHideo Kojimas elegiac science-fiction adventure is like nothing else youll ever play: a post-apocalyptic quest to save humanity, following a parcel courier with an extremely valuable and unlikely parcel.Why we love it: This uncompromising, unashamedly political work of artistic intent is 2019s most interesting blockbuster game by a distance. Read the full review.Demons SoulsEndlessly rewarding Demons Souls. Photograph: SonyBefore Dark Souls came FromSoftwares original hacknslash masterwork: a dark, dread-filled brawl through the ruined kingdom of Boletaria. This remake carefully updates the visuals, combat and structure to forge something new and equally deadly.Why we love it: One of the most quietly significant games of the 00s has been transformed here into a visually incredible, endlessly rewarding dark fantasy.Elden RingSpectacular landscapes Elden Ring. Photograph: Bandai NamcoA grandiose fantasy opera from the makers of Dark Souls, filled with spectacular landscapes, bizarre characters and seemingly insurmountable bosses. Complete with the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC its a challenging and engrossing open world like no other.Why we love it: This is a massive world, astonishingly rendered (the sun and moon wheel in the sky, casting each scene anew) and seemingly limitless in its creative diversity. It is an unrivalled feat of design and inventiveness. Read the full review.Final Fantasy VII RemakeRevolutionary Final Fantasy VII Remake. Photograph: Square EnixThe first in an epic reimagining of Squares revolutionary role-playing adventure from 1997, with lavish new visuals and extended sequences.Why we love it: Final Fantasy VII Remake elevates the original to new heights. It looks spectacularly good, but, more importantly, its gameplay has acquired a modern sheen without losing what made the game distinct in the first place. Read the full review.God of War RagnarkGripping, detailed and imaginative God of War: Ragnark. Photograph: APThe sequel to Sony Santa Monicas incredible reboot of the revered mythological action adventure series. This time, hero Kratos and his teenage son must explore the frozen landscapes of Scandinavia to find a lost god and prevent the end of the world.Why we love it: There havent been many interpretations of ancient mythology as gripping, detailed and imaginative as this, in video games or any other medium. Read the full review.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionGran Turismo 7A stunning 4K makeover Gran Turismo 7. Photograph: Sony Interactive EntertainmentThe landmark PlayStation driving simulator gets a stunning 4K makeover and a vast array of meticulously modelled super cars.Why we love it: This is a jaw-slackeningly beautiful game. Each vehicle is fettled in obsessive detail, down to the exact arrangement of reflective elements in an individual cars headlights. Read the full review.Helldivers 2Everything about this game is ridiculous including how good it is Helldivers 2. Photograph: Sony Computer EntertainmentA thrilling co-op space shooter and a glorious pastiche of Starship Troopers, in which players land on a series of planets to blow deadly robots, giant insects and other alien scum to smithereens.Why we love it: It is so precise, its gunplay so invigorating, its feedback and effects so generous. Everything about this game is ridiculous, including how good it is. Read the full review.The Last of Us Parts I and II RemasteredA landmark for the industry The Last of Us Part II Remastered. Photograph: Sony Computer EntertainmentVulnerable teen Ellie and cynical survivor Joel fight their way through the apocalyptic states of America looking for the cure to a zombifying fungal infection and then must deal with the consequences of what they discover. Updated for PS5, Naughty Dogs brutal yet beautiful adventure games are industry landmarks.Why we love it: Experiencing this brutal adventure once again, in a visually and haptically enhanced format, was a bludgeoning experience, as exhausting, moving and invigorating as my first playthrough. Read the full review.Marvels Spider-Man 2Lovingly envisaged Marvels Spider-Man 2. Photograph: SonyPeter Parker and Miles Morales team up to defeat Venom and a cabal of super villains threatening to destroy their lives, loved ones and the entire city of New York.Why we love it: It is a genuine pleasure to play something that has been so lovingly envisaged, and which is so true to its source material. Its a game everyone with a PS5 should experience. Read the full review.Ratchet & Clank: Rift ApartA shower of sensory feedback Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. Photograph: Insomniac GamesTwo furry heroes warp between worlds to defeat an evil galactic emperor in a visually astounding multiverse adventure.Why we love it: This is a blissfully uncomplicated cartoon science-fiction escapade Everything you do feels good and showers you with sensory feedback, whether visually, aurally or through the controllers haptic rumble. Read the full review.ReturnalGlorious to play Returnal. Photograph: Sony Computer EntertainmentAfter crash-landing on a hostile alien planet, sole-survivor Selene must escape a nightmarish cycle of life and death if she is to get away. A merciless time loop shooter.Why we love it: Its unforgiving and sometimes dispiriting, but also intriguing, mysterious, and just glorious to play. Read the full review.Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves CollectionRollicking fun Uncharted 4. Photograph: Sony Computer EntertainmentNathan Drake hunts for a lost pirate treasure in Uncharted 4, while high-class thief Chloe Frazer searches India for the fabled Tusk of Ganesh in The Lost Legacy. Two wonderful globe-trotting adventures, remastered for PS5.Why we love it: Uncharted 4 is a rollicking, globe-trotting adventure that manages to be funny and exciting, yet also touched with sadness. Read the full review.

