A Look Back at Pacific Rim

Time for a thought exercise.

I want you to imagine a child. A kind of small, impressionable young boy. He's playing in the bathtub with toy boats and rubber ducks and basically having a real fun time. And then he's like, oh man, what if the boat was a boat and the duck was a Godzilla. And he smashes the duck into the boat, making fake Godzilla roars with his mouth and just reliving the same moments he just saw on TV in black and white, but, like, it's him doing it. And he's pretty happy about it.

Now I want you to imagine that the kid has grown up and their name is Guillermo Del Toro and they're given millions of dollars to do the duck and boat thing but instead of a rubber duck and a toy boat in a bathtub, it's a real boat and a giant CGI duck in the Industrial Light and Magic office. And instead of making fake Godzilla roars with his mouth, it's Tom Morello making weird cool noises on his 'lectric geetar on the soundtrack. You've pretty much just imagined how Pacific Rim was made. Probably.

Review: "The Lego Movie"

The Lego Movie is high art. I stand by that statement with 100% conviction, too. Despite being a laugh-a-second, impeccably-timed, must-see family comedy, it is smart. And by that I mean book-smarts smart; it brushes on so many themes, most of them having to do with Lego itself as an institution, that it kind of defies rational explanation. It's majestic in its audacity and it is audacious in its majesty, and directors Chris Lord and Phil Miller have bought an influence to the table that is completely bereft of irony and cynicism. Which isn't so impressive considering their prior masterworks, until you realize it's a goddamn Lego movie.

In a world entirely made of Lego, we follow our protagonist Emmett, a minifigure so devoid of imagination, personality and free will, that he is a literal blank slate. He lives by the rules. He follows the instructions. The benevolent leader President Business (secretly the villainous and super-evil Lord Business) has basically brainwashed the entire world to be unquestioning and passive; none moreso than Emmett, who is basically destined to be completely forgotten. His only defining feature is that he is utterly generic and indistinct... until he stumbles upon the Piece of Resistance, and fulfils an eight-and-a-half-year-old prophecy, becoming The Special - a Master Builder so powerful he can stop the ancient weapon known as The Kragle, and save all the universe. Chased by Business' robotic minions, the schizophrenic Good Cop/Bad Cop, and his own looming sense of inadequacy, it's a race against the clock to save the world before Lord Business destroys it.

Andy Plays Games presents... Ten Videogames From 2013 Listed In Order Of Subjective Goodness

It's time for Game of the Year! There are games I played this year! I quite liked them! I liked them so much I arranged them in a kind of list, and wrote a paragraph about why I liked them so much! But first things first! I need to qualify some stuff! Okay, so, this is only best of list of the games I actually played. I don't own any of them fancy PlayStation consoles, so none of them are on the list. There's a Wii U in my house, but it ain't mine - Super Mario 3D World would probably have made this list otherwise! I also only list games I've played substantially. I was going to put Risk of Rain on this list because it's fantastic and the soundtrack is phenomenal, but I've barely unlocked two classes and longevity is important when evaluating Roguelikes. I love the cut of Saints Row IV's gib, but I've not played much more than a few tutorials. I also don't have a next-gen system, but I'll be honest, none of their games are any good eh? Eh? New consoles, amirite? Crap games, eh? Haha, what fresh material. Okay then, onto the list!

Review: "Hotline Miami"

Welcome to Another Vice City

Review for Hotline Miami (PC)

1-player action/puzzle, Developed by Dennaton Games

There's something to be said for the kind of game that can truly get its hooks into you. From the very title screen of Hotline Miami, its rubbing your skin preparing to pierce - the psychedelic colours, the dreamy soundscape, the utterly captivating bobbing Russian title text, and the bizarre 16-bit-esque pixel aesthetic. Less than ten seconds in, you hit "start game," and Hotline Miami has its rusty, bloody hooks in your arms. All it has to do now is to pull firmly and gently. You now belong to the Hotline Miami.

The tutorial is adequate as a way of teaching you the basic controls, but what it does better is to establish the tone of this dark, unbelievably violent videogame. An unseen man barks instructions at you as you smash men's skulls in with a baseball bat, the surroundings - a dimly lit, murky basement - concealed of their true terror though the captivating, and often times trippy, faux-16-bit art style. The background flashes slowly through several gradients of gaudy colours, the screen wobbles back and forth like you're drunk (or high), and there's a very subtle film-grain effect that creates the illusion that you're viewing the whole thing through a busted VHS player. In other words - its the 80s, baby, viewed through the murky rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, but recreated from memory, resulting in a setting that is both wholly authentic and unsettlingly off.

