Kurt Of Cambridge

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...

  I will make no secret of the fact that I do not especially care for the open-world genre. They’re not all bad, and as we’ll get to some can even manage the feat of being palatable to this ol’ grumpus of a person. But in general, yes, I’m pessimistic about the genre, specifically its tendency towards content-for-content's-sake often resulting in bloated, aimless game worlds. That having been said, sometimes a studio comes along to use the open-world mold in order to make something actually quite compelling and distinctive, works that transcend their genre trappings to become something greater. So what are the good ones, according to me? Well…   7. Deadly Premonition I’m not about to act as though Swery - real name Hidetaka Suehiro - is as creatively beyond reproach as he seemed at the time of this strange 2010 cult classic’s release. His work reflects a lot of imperfect or questionably unchallenged views about the world and, in particular, certain marginalized c...

  So that happened. 2021 managed the feat of being potentially more demoralizing and negatively revelatory than the year before, both in personal terms and when looking at the state of the globe. Naturally, the game industry being what it is (in part, an intensified and distilled expression of the state of art, technology, wider cultural and political concerns, and the values of humanity for good or ill), that meant that what went wrong in 2021 - pandemic-related or otherwise - was all the more evident in and around the games. Still, I'm a believer in the idea that for the wretched things in gaming there are still things (and people) worth fighting for, now and yet to come. And, thus, I feel obliged on some level to acknowledge that there are indeed projects coming down the pipeline that show the most promise, that seem best prepared to revitalized and refresh other folks' love of the medium. So, without further ado, here they are... The Runners Up SIFU - The studio's last...