Many years ago, when Civilization II was on its way, Id just started as a writer on the video game magazine Edge. As a fan of the original Civilization, a complex turn-based strategy sim about building vast kingdoms through thousands of years of human history, I was keen to review the sequel and my editor let me. Reader, I became completely addicted. I played the game for two weeks non-stop, leaving many pages of the magazine unwritten. This earned me a very severe written warning. In short, Sid Meiers series almost ended my career in games writing which is perhaps why I didnt review the following four instalments. Now it is back, and I can no longer avoid it. I must face my seductive nemesis.In many ways, this is the game that I, and many thousands of other fans, have always known and obsessively loved: a complex, far-reaching and fascinating simulation tracking the rise of empires from ancient tribal groups to modern-day superpowers. As a player, you found towns and cities, gather resources and research new technologies, from literacy to nuclear fission, while sending out settlers, merchants and armies to expand your reach and either placate or destroy other nations. Victory can come from military might, cultural cachet or economic domination, depending on how you play and what youre interested in. No two campaigns are ever the same.Extra nuance Civilization VII. Photograph: 2K GamesFor this new instalment, coming almost a decade after its predecessor, Firaxis has made some radical alterations. The biggest by far is that you no longer guide a single civilisation throughout the entire campaign. Instead, you select a leader with attributes you admire the sneaky Machiavelli, perhaps, or how about the wise Confucius then guide that figure through a series of three distinct historical ages picking a different nation for each section. Each nation has its own unique units and buildings, adding extra nuance to your game. In my first playthrough I started the Antiquity Age with Greece because I really fancied building the Acropolis. Then I flipped to the flighty Normans for the Exploration Age, then finished as the US for the Modern Age. You dont lose everything in this switching process all your discoveries and progress points from the previous age remain, and you can opt to keep all your towns. Youre also able to select specific legacies of your past to bring forward.This gives the game a very definite structure, combatting the malaise that can often occur hours into a Civ campaign when you realise you dont stand a chance against some brutally powerful neighbour whos somehow developed an army five times the size of yours. If youre struggling during one age, you just need to hold out until the next one arrives, giving you the chance to reset your objectives and relationships with nearby nations. It also ensures a technological makeover for all your units, so you cant enter the modern era with a civilisation that can build nuclear power stations but still fights with spears and gets about the place on horseback. In a sense, its like your leader is on a journey through successive domains which makes it feel more like an adventure than a straightforward sim.More approachable Civilization VII. Photograph: 2K GamesThere are other changes to make the game more approachable for modern players. Leaders attain attribute points based on achievements in six categories such as culture, science and combat, which can be spent on related skill trees just like a role-playing game. There are also legacy targets that act as quests, such as building a certain number of Wonders of the World or making key scientific discoveries, moving you towards an outright victory.Beneath all this, lots of systems have been tweaked and re-thought. Maintaining diplomatic relations with other nations is a multifaceted dance involving the use of a new currency influence to organise shared cultural events and economic pacts, or when things go badly, many different types of subterfuge and sabotage. Throughout the years, narrative events crop up like Chance cards in a game of Monopoly, providing moments of humorous challenge. How do you react when a famous poet writes a highly critical epic about you? What do you do when a mysterious stranger demands that you copy and pass on a dusty old scroll to at least three other civilisations or face a terrible curse?Does it still resemble a sort of digitised board game? No. The landscapes may be divided into hexagonal tiles in the traditions of table-top wargaming, but they are now crammed with colour and authentic detail, from craggy mountains to swirling seas, to lively cities crowded with ornate buildings reflecting both the time period and the civilisation they belong to. Battles play out as animated tussles between intricate miniaturised troops and thundering armoured vehicles. Occasional natural disasters send floods, tornadoes and fires across the map with devastating drama.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionOne of the key concerns in the run-up to release was the quality of the opponent AI, but to me, it seems like business as usual. You get the nations that hide in a corner and quietly invent space travel before youve got a reliable train service, and then there are the warmongers and Im looking at you Gilbert du Motier who start little fights to probe your defences then turn vicious and unrelenting, surrounding your cities and crushing isolated units. Alternatively, theres always the cross-platform multiplayer mode if you want to pit yourself against human competitors; I wasnt able to test this on public servers before release, but it has performed well in previews.So here we are, more than 30 years after the original game, still hungry to rule the world and devouring every morsel of maniacal power. Some veterans may balk at the structural changes: Civilization VII is very much the Civilization for now deep and complex, but with an emphasis on human drama and achievement rather than the sweep of faceless units across a mathematical matrix. There are still few moments in video games as pleasing as building the Hanging Gardens, or discovering a bountiful new location for a town, or marching a phalanx of troops into a battered enemy capital. This game, which once almost cost me my job, will gracefully sneak away with hours, days and possibly months of your life. But then, nobody ever conquered the world in an afternoon.

