Illusion Software is one of the genuine trailblazers in video games. The studio has been around for 22 years, having been founded in 2001, but it’s all over now. The company has announced its imminent closure, and in its shutdown notice, also said that it would also be taking all…
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Valve’s inconsistencies around what is and isn’t too offensive for its platform are at the point where it is so blatant that there are ulterior motives at play that it is incredibly offensive. Here’s a story of two different sets of games to illustrate. The first involves Hitler. Steam is…
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I feel for the people who are saying Final Fantasy XVI isn’t “their Final Fantasy.” I’m an arena FPS fan. I know what it’s like to watch something you love fall out of favour and either disappear entirely (Unreal, Tribes) or watch it try to contort itself into something else…
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As anyone in PR or communications will tell you, the best time to make a catastrophic announcement is when everyone is busy looking elsewhere. You don’t want to hide it, but you want to push it through the news cycle at a time when you’ll only generate half as many…
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As a child, Murao Junpei is captivated when a male ballet soloist takes to the stage at his sister’s ballet recital. A passion awakened in him, Junpei asks his parents if he can start doing ballet. His father – a stunt coordinator for films – suggests he tries something “manlier”…
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Sports anime and manga are not uncommon in Japan. Football, basketball, volleyball, baseball, figure skating and even badminton have popular stories that aim to make the sport, as well as the characters and their narrative arcs, interesting to both fans of the sport and complete newcomers. Related reading: If you…
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Artists are forever predicting the future. Sometimes the predictions are merely a testing idea that doesn’t play out. Sometimes they nail it. We’re about to talk about an example of artists totally nailing it. Overnight (for us here in Australia) Apple revealed the Vision Pro; a new high-end set of…
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Around this time next year, there will be a special event near Fuefuki in the heart of Yamanashi Prefecture (the one you travel through to get to Nagano from Tokyo). For decades there has been an annual recreation of the Battle of Kawanakajima, one of the most compelling and dramatic…
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Once on the DDNet podcast, we got to talking about “canon” games – ones that many people would consider to have historical or aesthetic significance. These are games that are worth going back to, even after technological increments have iterated and refined their design. For the JRPG genre, we immediately…
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“Oh! Rikku’s wearing a bikini! It’s bright yellow and it’s a THONG!” Looking at Final Fantasy X-2 now, with its PlayStation 2-era fuzzies and jaggies, it’s hard to believe that it was once right up there with the most controversially fanservicey things out there. I remember the discussions that raged…
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