GamerNode: Phil Williams's Columns

Games On Demand - The Future?

If there's one thing I really enjoy about life, it's living in the future. Think about it a moment, and you'll realise that the future really is now. We've got an omnipresent source of all knowledge (the internet), can contact people from just about wherever we are thanks to portable telephones, and increasingly, we can even use those same phones to hook up to that crazy knowledge source from wherever the heck we like! Seriously, the future rocks compared to what the dumb us'es thought it was going to be like. I remember reading my dad's Dan Dare comic when I was young: In one episode, this kid went into the future in order to steal... an adding machine! Yep, it was a crappy calculator that was bolted to the floor for a whole classroom to use. Wow, am I glad for the microprocessor.

Of cour...

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VG State of Play UK

The US and the UK share a lot of commonalities. You Americans use our language, for example. We suckle at the teat of your film and TV industry. Sweet music passes freely between us. We both come together for bloody and violent deathmatches online, and so on and so forth. There are some differences, too, though. We have free universal health care (Don't worry, I'm not going to get political, just saying it like it is...), red buses and post boxes, and have a reputation -- wrongly upheld, I reckon -- for bad teeth. You insist on telling everyone to have a nice day, whereas we're more than happy to revel in our misery, quietly fuming at the injustices of it all. You make a great cup of coffee, but you couldn't do a decent mug of builder's tea if your Xbox Live depended on it. I'm also intere...

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You've got red on you...

Zombie Apocalypse is released this week on Xbox Live and Playstation Network. I'm sure it'll be a riot. It looks like the spiritual successor to Loaded, with zombies.

So, that got me thinking. How many zombie games does that make? Left for Dead, Burn Zombie Burn, Plants vs Zombies, Resident Evil 5, Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil Dress-Up My Zombie (I made that last one up), Dead Rising, Alone in the Dark, Zombies & Me - the list goes on. How many more are in development, then? Left 4 Dead 2, Fort Zombie, Dead Nation, Dead Rising 2, Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles, Dead Island - all these are from a brief Google search for zombie games. It's safe to say the zombie concept is a popular one. In fact, I dug up a Wikipedia entry on zombie games. Based o...

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Return to Your Roots

The Legend of Zelda. The Final Fantasy series. Chrono Trigger. The Phantasy Star series. The Shining series. Unless you seriously hated console RPGs, it's likely you've had at least a passing encounter with some of these giants of the genre. As the console generations advanced, so too did the scope and presentation of the humble RPG. Sometimes it wasn't so successful - anyone remember Virtual Hydlide on the Sega Saturn? I do, because it's one of my nostalgic favourites. I'm pretty odd in this respect; the game was universally panned. How about Final Fantasy VII, arguably the most successful RPG, like, ever? Moving towards the modern era, genre lines blurred, and so were born the action/RPG hybrids. These were titles like Hybrid Heaven on the N64, Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance on the PS2/Xbo...

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Advertising: It's in the Game...

In-game advertising has been on the cards for a while now. It's already in place in some titles -- remember the Obama billboards in Burnout Paradise? Most recently Sony had to perform a swift about-face when adverts massively (no pun intended!) increased loading times in Wipeout HD. Before adverts become another established feature on the videogame landscape, I thought it'd be interesting to find out what the general consensus was regarding real-world, virtual-world intersections.

In some titles it intuitively seems that advertising, sensitively used, could actually enhance the videogame experience. Playing through a modern day squad-based shooter, for instance, it seems to me that fake advertising could be more jarring than actual, recognisable product adverts. Likewise, there's no better...

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Kids' Stuff

So the news has broken that over half the population of the US are gamers. That's great, right? So why does there still seem to be a residual embarrassment or reluctance to talk about this enormous pastime? For some reason, games have always been perceived as children's toys. Now, whilst that that perception is certainly changing, let's analyze why this has historically been the case.

The language of gaming has superimposed itself on the language of play, which itself has childish connotations. Think about play. Children are encouraged to play; play helps develop imagination and is essential to development. Think playdates, playpens, playgrounds. Adults, not so much. Once you've gotten past your childhood, that's it, so society seems to say. Adults playing? That's juvenile, infantile, imma...

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