Earlier this month, the BBFC refused to give a rating to Rockstar’s Manhunt 2, effectively (and legally) banning it from sale in the UK. Shortly after that, the ESRB in the US awarded the game the kiss of death A-O classification, and Sony and Nintendo both reiterated their policies that they would refuse to grant […]

From a UK perspective, the voluntary age rating system used by games publishers in the US (the ESRB ratings) seems to be pretty badly broken. In the UK, virtually all commercial games are submitted to the PEGI rating system (which covers most of Europe with the exception of Germany, which has its own ultra-strict government-enforced […]

And right on cue (erm, a month after my last post) here’s a great example of Microsoft’s games people sending the wrong message. At some fundamental level Microsoft really don’t seem to ‘get’ Nintendo. Every console manufacturer likes to claim that they don’t consider the competition a threat. But even now, with the stratospheric, global, […]

Shacknews have posted a very interesting interview with Alex St John, one of the key figures behind the DirectX initiative at Microsoft in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He explains how the reasoning behind DirectX was to build a gaming platform that could be anchored to the Windows PC and thereby avoid being upset […]

I don’t like the idea of ‘retro gaming’. That is to say, I don’t like using the term ‘retro’ to describe games released several years ago. It seems to imply that old games (encapsulated as a single monolithic entity) should be treated differently to newer games. This distinction comes from a misunderstanding of why people […]

At some point we’ve all read (on a magazine letters page, forum or news site) a version of the following argument: “The move from 2D to 3D graphics was a big step. The only advance that’s possible from 3D graphics is prettier 3D graphics. Ergo, graphics technology has plateaued and I was right to buy […]

I have a vague theory about what Microsoft are planning to do in the gaming ‘space’ in the next few years. I’ve not seen a similar conjecture put forward anywhere, so I’m not ruling out the possibility that this is either so obvious that it’s not worth mentioning, or I’m missing something important in my […]

I’ve never bought a Sony console, and I’m not about to start any time soon*. Please bear this in mind before reading the following. I have no desire to defend Sony, but there are a couple of points that have been cropping up in everyone’s analysis of their E3 showing this year that I feel […]

A few posts back I had a mini-rant about people jumping to conclusions with regards to the Playstation 3 demonstration videos Sony showed last year at E3, in particular the seemingly too-good-to-be-true sequences shown for Killzone and Motorstorm. I wanted to point out how ridiculous it was that in the absence of conclusive evidence one […]

  What do you see when you look at the picture above? If you’re American, you no doubt recognise this as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), a console that you probably owned during its commercial lifespan. (There’s even a moderate chance that you have re-purchased one in the intervening period.) It’s also likely that you […]

I really, really don’t want to make a habit of making posts just to comment on stories elsewhere, but I think this interview deserves a mention. Jeff Strain of Guild Wars developers Arena.Net draws attention to the barriers that Xbox Live’s business model puts in the way of MMO games for Microsoft’s consoles. “They know […]

This is a topic that you might expect to see investigated by Video Game Media Watch, although they’ve gone off the boil a bit recently so I thought I’d have a stab at it. On May 16th, 2005, Sony Computer Entertainment demonstrated their forthcoming Playstation 3 console at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). Part of […]

As I write this, Microsoft are a few weeks away from launching their new, ‘next-generation’ home console, the Xbox 360. As with any new console, it’ll be a good few months beyond the feeding frenzy of launch day before it will be possible to get a clear picture of whether the machine is worth the […]