Skyrim's Perfect World

  ign.com

How crafting, alchemy and well-constructed mythology could make Skyrim one of the most impressively cohesive worlds in gaming.
UK

If there's one thing that games almost always lack, with their eagerness to entertain and often underdeveloped scripts, it's believability. It usually stems from a lack of cohesion: it's difficult to believe that you're wandering around a real world when everything that you can interact with gleams with a highlighted shine, or when helpful tips keep popping up to remind you to press Y to get on your horse, or when there's a ridiculous story told in unskippable cutscenes. You're often snapped back to real life by their lack of subtlety.

Indeed, modern games are so tailored to the player's comfort that they often compromise their own fiction for the sake of it, making things purposefully obvious and easy to digest instead of rich and rewarding. The end result is that their worlds aren't easy to really believe in. How many times in a game have you really felt like you were wandering around in a real place, rather than a series of carefully-crafted scenarios for you to "experience"? 

Bethesda has always excelled here, creating games that succeed where almost all others come up short. Bethesda's worlds exist independently of you, the player. Follow a Skingrad drug-dealer as she leaves her home in Oblivion, and you'll see her spend an entire day and a half walking all the way across the world to the Imperial City to supply some off-the-wagon soldier with Skooma, whether you're there to watch her do it or not. That haggard old booze hound in the derelict bar in Fallout 3 will sit there all day, getting up occasionally for a go at the slots. Foxes chase rabbits, wolves chase foxes, and guards valiantly defend villages from bandits (and dragons). Bethesda is far from the only developer to attempt this natural, player-independent game ecology, but it has always done it extraordinarily well.

King Arthur: Fallen Champions Review

Fallen Champions is a short and mostly sweet compression of many of the good elements in its King Arthur predecessor.

The Good
Innovative blend of choose-your-own-adventure quests and RTS battles Smartly designed battle scenarios Intelligently aggressive AI Impressive, atmospheric visuals. 

The Bad
No save-on-demand feature.

King Arthur - The Role-playing Wargame had surprise on its side when it was released in 2009. Developer NeoCore Games' blend of choose-your-own-adventure quests and real-time fantasy battles came out of nowhere with impressive cross-genre experimentations, even if the end result was uneven and a bit too offbeat for its own good. Stand-alone add-on Fallen Champions also comes as something of a surprise for how much it pulls back from what its big brother brought to the table. The action here is distilled to the basics, giving you a close-up view of the innovative storytelling devices and the tactical real-time strategy combat without any of the kingdom building that gave the earlier game a Total War vibe. So you might not be getting exactly what you expect, although the game is very good in its own right and a great way for newcomers to ease into the deeper waters that await in the full King Arthur.

Fruit Ninja Kinect Review

 I wonder if in a few years people will talk about IOS games being consolized. If they did, would they use the term in a good way or would it still have the derogative connotation that's attached to it now? Whatever the case ends up being we've got one of our first true case studies in Halfbrick Studios Fruit Ninja Kinect, the popular IOS game that's been adapted for Microsoft's Kinect motion sensor. It's a strange choice for the Summer of Arcade and people might wonder why they'd pay for a game they can already get on their phones, but the most surprising thing is that it's actually a great showcase for the Kinect and hopefully a model they can learn from going forward.

Ten Times The Fun?

Fruit Ninja is a game for mobile devices where you use your fingers or thumbs to slice fruit. You might have to avoid bombs mixed in with the pineapple and papaya or you may be tasked with getting as high of a score as possible in a short time limit but for the most part that's really all the game is. Fruit goes up and you have to slice it before it falls. It's a simple game but it more than earns its 99-cent price tag. Fruit Ninja Kinect isn't 99-cents, though, it's 800 MS point ($10) and that's going to be a hard thing for a lot of people to ignore. I can't really justify a game that's ten times the price on one platform when it adds very little. Fruit Ninja Kinect adds some, but not necessarily enough. The good news is that it's still a highly addictive and enjoyable game.