The new Street Fighter film arrives in cinemas this Friday, and its Rotten Tomatoes score has already revived an old conversation about what happens when a beloved game is adapted for the screen. The early reception suggests the movie is closer to the bad old days than anyone hoping for a turnaround would like. Aggregate scores are a blunt instrument, but they are a useful signal of consensus. When critics line up on one side, it usually reflects something structural rather than a matter of taste: a script that cannot decide what it wants to be, or a production that treats the source material as a licence rather than a foundation. Street Fighter has the ingredients for a good film. A global cast of fighters, clear rivalries, a tournament structure and a villain with a personal stake in the hero’s defeat. The arcade games were built on broad archetypes, and broad archetypes travel well...
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The actor behind Biddy Blas is playing Star Wars Galactic Racer, and he is under no illusion about how his character lands. By his own account, the character is “annoying,” a description he delivers with the affection of someone who knows exactly what he signed up for. There is a particular pleasure in watching performers engage with their own work this way. Actors rarely get to choose how an audience responds, and the ones who lean into it, rather than defending every creative decision, tend to come across as more honest about the job. His comment about the game itself is equally refreshing. Enjoying something and being good at it are different questions, and admitting the gap between the two is a small act of humility that most promotional interviews avoid. Plenty of players will recognise the feeling immediately. Star Wars has a long history in games, spanning space combat, role-playing adventures, strategy and,...
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Leaving early access is a milestone that carries more weight than it used to. Enshrouded has spent an extended stretch in that phase, and version 1.0 is being presented as the point where the project stops being a work in progress and becomes something the studio is ready to stand behind. The setup is laid out clearly in the launch trailer. You are Flameborn, the last spark of hope for a species that is fading, and the goal is to reclaim Embervale. Between you and that goal sits a tainting mist, a threat the game asks you to endure rather than brush aside. Survival games built around a hostile environment live or die on how that environment feels. A mist that corrupts and spreads is a useful device because it turns the map itself into a source of pressure, giving exploration a cost and making safe ground feel earned rather than guaranteed. A 1.0...
Read MoreCall of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 arrives on October 23, and it will do so without the safety net that Xbox players have come to expect. The game will not be available through Xbox Game Pass at launch, a decision that marks a real change in how the series is being positioned. Activision has restated the point in a new blog post timed for the eve of the campaign’s early access period, which begins on October 16. The company has been clear about this for a while, so the post is less a revelation than a confirmation, but the timing gives it weight. Game Pass has spent years being sold as the reason to choose Xbox, and day-one arrivals have been central to that pitch. A release as large as a new Modern Warfare sitting outside the service cuts against the message, even if the reasoning behind the decision is easy to understand. For...
Read MoreSome games are remembered for what they were. Others are remembered for what they might have been, and Agent belongs firmly in the second category. Sony announced it at E3 2009 as a PlayStation-exclusive espionage title built in collaboration with Rockstar, with Sam and Dan Houser overseeing production. It never released. The project quietly stopped being discussed, and for years the only information available was the announcement itself and the occasional rumour. Now Dan Houser has offered more detail about why the game fell apart, in conversation with IGN. The context of that announcement matters. Platform exclusivity deals were common in that era, and a partnership with a studio of Rockstar’s stature was a genuine coup. It signalled that Sony was willing to fund original work rather than simply secure timed access to multiplatform releases. Cancellations are rarely the result of a single failure. Projects of that scale involve technology that has to be...
Read MoreStreet Fighter has always been more than a fighting game. It is one of the few series whose characters are recognisable far beyond the audience that plays it, and any list of the most famous faces in the medium tends to include Chun-Li, Ryu and Ken without much argument. For a lot of people, that familiarity started in the arcade. The series was a gateway into fighting games during the 1990s, a decade when the genre was a social space as much as a competitive one, and the characters carried that experience into other media. That is what makes the live-action record so frustrating. The curse in the headline is not a supernatural one. It is the simple fact that Street Fighter has never been served well by the transition to film, despite a premise that seems built for it. Adaptations of fighting games face a structural problem. The appeal of the source is...
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