Its good to be back in this far-flung future world. Like the game that preceded it, Citizen Sleeper 2 is packed with evocative portrayals of everyday life in outer space, from farmers tending zero-G crops in an asteroid greenhouse to water miners rising up against the cartel that controls them, everyone eking out a meagre existence in crumbling space stations left to rot by a long-dead mega corporation.Once again youre cast as a Sleeper, a robot with a digitised human mind shorn of the memories of the person it was copied from. In the first game you were on the run from the firm that made you, attempting to wean your robot off its reliance on a stabilising drug. In the sequel you play a different Sleeper who has successfully managed to ditch Stabilizer, but at the cost of being enslaved to a gang boss called Laine.Whereas before the action was confined to a single space station, Erlins Eye, the second game roves much more widely across a sector of space called the Belt. Your explosive escape from Laine sees you hot-footing it from station to station, with a timer signalling how close on your tail the gang lord is. In this opening section its a race against time to gather enough fuel and supplies for the next leg of your journey, all the while searching for a way to sever the mysterious link Laine seems to have with your body.Each destination offers a visual backdrop of wherever you happen to be visiting, whether its a long-abandoned space border crossing or a populated asteroid, but mostly youll be reading text descriptions of whats going on and clicking through conversations. As in the previous game you have five dice that are rolled at the start of each day (or cycle), and these can be plugged into various activities at each location, with higher numbers delivering a higher chance of success.The second game roves much more widely through different locations Citizen Sleeper 2. Photograph: Jump Over The AgeBut now, the dice can break. On timed, high-stakes missions, failure accumulates stress, which in turn can damage your dice. If a dies energy reaches zero, its broken, unable to be used until its repaired. If all five dice break on normal difficulty, your character gains a permanent glitch: a die that always gives an 80% chance of failure.Youre joined on these contracts by up to two crew members. Like in Mass Effect 2, you can gather crew for your ship, The Rig, and each comes with two dice that are attuned to their specialities. You can also use a push once per cycle, increasing the number on your lowest die at the cost of raising your stress. All of this makes contracts wonderfully tense and involving, as you decide how far to push your luck at the risk of outright failure. And failure stalks Citizen Sleeper 2: whereas many games promise power fantasies, here each day is a valiant struggle (at least at first). Some missions are locked off if you dont get to them in time. Its a game that encourages repeat plays, to see how things might have turned out differently.Citizen Sleeper 2 is around twice as big as the first game, with many more locations to visit. But this does mean it feels a little stretched thin compared with the previous title. Rather than getting to know one place intimately, we instead have a scattering of space stations with a handful of activities in each. The crew also feel underused: its a shame there isnt a way to upgrade their abilities or integrate them more into gameplay.Yet the characters are also the games greatest strength, and throughout they are expertly drawn, both literally (with comic book artist Guillaume Singelin once again providing some gorgeous portraits) and in terms of their compelling and heartfelt backstories. Despite its bleakness, the world of Citizen Sleeper 2 is full of compassion, and its a joy to return to the universe Gareth Damian Martin has created. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is out on 31 January

I have played many games that have great openings. Final Fantasy VII puts you in the middle of a raid. Mass Effect 2 introduces you to a world, then immediately destroys it. Sonic the Hedgehog bombards you with impossibly fast objects hurtling through a world of colourful danger.I have never played a game in my life that starts by telling you not to be a Nazi. But thats what greeted me when I played Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Before a single artefact was raided, before a whip was cracked, before you even see lead actor Troy Baker doing his best Harrison Ford impression in next generation graphics (amazing!), comes this warning:The story and contents of this game are not intended to and should not be construed in any way to condone, glorify or endorse the beliefs, ideologies, events, actions, persons or behaviour of the Nazi and fascist regimes Its difficult to see how anyone could possibly construe the fascists in this game as something worthy of imitation. Quite apart from their moral repugnancy, they are super dumb. Whether in Vatican City or in Thailand, they are terrible fighters, and so deaf you can crawl right past them. They make very bad decisions in what is, according to some well written dialogue, clearly a toxic workplace environment where their young male insecurity is weaponised by a few charismatic older leaders who dont care about them. Who would want to join that system?The games comically, brilliantly detestable uber-villain, Herr