Category: ChartedPage 7 of 51

A British history of popular video games, told one sales chart #1 at a time

“Shoot lights to create shadows” – Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction

Seven years and six games into the espionage of the Splinter Cell series, it was about time for the entry where Sam Fisher’s own organisation are turned against…

“Immobilized by love” – Pokémon SoulSilver

I have played a lot of Pokémon games through this project thanks to their consistent popularity in the UK. The success of the Nintendo DS helped take things…

“Ain’t no love in the world of international espionage” – Just Cause 2

For the past month I have been playing Just Cause 2 alongside The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It’s been an interesting experience because it has…

“I live for pain” – God of War III

Fighting a god from a vantage on top of a giant, God of War III starts with operatic grandeur and scale, turning and twisting as part of an…

“Guess we’ll have to talk about this later” – Final Fantasy XIII

In 2010, as a delighted Final Fantasy fan with an Xbox 360, I played Final Fantasy XIII. I played some way in and got distracted by other things….

“The Dallas Cowboys go to war every Sunday” – Battlefield: Bad Company 2

I knew extremely little of Bad Company when I started Battlefield: Bad Company 2 ( basically that it was a first person shooter) and thought that I got…

“Am I grown up now?” – Heavy Rain

By 2010 it was a long-established idea in games to reward progress with a bit of story cutscene. Uncharted 2 the previous year had reached an advance in…

“Kill everything that gets in your way” – Aliens vs. Predator (2010)

One thing that this project has kept on showing is that there is never just one story happening in games at any given time. When movie action games…

“Look Daddy, it’s you!” – Bioshock 2

Bioshock had big ideas of overturning standard approaches to video game storytelling, questioning philosophies, the horrors humanity can fall to, and the nature of free will. It even…

“They still die when you shoot ’em” – Mass Effect 2

When Bioware struck out from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic with their own space opera RPG setting in Mass Effect, they planned for it to be…