Review: "Rayman Origins"

Everybody Loves Rayman!

review for Rayman: Origins (Xbox 360), 1-4 player platformer, out now

Where can I start with Rayman Origins? A blanket statement of "it's fucking incredible in almost every possible way" seems fitting; but at the same time, it does it no justice whatsoever. Origins is a game that has had every single element polished and painstakingly crafted to the very core. It's a game of such unbridled quality and richness, that evokes the nostalgic joy of childhood classics while retaining the next-gen shine that only the best HD graphics can provide with such effortlessness and finesse that it barely feels like a videogame anymore. Rayman Origins is something else entirely; an astoundingly brilliant mesh of visual and sound design with joy-inducing, oftentimes hilarious gameplay that is ever-engrossing, ever-mesmerizing, and will likely remind you at some point why you play videogames at all in the first place.

Review: "Serious Sam 3: BFE"

Go "Auuuurgggh!" Yourself

review for Serious Sam 3: BFE (PC), 1-16 player FPS, out now

I'm writing this review right now, ladies and gentlemen, out of panic. Y'see, Serious Sam 3: BFE has been out for a relative while now, and it is quite possibly the best first-person shooter of 2011. No, actually, strike that "quite possibly". It is the best FPS of the year. I know so. It's a fact. ...but, you see, despite having been released some time ago, and despite having a plethora of mostly positive reviews written about it, I'm utterly convinced that I'm the only sane person left on the internet who actually understands why Serious Sam 3 is so goddamn amazing.

There's a misconception, you see, that Serious Sam is "stupid". This idea that Serious Sam, as a series, is just about shooting guns at monsters. ...and, well, okay, that's not a lie, but Sam goes beyond that. It is a game about shooting guns at monsters, but that's not what makes these games so special. They are so good - Serious Sam 3 especially - at creating an experience driven by the player and AI alone. They're part of a very rare breed of shooters - a very rare breed of games - that will dump the player (or players) into an arena full of vindictive AI, and let the game plot its own course. Back in 2001 when the first Serious Sam game came out, this was more or less the norm - but now, ten years later, in 2011, games like this have been replaced by linear asset tours - heavily scripted movies in which the player is grudgingly invited to participate. Not even participate; watch.

Review: "Batman: Arkham City"

I Am the Batman

review for Batman: Arkham City (PC, X360, PS3), 1 player action, out now

To say Batman: Arkham City is the best videogame to come out this year is a hefty mouthful of a statement indeed, but the more I think about it, the more it rings true. Y'see, analysis of this game comes all but rationally. I've thought long and hard, and I've decided, as full of unbridled awesomeness as Batman is... it is really, really hard to do it right. I've been rewatching The Dark Knight, the Tim Burton Batman movies, Batman: The Animated Series, and as good as they all are - and they're pretty much all universally brilliant - there's always elements of Batman that come off as pretty damn, almost irredeemably, stupid.

Batman started off as a funny pages strip, of course. It wasn't until incredibly recently in the character's long, varied history that he became less of a detective and more of a fucking ninja, and the series started to focus less on a colourful array of comically fiendish bank robbers and arsonists, and more on a staggeringly dark, painfully accurate depiction of the depths of the insane, criminal mind. Modern Batman is incredibly deep and psychologically rooted. It's not quite Watchmen standards of dark, brooding, edgy and psychological, but it's damn close, and that says a lot for what started off as an incomprehensibly silly game of men-in-flashy-tights-beating-each-other-up back in the Golden Era of comic books.

Review: "The Binding of Isaac"

Lord of the Flies

review for The Binding of Isaac (PC/Mac), 1-player adventure, out now

I finished The Binding of Isaac some time ago. At least, I think I did. I was the first person to play the game - no, really, I won a competition. I was legitimately the first person to play the game on Steam. Pre-release and everything. I have sunk at least thirty hours into the game - that's twenty-five more than most recent release games. And while I think I have "beat" the game, there's... there's no way of knowing. The game is so freeform, so randomized, I have no idea whether or not I have genuinely seen everything the game has to offer. Well, I do know. I haven't. This game is huge.

Review: "Deus Ex: Human Revolution"

Some Kind of Wonderful Mechanical Man

review for Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Xbox 360, PC), 1 player FPS/RPG, out now

Choice. Choice is an illusion in games. A game may offer you different paths, different weapons, different encounters; it may even let you do these things at your own pace. But everything you're offered as a "choice," has been pre-planned, pre-programmed, pre-made. Everything in the game, has already been chosen. You may be able to choose to either save the little sisters or harvest them, but that choice isn't yours - someone has already made the choices for you. You're just choosing A or B - and that isn't choice, that's a goddamn pop quiz.