Voss. Photograph: BethesdaBut then, in the middle of playing this, the Trump cult retook the US. A load of real Nazis were immediately released from jail, because they were fashing for Donald. And the worlds richest man apparently sieg-heiled live on stage in front of a televised audience of millions, and is actively promoting far right parties in Germany and the UK. This was on day one! Across the globe, dumb young men suckled on Joe Rogans raw milk lapped it up.I was so happy escaping into the virtual world of Indiana Jones. Its crazy that a game featuring Hitler and Mussolini on their rise to power feels comforting, but here at least it is entirely permitted indeed encouraged to punch the Nazis. The more I played the game, the more it became about getting one over them, as I lured them one by one into a corner and punched the hell out of them. The joy of creeping through an encampment of fash and nicking stuff from their safes right under their noses was only matched by the euphoria I felt shoving one of them off the edge of a battleship stuck at the top of a Himalayan mountain.Actually, I had so much fun knocking Nazis out with candlesticks that the rest of the game became a bit of a drag. Maybe Ive played too much Uncharted and Tomb Raider, but I no longer find it exciting to wander around caves looking for ropes to swing off while solving puzzles. Thats the boring side of archaeology. That is why nobody wanted to be one, before Indiana Jones added Nazi-punching to the job description. The archaeological sections feel as if they take for ever (though I am sure Elon Musk completes them in minutes, having paid someone else to do it for him).I no longer find it exciting to wander around caves Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Photograph: BethesdaI also keep getting stuck halfway through opening doors, thanks to the clunky controls. I am at an age where I get bored by any kind of mundane activity in games. Turning keys in locks, searching for objects, eating food Id do away with all of it. I want locked doors to fly open and every object within to magically fly into my infinite-sized backpack and stomach. I have spent nearly 30 years as a dad searching rooms for things that are lost. I want a break from that.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionThankfully theres a LOT of action. One part where you go from sliding down a mountain in the Himalayas to running around Shanghai under bomber attack before flying your own plane out of there is the most fun section of a game I can remember. It was so immersive that the day after I completed it, I felt the same sadness I feel when I finish binge-watching a brilliant TV series.There are still people out there who think video games have nothing to do with real life. Well, I have just spent three weeks surrounded by fascists hellbent on world domination. The only thing that told me I was in a game rather than real life was that I was personally able to stop them. With my fists.

I just finished writing a feature about the Video Game History Foundation in Oakland, California, and how it is preparing to share its digital archive of games magazines. From 30 January, youll be able to visit the institutes website and explore a collection of about 1,500 publications from throughout the history of games, all scanned in high detail, all searchable for keywords. Its a magnificent resource for researchers and those who just want to find the first-ever review of Tetris or Pokmon. I cant wait to visit.While researching the article, I spoke to John OShea and Ann Wain from the National Videogame Museum in Sheffield, which is also collecting games mags and other printed ephemera. They said something that really fascinated me. The museum is looking for donations to build its archive, but its focus is not so much on the magazines themselves, but on who brings them in. Were particularly interested in fan perspectives, OShea told me. Were not intending to develop an exhaustive collection of every video game magazine ever made were interested in the full suite of an individuals video game experience in how games connect to their lives. Wain continued: Were interested in the stories of why why did they collect these particular things, what were they looking for? Its that kind of social context were after.Collections are about memories more than facts and this applies to games and the cultural matter about them. Im writing this letter to you in my little cellar office, surrounded by piles of games, game magazines and game books. There are things in here that I cherish, including a copy of Devil May Cry signed by game designer Shinji Mikami, and my fathers Sega Mega Drive; there are also some endlessly useful and fascinating things, such as Steven Kents seminal book The Ultimate History of Video Games, and an old Sony personal video monitor, for which I bought special cables allowing me to connect very old consoles. What does all this stuff mean in the end, and what does it say about me?Jet Set Willy: as important as the Smiths. Photograph: YouTubeIm not sure. All I know is, when I happen on TikTok videos of peoples games collections I watch transfixed, over and over. I look at the console formats theyve bought and the magazines they read. It helps me to picture their journey through games history, which may be very different than mine. I think thats why the National Videogame Museum wants this sort of