The Cartridge Thief Blog

Generally, when a team of developers spend months and miss countless family dinners drafting, pitching, designing and programming complex mechanics into their games, it is on the assumption that players will find them important during their playthroughs.  After all of the work that they put in, it would be a social faux pas to say the least for players to just ignore them all together.  It would be a bit like going to a fancy dinner party and only eating the Cheerios you brought from home. However, there are some games where this is absolutely possible and you can make your way through the entire thing without engaging with the mechanics that the poor developers put so much time and effort into producing.  Below, I've itemised a short memorandum for all of the mechanics that, despite all of the hard work put into making them, you can just ignore entirely, you monster. Vague spoilers ahead for Bioshock, Yakuza 0 and one mission in GTA: San Andreas Bioshock 's hacking Bios...

I've recently been making my way through Bioshock: The Collection  in a similar manner to how a slug moves through a wedding cake.  However, my slow progress isn’t down to lack of enjoyment.  If anything, it’s the opposite.  My feelings on Bioshock so far have been that the game contains such strong writing and so many interconnected themes in each area that I’m reluctant to rush through it all at once.  Effectively, the wedding cake has so many layers that I want to stop and sample each at my own pace. (Image property of 2K and Irrational Games) This, however, has caused me to ask myself why more games don’t feel like this.  After all, Bioshock  released in 2007, you’d think more games would have been able to mimic its success if it was simply on a technical level.  However, for me, what sets Bioshock apart isn’t technical.  Instead, it is about the quality of writing and the way that the game presents themes and ideas in such an intellige...

No work of art has ever been considered a masterpiece for doing exactly what people expected from it.  Picasso would be a lot less interesting if he drew faces properly and everyone prefers The Beatles after they discovered LSD.  In the mundanity that is our everyday lives, it is novelty and subversion that makes art truly stand out and connect with us, even when it isn’t perfect. (Image property of MachineGames and Bethesda Softworks) It’s this attitude of subverting expectations that makes Wolfenstein: The New Order , in my opinion, a fantastic achievement in video game storytelling.  Everything from its mechanics to its story and characters is highly polished and well-designed on a surface level, but what makes it stand out in the saturated shooter market of the 21st Century is its almost aggressive subversion of audience expectations. Today, I want to break down what works so well about The New Order  and how it openly defied the cultural context that it was...

In general, when you plan to make a sequel to a hit game, the idea is to improve on the original.  It's hard to imagine the developers of games like Resident Evil 5 in a planning meeting saying, "Oh boy, I can't wait to half-arse this," even if that was the end result. Perhaps it's a sequel that's been hacked out to capitalise on the unforeseen success of the original.  Maybe the magic of the first game just didn't survive the process of repetition.  Regardless of the cause, over the years there have been more than a few occasions on which sequels have attempted to build upon the first game's success and somehow fallen flat. Here, I have curated an itemised list of the original games which, for one reason or another, still manage to overshadow their younger siblings. Batman: Arkham Asylum If you read my previous article about Arkham Asylum being my high school sweetheart, there probably shouldn't be any surprises here.  Even 14 years later, it sta...