Recently, my DS charger has gone missing and I’ve resorted to playing MJ’s PSP. I’ve always been turned off by their size and reported lack of quality original games, but I just completed one that left me impressed enough to write about – Sony’s own Loco Roco. Created by Team Ico alumnus Tsutomu Kouno, this [...]

The alsoran cautiously picked this up due to the series-damaging sequel, produced by the (apparently inexperienced) Ubisoft Shanghai studio. However, this latest offering comes from an internal team at the original Montreal studio, and despite the controversial defection of some of the key original Splinter Cell creators to EA, this third franchise installment captures all [...]

Back in the days when sprites were moved around the screen in a linear fashion, with pixel-perfect accuracy often required to overcome single-screen levels and similarly limited enemies, Super Mario Bros on the NES opened up opportunities for creative level design and an equal amount of creativity on the player’s part to navigate them. This [...]

Imagine a racing game where the cars grip the road with almost glue-like quality, that can accelerate to maximum speed in the blink of an eye, where races are dull affairs essentially comprising the movement of a weightless metal block from A to B in the most efficient manner possible. Doesn’t sound like much fun [...]

In the past, animations on videogame characters have played sequentially. When one ends, another begins, regardless of whether the action is fire-and-forget or cyclic, as the cycle ends before playing through again. Seen abstractly, 3D animation is just a series of numbers or values applied to virtual bones within the characters we see on-screen, (actually [...]

Developed by the late French developer Delphine Software, this spiritual successor (not a sequel) to their 1991 hit Out of This World (Another World in PAL territories) was initially released on the Commodore Amiga in 1992, and for DOS and the 16-Bit era consoles a year later. You guide amnesiac Conrad B. Hart in his [...]

Traditionally, videogames have three character archetypes around which all modern character selections are based. Slow but strong, fast but weak, and an average of the two. These basics can be deepened by additional attributes, but this basic model of advantages/disadvantages holds true to this day. It should be the animator’s task to bear these characteristics [...]