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Jan 14, 2025 | 
vulture.com | Lewis Gordon
How does Elon Musk find the time? Not content with spending his precious hours busting unions, hanging out at Mar-a-Lago, and catapulting meme coins to the crypto stratosphere, Musk is also a bona fide gamer god — or so he would have you believe. On a recent X livestream, Musk played the just-released action-RPG Path of Exile 2, turning heads with two extremely high-ranking characters on hardcore mode, a punishing version of the game most notable for its permadeath mechanic.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
vulture.com | Lewis Gordon
All eyes are on Rockstar’s return — and on Nintendo’s successor to the Switch. 2024 was not flush with consensus classics. Sure, everyone seemed to love poker roguelike Balatro (including us), but there were unusually few universally agreed-upon standouts in the way that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur’s Gate 3 defined 2023.
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Dec 18, 2024 | 
vulture.com | Lewis Gordon
An artifact framed by cascading light in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is played from a first-person perspective and involves guns, so one might reasonably assume it is a first-person shooter. In actuality, you do remarkably little shooting.
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Dec 9, 2024 | 
ft.com | Lewis Gordon
Something is off about the leading man in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
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Dec 5, 2024 | 
vulture.com | Lewis Gordon
Multiplatform titles asserted themselves in thrillingly weird style. Is the era of the blockbuster console exclusive coming to an end? In 2024, the conspicuous absence of big-name, first-party titles certainly made it feel that way. Sony’s major exclusive was Astro Bot, a brilliant if modest platformer compared to the God of War and Horizon games.
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Oct 22, 2024 | 
atmos.earth | Lewis Gordon
Haunting and bizarre, and with a surprise fourth book out today, Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy is testing the definition of nature and humanity’s place in it. Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation opens with a biologist entering the mysterious, unpopulated wilderness known as Area X. Nothing seems out of the ordinary at first.
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Oct 22, 2024 | 
ft.com | Lewis Gordon
A white wolf gallops through a forest that is rendered in impressionistic swirls and colourful splodges.
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Oct 9, 2024 | 
vulture.com | Lewis Gordon
2001 is rightfully remembered as a benchmark year for video games. Grand Theft Auto III laid the blueprint for the now-ubiquitous open-world genre; Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty served peerless stealth action primed for the post-truth era; Ico delivered a mythic fairy tale to rival those of Studio Ghibli’s.
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Oct 4, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Lewis Gordon
The storms start off small in the vehicular survival game Pacific Drive. Raindrops fall on the windshield, as lightning cracks ominously in the distance. In a few minutes, the pristine Olympic Peninsula will shake with nature's full terrible force. Hollywood has long portrayed extreme weather, and 4-D screenings of the summer hit "Twisters" bludgeoned viewers with wind and water in gyroscopic seats. Yet video games have the power to truly envelop an audience in severe meteorological conditions.
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Sep 5, 2024 | 
vulture.com | Lewis Gordon
For a time in the 1990s and 2000s, mascot platformers like Mario and Sonic were on top of the world. These cute little dudes bounded across kaleidoscopic levels, helping drive the sale of millions of consoles for their makers, Nintendo and Sega, respectively. Sony had its own cohort: Crash Bandicoot; Spyro (for a few years); Jak and Daxter. They were the perfect torchbearers for a medium of ostensibly simple pleasures still in its relative infancy.
