Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad Review (PC)

Tripwire Interactive’s realistic shooter focuses on the often overlooked Eastern Front of World War II....  read more

Paste Goes to E3: Day 3

Every year they hold E3 in LA. But they could just as well hold it in any city. Even Omaha. Despite the somewhat opulent use of local facilities to host parties, get-togethers, schmooze-fests and marketing throw-downs, the reality is E3 insulates you in a parka of videogame fluff. So, even as I walk into the conference this morning, and notice that the North Koreans have, apparently, taken over a parking lot next to the convention center, I don’t have to wonder about this peculiar military strategy of Kim Jong Il. Nah, surely it’s just some marketing stunt and I eagerly...  read more

Tom Bissell: Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

Celebrated journalist does some videogame soul-searching In April, legendary film critic Roger Ebert doubled-down on an assertion he first leveled in 2005: "Video games can never be art." His unflinching blog-post dismissal stung gamers the world over, eliciting countless rejoinders. A friend of mine summarized the ensuing fallout quite nicely: “Never have so many gamers expended so many words insisting they don’t care what a film critic thinks of them.”...  read more

Start Press: The Floating Gun Barrel

I watched the dawn of the first-person shooter genre in third person. It was my older brother Trey obsessively playing id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D at the family computer, while I skeptically eyed the proceedings over his shoulder. I had no interest in playing the game myself, steering that floating gun barrel down one indistinguishable stone corridor after another. Every few seconds he’d plug a Nazi or an attack dog. I never stuck around to see if he got a chance to nestle a bullet in Hitler’s pencil-thin moustache....  read more