sociocultural context in its collections: the choices other people make are fascinating.Its such a shame that museums and academic institutions have only relatively recently been given the resources to collect material about video games. Although classic games are now being carefully archived, the VGHF estimates that 87% of classic video games released in the United States are critically endangered Im sure the situation is the same elsewhere in the world. Games discs and tapes deteriorate and become unplayable; the machines they ran on break down. Games magazines were considered ephemeral and throwaway, and are only now being seen as cultural artefacts in the same way as music and movie publications. Theres a lot of history to catch up on. If we really want to remember the youth culture of the 1980s, we need to think just as much about Jet Set Willy and Crash magazine as we do about the Smiths and NME.As OShea said in our chat, cultural memory exists in the detritus of our lived lives. Last year, a good friend and I went to the Naomi Campbell exhibition at the V&A. In one area, the curators recreated the models dressing room a chaotic explosion of discarded clothes, wet wipes and makeup. It told us as much about her as anything else on display. We are what we surround ourselves with, and what were passionate about. All my books and games are, in the end, me.Perhaps this is why I felt emotional when OShea and Wain talked about how games mags are important for their social and personal context. And actually, I had a very recent experience of their intimate value. A couple of weekends ago, I help my mum clear out a few old things at her house. In a dusty corner, we found a plastic bag that had obviously been safely stored away by my dad, who died in 2003. I discovered it contained a pile of games magazines that I had worked on Edge, DC-UK and others, as well as some copies of my first stories for the Guardian.I used to post him these things because he was interested in games and cool new gadgets. I thought hed have a quick flick through and chuck them out. But there it all was: my career in a plastic bag, as collated and archived by my dad. Those magazines are in my collection now once they were about me, now theyre about him. We all have a natural ability to share and ascribe cultural meaning and emotional value. As well as bringing us joy, the things we collect are a message to others. This was important once; take care of it and youll understand why.What to playThe Reuters game and story Cosy Comfort. Photograph: ReutersWhen is a news article not a news article? Um when its a game? Reuters has just run a lovely introductory article about cosy games such as Spiritfarer and Animal Crossing, which have proven mental health benefits for stressed or anxious players.The Reutuers feature is also an interactive role-playing game, Cosy Comfort, which allows you to guide a cutesy anthropomorphic Radish around the teeny village of Rootersville as you read, customising its clothes and house en route. This is such a lovely, relevant way to present a positive story.Available on: PC, Mac and smartphone Estimated playtime: skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionWhat to readIs a Sims rerelease on the horizon? Photograph: EA/MaxisThere are rumours that Electronic Arts is preparing to rerelease The Sims and Sims 2 to celebrate the games forthcoming 25th anniversary. Kotaku reports on teases from the publisher and I hope theyve got it right: the origins of this 200m-selling life sim havent been available to download and play for many years. I wonder if my old saves will work?Alice Bell has written a beautiful article for Eurogamer about how video game spaces have become memorials to friends we have lost. This makes complete sense in the digital era when so many relationships play out online and in virtual worlds.Yet more games industry job losses this week as Ubisoft announced it is closing its Leamington studio and downsizing Ubisoft Reflections in Newcastle, Ubisoft Dsseldorf and Ubisoft Stockholm. According to GI.biz, 185 staff will lose their jobs.What to clickQuestion BlockTunic is a game to bring an old friend back to the console again. Photograph: FinjiThis weeks question comes from Martha, who asks:My friend and I live together and we are avid gamers. Not into sport or platformers but we love all the modern greats; GTA, Last of Us, Uncharted, Days Gone, Horizon ZD and FW, Spider-Man (and Stardew Valley). You get the picture! A friend of ours who hasnt gamed since the 90s wants us to help get her into gaming again. So it needs to be something we enjoy with a good learning arc. What would you recommend? We are PlayStation gamers.Of the games youve mentioned, Spider-Man, Uncharted and Horizon are all excellent introductions to modern games and they all have good easy modes. If they were playing in the 1990s, they might recognise a few of the franchises still going today, so Rise of the Tomb Raider and Resident Evil Village might be a good idea. I also love Stellar Blade and The Quarry, which have quite a 90s gaming vibe to them. Also, as you mentioned, Stardew Valley, which has a real Super Nintendo look and feel, Id recommend Tunic and Roots of Pacha, which both look as if theyve come from that wonderful era.If youve got a question for Question Block or anything else to say about the newsletter hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.

