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“Is that a gun in your pocket?” – Saints Row

The success of Liberty City Stories reinforced a clear message – people badly wanted more Grand Theft Auto on their consoles, and it didn’t matter if it wasn’t…

“Safe driver” – Cars

Going right back to Way of the Tiger, Barbarian II, Sensible World of Soccer, there has been a lot of opportunity in taking already successful games genres and…

“Smash and Grab” – Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories

I can see where the wow factor would have come from in Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories. In 2001, when Grand Theft Auto III was achieving mind-blowing…

“Surely you can’t oppose all the uses of cloning?” – Hitman: Blood Money

IO Interactive made a real attempt to make Hitman: Blood Money more approachable than its predecessors. The whole control scheme is rehashed, with context-sensitive buttons replacing the PC-feeling…

“EA passport” – FIFA World Cup Germany 2006

For all of the attendant pomp and ceremony, the World Cup is just a bunch of football matches, right? That’s the approach EA Sports relied on, with FIFA…

“Old friends” – Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend

If the success of Shadow of the Colossus was the perfect proof-of-concept for games as award-season movie, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend is a good match for a…

“It’s just business” – The Godfather

In the mid-00’s, we were fully in the phase of others working out what they could learn from the success of Grand Theft Auto. Some of this came…

“Toutius Sextius, do you know him?” – The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

I had saved the town of Kvatch from falling completely to the demons of Doom-world (alright, ‘Oblivion’), but it wasn’t that simple. Death and damage had already been…

“Stop buying your albums from the supermarket” – FIFA Street 2

In my post on FIFA Street, I talked about MC Harvey’s performance in the game, doing ”quadruple service as commentator, hypeman, provider of advice, and stand-in for the…

“Drop everything that moves” – Black

For all of Medal of Honor’s massive success for a couple of years, and the phenomenon of Halo, in early 2006 we still hadn’t quite reached peak First…