In the ashes of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, amid the bloat and pretense of the games industry, always must there be a presentation... always must there be game trailers... and always must there be those who commentate. So it is we find ourselves in the aftermath of this year's collected summer showcases, a cavalcade of announcements and information to parse in its wake. For my part, I set forth to once again note the games (and, occasionally, people or moments) that stood out - for good or ill. Today, we tackle that which was displayed at Sony's State of Play, the OTK Games Expo, and the Summer Game Fest... Sony State of Play The High Point: Astro Bot Is it nakedly playing off of lingering nostalgia for various Sony properties, current and forgotten? Yes. Is it unmistakably taking cues from other more successful platformer series? Absolutely. Nevertheless, the team at Sony seem to have nailed the charm when it comes to their robot mascot, which is half the battle for cr...
I'm still cooking up the next new piece, so this week I thought I'd dig through some of my past work and find something that still actually holds up well. The following is a retro review of 2003's Call of Duty , originally written for and published on a previous blog that I created and ran for a number of years. While there may be individual points and observations with which I now disagree or regard in different terms, and while certain details about the wider franchise may have changed in the time since publication, I feel that this is a solid piece from the end of that blog's run and that there's much to be learned from revisiting one's earlier productions. So, for your reading pleasure (I hope), here goes... When I think about how the first-person shooter has evolved, my first instinct is to turn to Call of Duty . The little-remembered 2003 war epic turned a niche genre – the military shooter – into a full-blown phenomenon, earning millions for publishe...