Before the internet, if you were an avid gamer then you were very likely to be an avid reader of games magazines. From the early 1980s, the likes of Crash, Mega, PC Gamer and the Official PlayStation Magazine were your connection with the industry, providing news, reviews and interviews as well as lively letters pages that fostered a sense of community. Very rarely, however, did anyone keep hold of their magazine collections. Lacking the cultural gravitas of music or movie publications, they were mostly thrown away. While working at Future Publishing as a games journalist in the 1990s, I watched many times as hundreds of old issues of SuperPlay, Edge and GamesMaster were tipped into skips for pulping. I feel queasy just thinking about it.Because now, of course, I and thousands of other video game veterans have realised these magazines are a vital historical resource as well as a source of nostalgic joy. Surviving copies of classic mags are selling at a vast premium on eBay, and while the Internet Archive does contain patchy collections of scanned magazines, it is vulnerable to legal challenges from copyright holders.Thankfully, there are institutions taking the preservation of games magazines seriously. Last week, the Video Game History Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation of games and their history, announced that from 30 January, it would be opening up its digital archive of out-of-print magazines to read and study online. So far 1,500 issues of mostly American games mags are available, as well as art books and other printed ephemera, but the organisation is busy scanning its entire collection. The digitised content will be fully tagged and searchable by word or phrase, so youll be able to easily track down the first mentions of, say, Minecraft, John Romero, or the survival horror genre.In a recent video introducing the archive, VGHF librarian Phil Salvador explained: We wanted to make something thats going to be useful and easy for anyone studying video game history, whether youre an academic writing a book or a creator making a YouTube video, or youre just a curious person.Founded by game historian Frank Cifaldi in 2017, the VGHF is part of a growing number of archives, academic institutions and museums dedicated to preserving games history. While the focus is usually on tracking down and preserving the games themselves, there is a growing understanding that magazines provide vital context. Video game magazines are often representative of peoples relationships to video games they accompany that journey, says John OShea, creative director and co-CEO of the National Videogame Museum in Sheffield, which has a growing collection of printed materials. They have a similar lineage to football and music fanzine culture, in that they provide perspectives on the players and the fans and what they were thinking at the time. They also provide insight into particular trends and narratives, what gets emphasised, what doesnt. They provide direct access to a particular historical period.Magazines then tell a sociocultural story that the games themselves cannot. Looking at these magazines now, through the lens of contemporary video game culture, its not just what is there, but what is not there, says OShea. The majority of characters featured in magazines up to the early 2010s are men. I looked at a selection of PC magazines from 2011 and there were the same number of female protagonists represented as there were panda protagonists.Games mags were often written for very specific, very dedicated demographics, and reflected the focus of the industry itself. Many adverts throughout the 90s and into the early 00s featured skimpily dressed women, even when the games were military shooters or strategy sims. Classified ads for premium rate video game tips lines were accompanied by photos of women in bikinis. Its there because that was the demographic they were aiming at teenage boys, says the museums collections officer, Ann Wain. The marketing shows who was getting the attention and why. The letters pages also tell us a lot about player culture. What topics were people discussing, what was the conversation around games. It contextualises games in a way that just playing them cant.The Video Game History Foundation in the US are digitising their archive of classic video game magazines. Photograph: VGHFBoth the VGHF and the National Videogame Museum are reliant on donations: the latter has just received an almost complete collection of PC Gamer from a collector who also kept all the cover demo discs and inserts. Its important work because often the magazine publishers themselves have patchy records on preservation. Future Publishing does have an archive at its Bath office but it is not complete, and whole collections have been lost when other companies have shut. In a post on LinkedIn last year, veteran games media publisher Stuart Dinsey recalled that when he sold Intent Media in 2013, the new owner pulped almost the entire back catalogue of its industry publications CTW and MCV.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionLooking back on video game history, its easy to imagine a smooth narrative flow, a sense of inevitability about which games or technologies would be successful and which would fail. But it wasnt usually like that: contemporary reporting reveals a mass of complications and uncertainties. Video game magazines provide a lot of resistance to that very linear idea of history, says OShea. Especially the technologically deterministic view that more powerful tech would inevitably be more interesting and successful.When you go to the VGHFs digital archive next month, look at contemporary news around the Sega Mega Drive, the original PlayStation or the Nintendo Wii there was no agreement at the time over their impending success. Games mags were on the frontline of games history. In this uncertain era for the industry, their voices, dimmed and distant though they seem, are more important than ever.

