Following on from part one's release yesterday, part two of our retrospective look back at 2021 takes a look back at the second half of the year, including the breaking of the biggest story of the year with Activision Blizzard embroiled in serious allegations of toxic misconduct, sexism and a lot more within the latter . And it gets worse for the company over the course of the year before the bombshell report by the Wall St Journal that sees Activision Blizzard chairman and CEO Bobby Kotick poin...
Dec 31, 2021•56 min•Ep. 18
2021 has been a year , shall we say. There is way too much to go over in text form what has happened, but to name a few: Ubisoft and Star Wars , Bethesda and Indiana Jones , Bethesda and Microsoft , closures of Japan Studio and Google Stadia’s first-party unit , the return of Nintendo Direct and releases of the likes of Hitman 3, Returnal, Resident Evil Village, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and more. Oh, and the return of E3. And that is just between the period between January and June. And be...
Dec 30, 2021•47 min•Ep. 17
Over the past few years, but especially since the pandemic began and has gone on, an emerging trend has appeared within the games industry: cosy, wholesome games. These games have existed long before 2020, but in a time where the world has become a lot more cynical and scary thanks to outside events and in need of something comforting while we’ve been stuck inside for the better part of two years at this point, they’ve become a lot more prevalent. But outside of games like Animal Crossing or oth...
Nov 10, 2021•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 16
Fabraz's Demon Turf is a love letter in numerous ways. It’s a love letter to the platforming genre. It’s a love letter of self-expression through the art of gameplay. And more than anything else, Demon Turf is a love letter of telling slapstick humour while telling a serious story of its main character finding confidence in herself to become ruler of the demon kingdom (even when she is still a smartmouth even then). "For example, the first boss [in Demon Turf] is this very big pig demon. And she...
Oct 26, 2021•27 min•Ep. 15
Loddlenaut and Venice 2089 are two very different games. Loddlenaut is an aquatic survival game where you look after creatures on the ocean floor. Venice 2089 is a 2.5D adventure game where you ride a hoverboard around a ruined Venice. Both games are from different teams: Loddlenaut comes from a team led in the States, while Venice 2089 is from a team set in Italy (shocker). And both Loddlenaut and Venice 2089 have different play styles. But what unites both games together is their message of gl...
Oct 12, 2021•33 min•Ep. 14
Nearly four years since it was first announced as an actual game after some initial inspiration seeing a GIF of an actual bird skating, today, Skatebird finally arrives on PC, Xbox (including Xbox Game Pass) and Nintendo Switch. Even with a last-minute delay from an August release to today’s rearranged release date , the game could not have come at a better time for the skating renaissance that is building with the launches of Skater XL and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 as well as the early access ...
Sep 16, 2021•38 min•Ep. 13
When Behind the Frame debuted for the first time earlier this summer during E3 and the summer showcases held during it , it had an immediate thing in its favour: a massive influence from Studio Ghibli. It wears on its sleeve what the Japanese animation powerhouse has brought to the world with glee. But art director and lead writer Weichen Lin wants Behind the Frame to be more than its Ghibli-inspired looks. It wants to provide something cozy, something challenging and something that is endearing...
Aug 25, 2021•26 min•Ep. 12
When you’re in AAA, you usually go from one game to the next. It’s a cycle that lasts every four or five years, if not longer. At BioWare Edmonton, Fernando Melo was coming off the back of working on Mass Effect: Andromeda and hopping on to the next Dragon Age game currently being made . But as production wore on, he started questioning whether another four or five-year cycle was worth it anymore. “When we got to EA’s greenlight towards the end of pre-production [of the next Dragon Age], things ...
Aug 18, 2021•35 min•Ep. 11
If you only go in from the outset of Button City thinking its core theme is being a love letter to games, you wouldn’t be that far off. Subliminal Gaming co-founders Ryan and Shandiin Woodward certainly helped shape Button City with that motif in mind. But there’s another aspect too that feels instrumental to what Button City is about at its core: friendship. “A lot of their tactics to try to save the arcade just don’t fully help, honestly,” says Ryan Woodward. “I think that was something that w...
