Smartbomb

I don’t think there’s a lack of creativity in the games industry – in the UK, or anywhere else. Games like Rhythm Tengoku, Shadow of the Colossus, Dead Rising… oh wait, those are all Japanese… okay, let’s say games like Little Big Planet, Viva Piñata and Black & White still manage to bring interesting new [...]

Heroes Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone Recently I was treated to a livetweeted report from the Edinburgh Interactive Festival by the fragrant Cara Ellison. Among the sessions was one by Ian Livingstone, who as far as I could tell was rehashing the conclusions of the Livingstone-Hope review. In a nutshell, the report claims firstly that [...]

Note: The following three articles were originally collected up as a single massive rant sparked off by various events over the summer, but I wasn’t really happy with the way they transitioned between topics so I’ve split them up into three separate, more focused articles. They cover a family of related issues though, and if [...]

Hey, we made it! In this final installment of TRAIN WEEK, we will look at some games that end with a train journey. I’ve always been terrible at survival horror games, but there was a period in high school where one of my friends seemed to be play Resident Evil 2 over and over again [...]

In all likelihood, you have previously ridden on a train. You may have read a book on a train. You may have used a toilet on a train. But ask yourself this: Have you ever played a round of golf on a train? Of course not. Trains generally share a long and thin design, wholly [...]

Yesterday on TRAIN WEEK we looked at games that played off the restrictive nature of travelling on rails. Today we’re going to make a short detour through a siding to consider games in which trains symbolise technological development. Obviously trains aren’t the most amazingly futuristic devices in the world, but – perhaps influenced by the [...]

Previously on TRAIN WEEK we saw that trains often symbolise transportation between distant environments – not just geographical, but sometimes metaphorical. It’s important to remember that this transportation takes place in a very fixed manner – the player must follow certain routes through the rail network, and cannot simply transport themselves to any point in [...]

Yesterday I wrote about games that start with a train journey, how they signify the player-character arriving in a strange new place full of mysteries to uncover. The implication is that they have travelled from another, more familiar place, but the train journey has transported the character – and the player – out of their [...]

Hopefully you won’t be surprised when I say that many games start with the player-character arriving somewhere. It’s a plot device that marks the player as an ‘outsider’, dropping them into an alien environment that they must explore, and gives some context as to why they have no established relationships with the characters they meet. [...]

Dear reader, let me tell you a little-known fact: I like trains. I’m not an expert on trains by any stretch of the imagination, and I’ve never gone out of my way to look at or ride a particular train (with the exception of the miniature train loop at Newby Hall), but I have a [...]