There’s an entire aesthetic of games marketing and discourse that, frankly, deserves to die. The games press, both consumer and industry facing, has struggled with some very tricky questions for years now, largely around the relationships between publisher and reviewer, and reviewers and fans.
It’s easy to spot something is wrong, even enumerate the sector’s faults [...]

Alice and Kev is quite an astounding project built around AI and storytelling in The Sims 3. Their creator destroyed all their wealth to see how they would behave as homeless sims, and the results are surprisingly human. Go there and read it. Most astounding moment yet is the post Selflessness, but I doubt it [...]

…aaaaand PEGI wins.
To quote editor in chief of Develop, Michael French, indeed it does. Following recommendations of the Byron Review, the UK Government has chosen PEGI as the universal ratings system for games in the UK, which much better reflects the needs of the industry.
Tech Radar has some reactions already. It’s being reported as a [...]

TIGA and NESTA today announced the launch of Play Together. It’s provoking a bit of cynicism, even here at Pixel-Lab, and I can see why: A lot of habitually insular UK games companies are not going to be keen on, for instance, sharing staff.
However, we’ve been banging on at them for so long to bang [...]

Schulze and Webb recently printed this fantastic mapping project called Here and There, showing perspective views of Manhattan morphing into plan views. My first thought in seeing them was “Why isn’t there an FPS renderer that does this?”. See the video to get a clearer idea of it, and how utilitarian at could be (As [...]

It came as no surprise to us that UK Midlands studio Rare are working on Project Natal, having some excellent software engineers based there.
What did surprise me recently was to realise just how many major projects have passed through the region, particularly around Rare and Free Radical (now Crytek). Going way back, Tomb Raider, Golden [...]

On Game Politics today. Despite there being no likely, let alone proven connection between violent games and violent crime, apparently regional representatives from all parts of Germany have requested a ban not only distribution, but also production of violent videogames in Germany.
It genuinely worries me that such baseless proposals and legislation can get so far [...]

A lot of games were just announced at E3. Here are HD trailers of some of the ones we’re most looking forward to:
The Last Guardian, by Team Ico
WipeOut HD Fury, developed by Sony over in Liverpool
Assassin’s Creed 2, set in Renaissance Venice. While the gameplay of the first may have been criticised, the artistry in [...]

Sony also delivered their keynote hot on the heels of Nintendo last night (GMT), announcing a raft of new games, the leaked-last-week PSP Go, and their own motion control prototype for the PS3 offering 1:1 motion sensing. Both Sony and Nintendo showed very similar looking archery demos with their 1:1 controllers, though I’m curoius to [...]

Nintendo’s E3 keynote yesterday didn’t contain many surprises, but it did quell some of the talk about Wii software. There’s been a lot of talk about them exhausting their stock of IP with the Wii and it having nowhere to go next. Incorrect: There are going to be sequels, of course.
They also showed a lot [...]