We’re back again to take a look at the highlights of a gaming showcase. This time, we turn our attention to Gamescom, the gaming trade show in Germany whose “ Opening Night Live ” presentation happens to be hosted by Geoff Keighley . Can’t so much as walk five paces without bumping into a show that that man is hosting. Anyway, same principle as before - just the good-looking and interesting projects, keeping the pessimism and negativity to a minimum. Bubsy 4D Developed by: Fabraz Someone made the call to stick this in the pre-show before the main presentation, and that’s baffling to me because it’s one of the most interesting nostalgia revivals I’ve seen in a while. Immediate takeaway: Fabraz seems to be leaning hard on self-aware and self-deprecating comedy here. An understandable creative choice, given both Bubsy’s wisecracking persona and the series’ charms having been overshadowed for three decades by this game’s infamous predecessor Bubsy 3D. The jokes in the trailer are amusi...
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...