It was November 2020 when Microsoft launched its latest console duo into the rapidly evolving gaming marketplace. Over four years later, the Xbox Series X together with its more budget-friendly counterpart, the Series S has amassed an impressive and varied library of games, ranging from sprawling open-world blockbusters to intimate indie puzzlers. If youre just getting started with the console, here are 15 games that represent the variety on offer, each one interesting, enjoyable and rewarding in its own right.Alan Wake 2Alternate dimension Alan Wake 2. Photograph: Remedy EntertainmentThirteen years after the original game, cursed horror author Alan Wake returns, now trapped in an alternate dimension and determined to write his way out, while FBI agents close in on the mysterious town of Bright Falls.Why we love it: a thoroughly entertaining blend of detective procedural and surrealist survival horror. Read the full review.Baldurs Gate 3Bursting with imagination Baldurs Gate 3. Photograph: LarianOne of the greatest role-playing fantasy games of the modern era, providing players with almost as much narrative and imaginative freedom as a table-top D&D adventure as they face off against the mighty mind-flayers.Why we love it: Its a towering landmark of an RPG. Bustling with life, brimming with scope, and bursting with imagination. Read the full review.Psychonauts 2Psychic playground Psychonauts 2. Photograph: Double FineThe long-awaited sequel to Double Fines cult 3D platformer sees the return of psychic acrobat secret agent Raz embarking on a mission to root out a dangerous new adversary.Why we love it: Ive rarely played anything that is so unashamedly itself. Each hour is different, each character distinct and memorable, each new psychic playground full of surprises. Read the full review.Death StrandingA quest to save humanity Death Stranding. Photograph: Kojima ProductionsHideo Kojimas elegiac science-fiction adventure is like nothing else youll ever play, a post-apocalyptic quest to save humanity, following a parcel courier with an extremely valuable and unlikely parcel.Why we love it: This uncompromising, unashamedly political work of artistic intent is 2019s most interesting blockbuster game by a distance. Read the full review.Elden RingSpectacular landscapes Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. Photograph: FromSoftwareA grandiose fantasy opera from the makers of Dark Souls, filled with spectacular landscapes, bizarre characters and seemingly insurmountable bosses. Complete with the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC its a challenging and engrossing open world like no other.Why we love it: This is a massive world, astonishingly rendered (the sun and moon wheel in the sky, casting each scene anew) and seemingly limitless in its creative diversity. It is an unrivalled feat of design and inventiveness. Read the full review.Forza Horizon 4Perfectly recreated cars Forza Horizon 4. Photograph: MicrosoftA beautiful open-world driving game providing hundreds of square miles of the British countryside to explore while racing other drivers, completing challenges and collecting stunningly modelled supercars.Why we love it: As driving games go, its the best Ive ever played, not only because of its irresistible scenery, exhilarating driving and perfectly recreated cars, but because spending time with it puts me in a lasting good mood. Read the full review.HadesHell of a fight Hades. Photograph: Supergiant gamesFight your way out of hell while enjoying the horny shenanigans of ancient Greek gods. Has there ever been a more attractive premise for a Rogue-like action role-playing romp?Why we love it: Interesting things happen all the time, and no matter how long I spend with Hades I feel like I am only just getting acquainted with it. Read the full review.Hi-Fi RushUnashamedly music-centred Hi-Fi RushBetter known for its horror adventure series The Evil Within, Tokyo studio Tango Gameworks surprised us all with this stomping rhythm action brawler where enemies, action and hallucinogenic environments are all in sync with the infectious beat.Why we love it: As brazenly colourful as a Jet Set Radio fever dream, its refreshing to play a game that is so unashamedly music-centred. Read the full review.MinecraftUltimate crafting adventure Day Gliding in Minecraft: Console Editions Holiday Update Minecraft (2016). Photograph: MojangThe ultimate crafting adventure, providing a vast procedurally generated world to explore and an almost limitless range of activities from building castles, to fighting zombies, to competing in mini games. Fifteen years old and showing no sign of running out of ideas.Why we love it: By constructing the world from 1x1 blocks that can be arranged in every imaginable combination, Minecraft is perhaps the closest we have to a true god game. Read the full review.PentimentInspired by illuminated manuscripts Pentiment. Photograph: Xbox Game StudiosIn an Alpine Bavarian village during the 16th century a young artist sets out to solve a series of gruesome murders. With luscious visuals inspired by illuminated manuscripts of the era, this is an extraordinary detective adventure.Why we love it: It provides a wonderfully evocative window into the past [] a gift to any player who longs for a historical setting thats more than a surface texture. Read the full review.Persona 5 RoyalMessy adolescent love Persona 5 Royal. Photograph: Atlus/ SegaA group of Tokyo high-school students develop incredible powers and set out to battle evil and corruption while also falling in and out of messy adolescent love. Part sprawling metaphysical role-playing game, part super cute dating sim.Why we love it: With its stylish cuts and transitions, loose and unorthodox structure and real-world setting Persona 5 is unlike any other video game. Its depth and texture far outstrips even earlier games in the series. Read the full review.Resident Evil 4 RemakeBloody thrills Resident Evil 4 Remake. Photograph: CapcomArguably the greatest ever survival horror game, brought bang up to date while retaining its mix of bloody thrills, cunning puzzles and truly horrible monsters.Why we love it: It is resplendent, delicious and decadent, like an incredibly rich banquet served amid the detritus of some horrible battle. Read the full review.Sea of ThievesA rollicking adventure Sea of Thieves. Photograph: RareEffectively a pirate fantasy simulator, player crews take to the high seas together, discovering buried treasure and battling with other buccaneers. A rollicking co-op adventure filled with memorable moments of shared excitement and hilarity.Why we love it: Youll laugh, youll sail, youll drink grog until youre sick. What a luscious, singular sandbox experience. Read the full updated review.The Witcher 3: Wild HuntChaotic world The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Photograph: CD Projekt REDGruff monster hunter Geralt takes on his defining quest as he searches for his adopted daughter Ciri through a chaotic world of giant beasts and warring factions. Memorable characters and a rich seam of romantic tension bring depth to the destruction.Why we love it: Geralt has a Swiss army knife of interactive tools, and his set of abilities offer a uniquely varied and diverse journey. Read the full review.Yakuza: Like a DragonInteractive comedy soap opera Yakuza: Like a Dragon. Photograph: SegaThis hilarious, shambolic and gripping refresh for the Yakuza series features low-level gangster Ichiban Kasuga attempting to get his life back in order on the mean streets of Yokohama. Come for the fights, stay for the karaoke.Why we love it: Like a Dragon preserves the old-fashioned, somewhat unreconstructed vibe of the previous Yakuza games, while adding a new twist that diverts it into a different genre [] a very Japanese, gangster-themed, interactive comedy soap opera. Read the full review.

