Tag Archives: feature

Academic studies of video games have long pondered the relative merits of gameplay vs story, or ludology vs narratology as it’s often called. While we leave such critical musings to the experts, the debate has rarely been played out in such stark terms across the two primary platform holders’ showcases. …

E3 press conferences were once littered with titles that wouldn’t see retailers’ shelves for years. But there looks to be a new sense of immediacy spreading across these events and the industry as a whole – and publishers are keen to point this out to consumers. Bethesda was a key …

We knew it was coming, but somehow Ubisoft still managed to surprise us. No, we’re not talking about Beyond Good and Evil 2 (although let’s just pause for a moment and luxuriate in that tremendous trailer again); we’re talking about Mario+Rabbids: Kingdom Battle.  We’ll admit, even our resident Nintendo evangelist …

EA’s been marching to its own E3 drum for a couple of years now, but last weekend saw the publisher putting players at the heart of its event like never before. It not only had 300 content creators at its presentation, but also a barrage of YouTube co-hosts and an …

Today, E3 seems like the most monolithic of institutions, but it wasn’t ever thus. The first one I attended was the second ever, in 1996, and it had a very different cast of major players. I was taken out by the long-forgotten 7th Level – the only publisher to get …

Welcome to E3, Los Angeles, and the biggest video games trade show in the world! In truth, I’m penning this piece not while basking in the hot, Californian sun, but rather from my house in a typically overcast south London. For once in my life I won’t be wandering the …

A games conference like E3 offers a unique glimpse into the makeup of the industry at large. Like a microcosm in a petri dish you’ll find many of the elements on a showfloor that also exist out in the wild across the industry. In recent years, one of the more …

The games market is always changing and games marketing has always changed with it. But with ever-increasing post-launch revenues, it seems there’s something more symbiotic between the design and content of the games and the campaigns that support them.  We sit down with Tarquin Henderson, head of EMEA console gaming …

The Los Angeles Convention Centre has always been a place of peril as well as profit. Attending is something of a survival course: high-pressure meetings, late-late-late-night networking, cross-floor appointment dashes or the grinding endurance test of simply standing and smiling on the stand. But forget everything you think you know …

Dismissed by some as a marketing machine, watching E3 has become a sacred ritual for many gamers. Here, couch-E3 veteran Jack Ridsdale give us his survival guide for the event. A few years back, watching E3 from home was a more manageable affair. One solid Monday of hot games news that …