Aug 05, 2021•31 min•Ep. 10
In 2017, an adventure game was shown to the world for the first time at The PC Gaming Show at that year’s E3. Then initially known as Secret Legend – shorthanded by certain players as ‘Fox game’ – it was given new life under the name of Tunic. Numerous showings of Tunic at various events and multiple trailers have given it many comparisons to The Legend of Zelda with an adorable fox. But Tunic director Andrew Shouldice wants you to come away with the thought that it’s more than merely just its Z...
Jul 29, 2021•37 min•Ep. 9
It all starts again for Sony tomorrow. By the time this goes out, PlayStation 5 will launch in two waves, starting tomorrow in North America, Japan and other countries (in fact, it's already rolling out in Australia and New Zealand) - but not the EU and UK. That’ll come next Thursday. With those two launch waves and the global launch of Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X yesterday as this goes out, it marks the end of another transition between the now outgoing-gen and the just starting next-gen. B...
Nov 11, 2020•52 min•Ep. 8
For the past few months, we’ve been maintaining chronological guides on how both Sony and Microsoft have gotten to the launches of the next-gen machines launching this week (and in PS5’s case, Europe and the UK next week). But in the first of two episodes of Press Play coming this week – and after fixing some massive technical hurdles – we go over how Microsoft went from the failed unveil and release of Xbox One to build itself back up with Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S under Phil Spencer’s le...
Nov 09, 2020•49 min•Ep. 7
Seven years since its release and ten years since its reveal as of October next year, Grand Theft Auto 5 thrives. As of a few weeks ago, it's seven years since Grand Theft Auto 5 launched to massive anticipation and excitement on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. But even with the last-last generation version's launch and how successful that was with an $800 million launch in its first 48 hours and $1 billion in its first 72 hours, the fact it has still been able to be successful, although unsurprisin...
Oct 01, 2020•35 min•Ep. 6
So I’ve not really talked about this aspect of myself on the site a whole lot, if at all, since Play Diaries launched back in January. But I am a queer-identifying person. And there are a lot of queer-identifying people in the LGBTQIA community within the games industry. Representation with games, both the actual games and the people who make them, is finally starting to catch up, albeit slowly. But just in the past month alone, let alone this hellscape of a year, representation has picked up in...
Jul 15, 2020•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 5
Mid-January I’m on my way from my home in Derry, Northern Ireland – literally four days after launching Play Diaries – for a three hour trip across the border to the Republic of Ireland. Depending which way you’re going from in Derry, if you head east, you can be heading across into the border into Bridgend in Co Donegal within 15-to-20 minutes or Lifford – also in Donegal – in 45 minutes if you head south via the town of Strabane in Co Tyrone. However, for this adventure, we’re having to go thr...
Apr 01, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 4
Six years ago, Danny Weinbaum decided to leave his job as a 3D environment artist at Sucker Punch. just as the studio was on the cusp of launching inFamous: Second Son for PlayStation 4 as well as continued development on inFamous: First Light and begin pre-production on a new IP we now know as Ghost of Tsushima. He had an itch to make his own game, known as Eastshade, an adventure game where you explore the island of Eastshade as an artist. But he had given himself a two-year deadline to make t...
Mar 26, 2020•30 min•Ep. 3
When Final Fantasy 4 released in 1991 in Japan, it marked the beginning of one of the most influential periods in the JRPG genre and signaled one of Square Enix’s – or SquareSoft as it was then – most successful periods ever. Not only with FF4, but with 1994’s Final Fantasy 6 and 1995’s Chrono Trigger. Now, nearly 30 years on since it began, that successful trifecta of games will influence an upcoming JRPG with massive promise. The kicker? It’s coming from a small indie team in South America. Cr...
Feb 11, 2020•27 min•Ep. 2
Tanja Lind Tankred and Mira Dorthe met as students at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Both came from a bachelor’s literary background. Tankred a bachelor in comparative literature, Dorthe a bachelor in creative writing and linguistics. At uni in Copenhagen, they both studied a masters in game design. It’s there they first meet at a Magic The Gathering event. “I remember coming over to Mira very carefully, a little nervous, saying, ‘should we maybe write a thesis together?’ because we...
Jan 14, 2020•31 min•Ep. 1
