Marijn • Comments

• Dead Island: Riptide Zombie Bait edition has headless, armless bloody bikini torso figurine

• Marijn 15/01/2013

  Post deleted Reply 0

• Trends of 2013: Rise of the indies

• Marijn 10/01/2013

  Wait wait wait. Is Dan suggesting that "the traditional slew of high profile sequels" that offer "precious little lasting excitement" should be awarded 8/10? If that's how Eurogamer rates games (and frankly, I don't think that's true), maybe a little bit of a rethink is in order? Reply +3

• Guillermo del Toro talking to "one of the big ones" about picking up Insane

• Marijn 07/01/2013

  @IvorB But it's just the IP that they'd have to buy. They could subsequently get one of their World Wide Studios to actually develop the game under Del Toro's watchful eye. Besides, they DID basically fund (and are still funding) David Cage's projects. This kind of meeting between game and cinema is right up their alley.
  Still, having read the other comments, Valve might make sense too. Reply +4

• Marijn 07/01/2013

  Pretty sure it's Sony. Like someone said above, they'll be competing with Microsoft for big next-gen exclusives, and they seem to be much more interested in "arthouse" efforts like this than their direct competitor. But I suppose it could also be Ubosift or Bethesda (though I'd be surprised if Del Toro would be calling them "one of the big ones" ). Reply 0

• Games of 2012: Forza Horizon

• Marijn 27/12/2012

  Was ready to skip this article (I'm not just "not a car guy", I'm not even a "non-narrative games guy in a general sense" ) but then I saw that John Teti wrote it. I was not disappointed; I would marry a line like "the possibilities of the asphalt horizon possess a mystique beyond any one subculture" if I could. Reply +4

• Games of 2012: Asura's Wrath

• Marijn 24/12/2012

  "But only a tiny handful have contained as much truth about the human condition." I really liked Asura's Wrath for its glorious excess, but come on, really? Overwrought anime melodrama is a treasure trove of existential insight now? Reply +23

• Eurogamer Readers' Top 50 Games of 2012 voting

• Marijn 05/12/2012

  @DrStrangelove Nah, Far Cry 3 won't win, too many people won't have played it yet. Looking over the comments (and its remarkable sales), I think Dishonored might have a fighting chance. Reply +3

• Marijn 05/12/2012

  1. Journey
  2. Mass Effect 3
  3. Spec Ops: The Line
  4. Papo Y Yo
  5. Dishonored
  
  Honourable mentions for Fez, Botanicula, I Am Alive, The Unfinished Swan, Dust: An Elysian Tail, Tiny And Big: Grandpa's Leftovers, Catherine and Dear Esther.
  
  BUT: I haven't played/finished The Walking Dead, Gravity Rush, Hotline Miami and Far Cry 3 yet.
  
  Totally gutted that so few people have mentioned Mass Effect 3 so far. Even if you hated the ending, can you really deny that everything before that was Game Of The Year-material? Few scenes (in any medium) have had as much of an impact on me this year as the conclusions to the Genophage and Geth-Quarian storylines. Reply +4

• Splinter Cell: Blacklist response has been a "kneejerk reaction" and "uninformed"

• Marijn 28/09/2012

  @Saint_of_Killers "Saying it happens in real life isn't justifying torture." No, but calling it "the price of freedom" is. Reply +8

• Marijn 28/09/2012

  Footman defended the use of such violent scenes, and explained that their inclusion was designed to reflect the real world.
  "What people won't say, but what they'll dance around, is that is the price of freedom to protect Americans and their sedans and SUVs.
  "If it makes you squeamish and uncomfortable, maybe that's the point.
  "Where do you draw the line? What would you do to save your country when all it took was to torture someone using the wrong means? We feel it's an interesting dilemma for the player."
  
  Except, in the scenes you've shown of your game, it's not presented as a moral dilemma, but as an exciting gameplay element. Which is why this feels like an unconvincing, hypocritical lie to hide your sensationalistic mindset. Reply +9

• Torchlight 2 review

• Marijn 24/09/2012

  I have to buy this game just to cancel out the bad karma that I got from purchasing the mephistophelean (sorry, sorry) product called Diablo III. Reply +11

• Retrospective: Jet Set Radio Future

• Marijn 16/09/2012

  Fantastic article Christian! The experience of playing the game comes across beautifully, and then you top it off with the visit to Japan at the end. Maybe some of your best work - have a Games Journalism Prizes nomination. Reply +2

• Super Time Force is super hard, super interesting and more than a little like Super Contra

• Marijn 14/09/2012

  What is this? Am I on Eurogamer? Then what is this Super Contra you speak of? Me and my European friends can only recall an amazing game called Super Probotector. Reply +8

• Closure creator on why it didn't come to EU PSN

• Marijn 29/08/2012

  Many many thanks for following up on this Eurogamer! Still, it seems that part of the blame still lies with Sony for not integrating SCEA and SCEE better. Why should developers have to deal with two different companies? In cases like this, it just makes SCEE look bad. Reply +5

• Marijn 29/08/2012

  Post deleted Reply 0

• Retrospective: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

• Marijn 26/08/2012

  "Red Dead Redemption showed that the studio has mastered the art of tying a vast landscape to a personal story without breaking the mood with silliness,"
  
  Not really. Half the secondary characters in the game were one-dimensional satirical stereotypes (especially Irish, Seth, Nigel and Harold). The need to write these kinds of joke characters is the one thing that's holding the Housers back from true greatness in their writing (see also: almost the entire second half of GTAIV, with its return to ethnic criminal stereotypes). Reply -5

• Spooky PSN puzzler Closure is coming to Steam in September

• Marijn 23/08/2012

  I've been waiting for this game a long time on PSN. Oh well, I'll get it on Steam then. I'd very much like to know WHAT the F*CK is UP with SCEE, too, please, Eurogamer! Especially in comparison to XBLA's far more timely releases, like @doctor_fraud correctly pointed out. Reply 0

• Lost Humanity 9: Book of Predictions

• Marijn 22/08/2012

  "2000: Games get so real that people go to watch people play them in the pictures." Well, actually, the arts centre where I work has had the idea for some time to have someone play through Heavy Rain (or L.A. Noire) and let people watch it on a movie screen. And the idea isn't even ours: at the Tribeca Film Festival two years ago, they actually did this with a mission of L.A. Noire. So you weren't THAT wrong (even though you were ten years off in your prediction).
  Also, brilliant article. Reply +1

• So, who's the Remember Me voice actress?

• Marijn 21/08/2012

  It's a French development team, so I hope they actually have native English speakers to tell them whether or not their dialogue (on the page and in voice acting) is terrible. Reply 0

• Dust: An Elysian Tail Review

• Marijn 19/08/2012

  Just finished the game, and wanted to add my voice to the chorus: Rich's review doesn't do Dust justice. It's far and away the best Metroidvania title of the past few years, with great level design, a huge number of secrets, much-better-than-average dialogue and characterisation, a story that is by turns funny and moving and even some decent voice acting. All these elements are much more polished than most AAA titles, and it's frankly incredible that designer Dean Dodrill did most of it by himself. Sure, the combat is a bit repetitive, but if you turn the difficulty up it's certainly not too easy. It's a big game too - it took me 14 hours and a bit to finish (though I did 100% it, so knock off a few hours if you're not a completionist). If you love oldschool action RPGs, it's a 9/10 - for everyone else, it's still an 8/10. Reply +4

• Hitman Absolution level changed due to negative nun trailer reaction

• Marijn 16/08/2012

  @Cafuddled As far as I know, the whole outrage about the trailer came from WITHIN the gaming community. Unsurprisingly, very few other people cared. Reply +3

• Marijn 16/08/2012

  @Dangerous_Dan Thanks for your long reply. Of course I don't think that you hate women, or that the creators of the trailer hate women - it's the trailer itself that's misogynistic.
  The whole point is that women should be free to be valued not only for being sexy, but for being successful or competent also. Imagery like the Hitman trailer instead reinforces the idea that women only want to be "desired", and have no other role to play in society, and should leave things like "competence" to men, or find themselves the victims of men's superiority. This is what I meant by subjugation: the way the male-on-female violence mixes with sexuality, it gives a weird "conquest" vibe to the whole thing. Because 47 is presented as the hero, it feels like some weird power fantasy about violently conquering hot women.
  Again, the point is not that you're evil for enjoying the trailer, but the ideal of equality is undermined by a society that constantly bombards us with media that reinforce stereotypes. Reply +2

• Marijn 16/08/2012

  @danger.to.others It's not the fiction (it's not wrong that 47 kills women who are coming to kill him), it's the imagery (the way this whole thing has been visualised, as I tried to explain above). And it's certainly not about religion or blasphemy, but about propagating gender-based stereotypes. Reply +11

• Marijn 16/08/2012

  And everyone who is upset over IO "caving to PC pressure": they're adding some backstory for these characters, they're not removing or changing anything. If that adds enough context to make these characters less offensive to some people, why would that be a bad thing? Reply +6

• Marijn 16/08/2012

  @Dangerous_Dan Alright, once more. The reason the trailer was accused of misogyny (yes, not just sexism this time) by many people (including me) is that it first makes these women strip down to latex outfits, with very suggestive camerawork, and then brutally murders them (again, with very suggestive camerawork). This achieves the double whammy of objectification and subjugation in the space of a two minute trailer. Taken as an individual piece of media (after all, the trailer provides no additional context), it was nauseating. The fact that no one at IO gave it a second thought is probably down to the fact that they COULDN'T see it outside of the context of the game, so it can only be a good thing that the controversy has made them look at the in-game content with fresh eyes. Reply +18