My bag of infinite creativity

10:54am 11 Feb 2011 0 comments

Stick to the plan. Follow your orders. Complete your objectives and return the lady to her castle. Shoot the guys you're told to shoot, stop asking questions and enjoy your delicious high scores.

For an interactive medium, gaming is kind of obsessed with boundaries. Rigid frameworks which tell you that you can go down this corridor and talk to that person before stabbing these bunny rabbits.

But Media Molecule said no. What if, they said. What if you could make a game that let you make games. What if you created a series of tools which could be used to construct physical objects inside the software. What if you did this using a humanoid sack wearing a sombrero.

 And that resulted in Little Big Planet, a game which lets you make games inside the game. The sequel (Little Big Planet 2) is out now, as well as inside my PS3.

Killing time over the holiday

08:55am 18 Jan 2011 1 comment

BY ANDY ASTRUC

Despite all the warnings, the holidays are over, and now most of us are back at home and back at work. My Christmas and New Years were fairly low key, made to feel even more low key by the international holiday that preceded them.

Family was roughly cast aside and left dying in a gutter in favour of lying on the couch eating cheap ice cream. And gaming, of course.

In the spirit of whatever season you may or may not celebrate, my mother gifted me a copy of DJ Hero 2. If you haven't already read my thoughts on DJ Hero, it's like being hugged by a vibrating, neon stripper while she puts feather dusters in your ears. I'll leave it up to you to decide if that sounds awesome (it does).

The sequel mashes in more tracks, the ability to freestyle scratch and fade, and just generally amps things up to a respectably mental level. There is too much of that blasted hip hop nonsense the kids are listening to these days (if these days are 10 years ago), but there's also a giant pile of variety in the mix. And any game which includes a little mind-blowing, ear-jabbing Prodigy and the theme song from Beverly Hills Cop can totally sleep on my couch and steal my girlfriend.

How I win at everything

02:05am 17 Dec 2010 2 comments

BY ANDY ASTRUC

This post comes to you direct from Japan, the technologically savvy jewel of what one might consider the East, depending on one's original location. Being in Japan is a bit like being inside a video game. There are weird rules to follow, everything is made of bright lights and trippy music, pretty girls in cow costumes accost you in the street, you have to eat weird things to regain health, and there are collectibles. Seriously. My Pepsi came with a Gundam teddy bear.

But Japan is, as you might expect, populated mainly by the Japanese. As a very white, somewhat lanky, big-nosed, big eared person of Anglo-Saxon descent, I am a bit of a sore thumb around these parts. Of course I'm proud of who I am and what I look like, flying in the face of evidence. So much so that I am obsessed with getting myself into games.

There are two types of people in the world (he said, generally). There are those that, when given the chance to create their own person from scratch, go absolutely bat-cake crazy and pull out something a million miles from the source. Rugby-player slash labourers playing delicate elven mages, checkout girls playing space marines with the muscle slider set to eleven, teenage boys pretending to be anthropomorphic blue cats. It's all about escapism.

Not for me, though. I'm the other kind of person. The kind that has the inflated ego necessary to perfectly sculpt a clone of themselves whenever they get the chance. A monument to their own inflated sense of self. My avatar and his tiny eyeballs are the spitting (cartoon) image of me, although he has cooler clothes. Commander Shepherd managed to save the galaxy twice over while wearing my face - in a non-Lecter way. It really wasn't just so I could feel like I was personally the one who saved the day and got the sexy alien girl.

I like to feel involved. When I change the name of every-possible-hero in Final Fantasy to my name, I'm putting myself into the world, making it more real by connecting to real to the fantastically fictional.

Console Fight: PS3 versus Xbox 360

12:02pm 26 Nov 2010 63 comments

ANDY ASTRUC

Sorry, PlayStation. I like you, but not in that way. It could have been beautiful. I knew your mother and grandmother, who were both real lookers in their day. We did things.

Explaining why I prefer my Xbox 360 over my PS3 requires only the briefest mention of video games. Millions of years ago, dinosaurs would bicker over which console had the best games on their boxes. Here in the future everything is everywhere, with a few notable exceptions, so let's shelve that argument forever.

Instead, let's look at a typical day in the life of me, a gamer, running parallel like that Gwyneth Paltrow film where she realised being blonde makes you hot.

I go to my gaming store of choice and pick up a new game. Obviously it's a good game, I have excellent taste. At the point of purchase reality itself cracks in half, causing two versions of me to buy separate versions of the game - one Xbox and one PlayStation. I skip home, filled with joy. Both consoles are powered up and ready to rock.

Revisiting the Mirror's Edge

11:34am 16 Nov 2010 0 comments

BY ANDY ASTRUC

I have 137 games. I know this because I happened to count them as I was slowly moving them from one side of our apartment to the other in a frenzied bout of interior design Tetris. Our house is now a shining example of how video games make you better at life.

But yes, 137. At a rough estimate, I have finished half of them. Maybe. The rest are in various states of limbo due to my purchase of another game, the fact that it was a review copy of which analysis is complete, or because I got to the point where it drove a needle of frustration deep into my skull and I blacked out.

Mirror's Edge was one of the latter.

Set in a potential near future where almost all crime and dirt has been eradicated at the expense of civil liberties, Mirror's Edge follows a runner called Faith. Runners are vigilante couriers who help ferry information back and forth between people who aren't big fans of Big Brother. Your job is to carry packages of Pure Freedom across the rooftops of the city using your mad parkour skills and sensible footwear. Early on in the game your sister is set up for murder and some sort of conspiracy carpark meeting wrestler who owns a corporation shady deals corrupt police etc.