I dont remember much from the first weeks of parenthood a colicky baby and extreme sleep deprivation will do that to you but I do vividly remember one night with my baby son when absolutely nothing I did seemed to help him. I walked him around: he screamed. I tried to feed him: he screamed. I put him down: more screaming. So it went for a couple of hours. I remember thinking: this is like a text adventure video game where none of the answers are right.Game designer and college teacher Nicholas OBrien had similar thoughts. His first child was born during the Covid-19 pandemic in New York City, and he and his partner were trapped at home, on the endless merry-go-round of menial baby-care tasks. It was getting to him, like it gets to all new parents. I didnt have a lot of social or emotional outlets besides my partner, he tells me. I felt like I needed to create something about how I was feeling, work my way through it by making something.The result is Bundle of Joy, a quasi-ridiculous yet heartfelt game about early fatherhood. It breaks baby care down into frenetic microgames: aim your spoon to feed baby! Press a button with decent timing to burp baby! Try to get a pair of tiny socks on to babys feet! Fit the babys head through the impossibly small opening in this tiny jumper! Some of these made me laugh with recognition; my kids are in school now, so I had forgotten about the little bulb that you use to suck snot out of a tiny nose, and how much they hate it when you try. Ive never had to fit a nebuliser over one of my childrens faces, but I have now successfully managed it with a virtual child.These frantic vignettes are interspersed with moments of reflection. If you fail at the games, you get stressed out, and the game makes you take a break and perform a few deep breaths. When the baby is sleeping, you can talk to your partner, reflecting on your feelings (and theirs). But mostly, youre caught up in the endless now, a sequence of repetitive actions. It does capture something of the busy monotony of caring for a baby: youre never at rest for a second, but the tasks are all so unstimulating and repetitive that it saps your very sense of personhood.OBrien initially made a prototype that was more narrative-driven, and heavier in tone, but he landed on this minigame-driven format because the act of play felt more closely aligned to his actual experiences. The thing that was so important to capture was that chaotic energy, that moment to moment feeling that you have when youre taking care of an infant, he says. So I thought, Whats a gameplay type thats very similar to that? The WarioWare/Bishi Bashi format immediately jumped to mind.The difficulty of each day varies based on how the baby has slept (and consequently how you have slept); day after day, when you revisit each game, theres a new wrinkle. The baby kicks their feet more enthusiastically when youre trying to get the socks on. A hand will appear to swipe the spoon away from their mouth. It takes an hour or two to play through, depending on how deeply you engage in the written dialogue during moments of calm.The thoughts and feelings that show up in these reflective moments are based not just on OBriens experiences, but those of other dads who shared their stories with him. They touch on many of the complex feelings that early parenthood excavates from your marrow: not just the exhaustion, joy and tedium of the moment, not just the self-doubt, but how you feel about your own parents and the way that you form relationships. On the advice of his partner, hes kept it to the experiences of one parent, rather than guessing at the experiences of the other; you can choose your co-parents gender at the beginning of the game, and everyones skin tone, but you are always playing from the perspective of Dad.Making Bundle of Joy has been an act of catharsis for its developer, and he hopes it might be cathartic for players, too. You feel stuck on a loop. I think a lot of parents have that feeling. Even when youre not in lockdown, you lose track of days, he says. Especially for dads, I dont think that theres a lot of material out there thats positive and reinforcing and encouraging. I hope its positive encouragement for people going through that experience. Youre doing it, you CAN do it. You dont have to beat yourself up along the way. The baby will do that!skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotion