Game scholarship (yes, that’s a thing) hasn’t decided whether this “ poetic ghost story” is a bona-fide video game or an interactive film. In Minecraft, you create the world you want to live in.Īvailable on Windows, Mac, Xbox 360, GNU/Linux, $26.95
You might build a digital replica of your house, down to the plumbing and light switches, and why not relocate the Arc de Triomph to your backyard while you’re at it? Slash your way through zombies and other creepy creatures if you so choose, but violence is mostly avoidable. But even before the game made it out of its beta version, gamers began working together across multiplayer servers to construct ambitious and elaborate new lands and scenarios. So let’s wrap this review up with just two: play it.Įver wanted to build your own personal USS Starship Enterprise? A giant terrarium in the shape like R2D2? Landscape your own Westeros from Game of Thrones? The massively popular Minecraft was initially conceived as a straightforward game where players used the game’s Lego-like building blocks to build shelters from menacing creatures and so on. Take our word for it, or the fact that leading the Gawker gaming site Kotaku named Journey Game of the Year in 2012, it earned a profile from The New Yorker, and has even been likened to a “ nondenominational religious experience.” The game itself is utterly devoid of dialogue: its characters never utter a single word. It’s mind-bending gameplay that works your puzzle-solving skills and memories of eighth-grade physics, so much so that the sequel, Portal 2, is popular with K-12 physics teachers as a teaching tool.Īvailable on Windows, Mac, Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation 3, $9.99įrankly, this stunningly beautiful game feels impossible to describe. It so happens that you possess a blaster gun that can open portals in walls, and soon enough you’re popping out of floors and zooming through ceilings, leaping and hurling yourself around the lab, timing jumps for maximum velocity. You’re not exactly sure why you’re there, but a droll artificial intelligence being named GLaDOS informs you there’s cake at the end of all the lab trials if you make it through. You’re an unwitting subject who’s just been mysteriously dropped into the test chambers of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. If the last time you touched a game controller involved a spastic blue hedgehog, Portal is a great gateway into modern gaming. Use the comments to yell at us about everything we missed. Here’s our buyers guide to perhaps lesser known but thoroughly excellent titles we think you might love and are almost entirely devoid of physical combat, whether fantastical or realistic. We figured you’ve already heard of the big sports titles like Madden and the FIFA series, music games like Guitar Hero, and movement games like Dance Dance Revolution or Wii Sports? our list focuses on immersive narratives, physics-based games (think Angry Birds but way better), and “sandbox” games that let you build your own worlds. Games can be emotionally moving, intellectually challenging, deeply political, and straight-up good quirky fun. But like any art form-and yes, video games are art-there’s as broad a range of expression in games as the space between Kill Bill and Amelie and well beyond. Despite three decades of research, we’re still far from a definitive answer on whether violent video games are linked to IRL violence, as Erik Kain has noted here before. Still from the acclaimed game Journey ThatgamecompanyĪ bunch of us here at MoJo play games, love games, and cringe at the publicity that a few shoot em’ up games like Call of Duty receive every time another terrible mass shooting hits the news.
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