But Deus Ex - the original? That game had real choice. Mostly because, for the most part, nothing was an illusion. Sure, there were mission objectives, and hidden paths, and weapons to select, but the majority of the time, Deus Ex dumped the player into their world and said, "go ahead". The choices the player made weren't so much big ones like "good or bad?" - rather, tiny ones, seemingly inconsequential, like "do I go in the back or front door?", or, "do I hack the panel or look around for the password?" The game was still linear, but by having the choices be small things that frequently compounded, it made sure choice wasn't an illusion - it was as real to life as game can possibly be.

Review: "Portal 2"

Pretty Much Alive

review for Portal 2, 2-player first-person action/puzzle, available on Steam

Aperture Science is a big place. According to Portal 2, it was build out of a salt mine some 16 miles deep, stretching down from the top layers, and like a chunk of Antarctic ice, is layered in years - with "old Aperture" at the bottom, and the Aperture of GLaDOS being built on top of all that. With this said, it is Aperture Science that is truly the main "character" of Portal 2. GLaDOS is all well and broodingly hilarious and Stephen Merchant's Wheatley character is as irreverently charming as any British robot ever has been, but it is the facility itself - like Half-Life's Black Mesa, or Bioshock's Rapture, that steals the show. It helps, of course, that GLaDOS has been given free reign to rebuild the facility on-the-fly at her whim - the courses she builds can be dismantled and rebuilt at any point, and it makes Aperture Science less of an establishment, and more of a living, shifting laboratory of unimaginably sinister proportions. Joy.

Review: "Crysis 2"

Start Spreading the News

review for Crysis 2 (Xbox 360), 1 to 12-player first-person shooter, out now

My prediction: Santa will have a lot of trouble fulfilling the Christmas wishlists of all the 20-something gamers in the world this year. My guess is about 80% of people who play and enjoy Crysis 2 will inevitably have fantasies and flights of fancy about owning and using the military-grade nanotech suit which Crysis 2's gameplay is built around exploiting. Which is actually a little ironic - the plot of Crysis 2 is ostensibly an Isaac Asimov-esque tale about the genuine logistical problems that a nanosuit driver would face when in contact for extended periods of time with symbiotic hardware. But I digress.

The plot of Crysis 2 is of an alien invasion, pretty much. After Prophet's team from the first Crysis - which remains one of my favourite games of all time - uncovered the alien artifacts under the Ling Shan islands, years pass, an eventually the aliens have come back to reclaim their planet. Given the nickname "Ceph," these aliens unleash a deadly virus upon mankind, rise up from beneath the earth's crust causing untold natural disasters and climate change issues, and basically wreck shit up.

Review: "VVVVVV"

VVVVVV for Vendetta

review for VVVVVV, 1 player puzzle/platformer, available now

This year in gaming has been a perplexing one. While last year big-name developers were firing out hits like Batman: Arkham Asylum, Modern Warfare 2, and Plants vs Zombies this year pretty much every mainstream title has been a load of crap. In particular, this year's two biggest Christmas-time sellers, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, have come off as shovelware. It's almost paradoxical that this year's big-name titles like Red Dead Redemption and Halo: Reach can't compete with the likes of LIMBO or Super Meat Boy - for one of the first times, the independent scene is making better games than the mainstream crowd; in previous years, the playing field was laughably even.

One of the first of this year's indie games (and possibly the first sign that the indies were going to whip the mainstream like their little bitches) is VVVVVV, by Terry Cavanagh. I think I can safely compare it to Portal, as in, it's a puzzle/platformer with one, simple mechanic, that is used to brain-melting effect with the devious and minimalistic level design. You play as Captain Viridian, a brave starship captain, and your ship and its crew are sucked into a strange alternate dimension. All the crew go missing, and it is your job to rescue them. Easy. Well, not so easy. While design-wise its closest contemporary is Braid, difficulty-wise I can all but compare it to Super Meat Boy - über-challenging, pure difficulty, with a perfect curve that never gets frustrating. It's no-BS gaming fare. It removes all and any obstacles that might make the game difficult beyond the difficulty itself. It's a very clean, pure design principle, and it helps launch VVVVVV into the realm of "genius," alongside the aforementioned Braid.

Review: "Super Meat Boy (XBLA)"

A Million Little Chunks

review for Super Meat Boy, 1 player action/platformer, available now

Wrapping up Super Meat Boy in one word is easy – masochistic.

If you wanted me to add some more words to explain this, it’d go like the following paragraphs.