Kurt Of Cambridge

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1987's CONTRA: How Does It Hold Up?

As of February the twentieth, it will have been thirty-five years since the release of Konami’s popular run-and-gun title Contra to arcades. The action genre in gaming did not emerge with Contra , but it was helped along by that property as the medium inched ever closer to the new millennium. Though games about muscle-bound soldiers and plentiful gunfire had existed before, the Contra series leaned into the absurdity of the setup while refining and building upon the basics of the side-scrolling action template. So, in honor of this anniversary and the property's significance to gaming, let’s take a look back and see how that beloved title fares now… The Experience One’s experience of the original game’s aesthetic leanings absolutely depends on the version chosen. There’s the initial arcade release from 1987, which sports the more detailed backgrounds and character sprites, and the later edition for the Nintendo Entertainment System (or Famicom, for Japanese players) that simpli...

First Person Action Games in the 2000s: The Good Ones

For a hot second there, first-person action was a dominant, arguably overabundant presence in the realm of gaming. High profile series like Call of Duty and Battlefield set the template going into the 21st century, while lesser known works such as The Operative: No One Lives Forever and Prey explored a variety of angles by which to keep the genre interesting. Not all these works turned out to be winners, but for every few run-of-the-mill projects there was an outlier released between 2000 and 2009 that showed how much further the genre could be taken. So it is that we find ourselves here today, with what I feel are the best and brightest first-person action titles (a.k.a. “First-person shooters” or FPSes) of the 2000s… The Runners-Up Star Wars: Republic Commando - A very solid bit of grittier-than-normal Star Wars material that actually does well with the infusion of tactical shooter squad mechanics. If it’d been a tad longer and more involved, and perhaps a bit more forgivi...

From the Archives: Call of Duty Review

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...

Open World Games: What Are The Good Ones?

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...

2022 in Gaming: What Looks Good?

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...

PSYCHONAUTS 2 Review

"I am the crushed one. It crushes my heart to see you not doing your best." Release Date: August 25, 2021 Platforms: PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X Note: writer contributed to 2015/2016 Fig campaign funding the game's development In an age where sequels and reboots are in abundance, particularly where video games are concerned, sixteen years is a hell of a gap. Yes, it can help cultivate a nostalgic longing for the return of something beloved from a bygone era... but it can't be helped that in that time, everything from the basics of design priorities through to the greater-scope concerns of the world around us has shifted more than once in inescapable, inevitable fashion. So it's an interesting position for Double Fine's latest work Psychonauts 2 to find itself. It needs to not only stand on its own merits but also ride the line between honoring its cult classic predecessor and growing beyond its roots, while also reckoning with the reality t...

Critical Round-Up Volume I

I’ve sat on some opinions about a handful of games, most of which released in the hell year that was 2020, for a while now. This is owed largely to having being previously occupied by other concerns – professional and personal – as well as not feeling inclined to dedicate whole articles to them (at the very least, not while the pay for such work is... limited, let’s say). However, that ends now. I’ve decided to compile these together as a kind of loose round-up of sorts, a highlight reel of the highs and lows of a year in gaming where so much went wrong... but sometimes a few things turned out alright. Before we go any further: if you enjoy this piece and want to support the creation of more work like it, please consider checking out (and potentially signal-boosting) the Kurt of Cambridge Ko-Fi and Paypal pages. With that out of the way, LET'S BEGIN. Carrion So this is easily the best thing Devolver Digital has published since Hotline Miami . The remarkable simplicity of the gam...