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Grade: A As gamers of my generation who grew up on the Metal Gear series will know, its creator Hideo Kojima is a got-dang genius. The attention to detail and love and inventiveness he gave to 1998’s Metal Gear Solid and its sequels was second to none. There were quirks (smoking was good for you);

Edinburgh International Festival was established to champion the civilising power of European high culture in a spirit of postwar healing. But its lustre and mission have now been largely eclipsed by the viral spread of its anarchic bastard offspring, the Fringe. In competition with the latter’s potty-mouthed stand-ups and numberless student hopefuls, the dignified old

Grade: B+ Tony Hawk is an old guy these days. The most famous sk8r boi ever to have lived is now 57. A sk8r geezer, if you will; and the video games celebrating his glory days are of an age too. Gamer-geezers who remember losing hours to the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games will

Carel Weight, the inimitable painter of London life and landscape, was my godfather. I remember a clownish-faced elderly man with an air of mild quizzical enquiry, who for 16 years held one of the most important teaching jobs in Britain. In charge of painting at the Royal College of Art when David Hockney passed through,

In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera writes, witheringly: ‘we must reckon with the modernism of fixed rules, the modernism of the university – establishment modernism, so to speak.’ He is addressing the novels of Hermann Broch, which, he argues, don’t fit the standardised mould. ‘This establishment modernism, for instance, insists on the destruction

Grade: D– There’s some scholarly research to be done, I fancy, on the strange psychological appeal of boringness in videogames. These gaudy things could be non-stop excitement, and yet many of the most successful are mega boring. ‘Grinding’ – repetitive tasks undertaken for incremental rewards – is a matter of pride and pleasure for serious

Grade: A In the beginning, there was Doom. The videogame landscape was formless and void. But id Software created a square-headed space marine and several billion two-dimensional demons for him to kill with a shotgun, a chainsaw and a BFG (Big Fracking Gun); and several billion teenage boys saw that it was good, and they

Grade: B+ This is unexpected. A bright young cellist – one of the brightest, in fact – makes his recorded debut with a collection of opera fantasies. In the 19th century, touring virtuosos routinely ransacked hit operas for melodies, then decked them out with every conceivable bit of flummery, dazzlement and top-end-tinsel, the better to

Grade: A– For this winning little narrative adventure we are in the South – all gris-gris gumbo yaya, decaying mansions and ghosts of the underground railway – and it is a bit midnighty, what with the sinister otherworldly beings you fight.  Our protagonist is sassy, cornrowed Hazel, a mixed-race Lara Croft, who sets out to

Grade: A Sometimes you want to admire the pluck and inventiveness of an indie developer. At other times, you just want to sink into some thumping AAA franchise that’s thrown all the time, design talent and VC megabucks in the world at the screen. The new Assassin’s Creed has you covered there. Irresistibly, it’s set

Grade: A- It has been nearly ten years since addicts of the empire-building simulator Civilization – or Civ, as players call it – have had a fresh fix. Was it the original Civ that cost you a first in your finals? It’s back, and this time round it aims to cost you a promotion at

Olga in Three Sisters, the opening speech: ‘Father died just a year ago, on this very day – the fifth of May, your name-day, Irina.’ Jeeves says somewhere in P.G. Wodehouse that people with monogrammed slippers are afraid of forgetting their names. Irina, the absent-minded sister, probably needed reminding it was her birthday. A useful

Grade: A The original Monument Valley was a handheld puzzle game of beautiful design and high originality. Why it was called that I have no idea: the title suggests a desert landscape of red dust and sand-scoured buttes, but the playspace was a series of architectural arabesques hanging in space, around which the player navigated

Liszt’s compositions tend to have descriptive titles – ‘Wild Chase’; ‘Dreams of Love’ – whereas Chopin avoided titles. Thomas Wentworth Higginson wished titles on Emily Dickinson’s poems, opposed by his fellow editor Mabel Loomis Todd. They didn’t stick. Maybe this is why Dickinson is acclaimed but unread. ‘I heard a Fly buzz’ is easier to

Like all other forms of culture, video games offer a way to escape from, or reflect on, reality through fiction. Unlike almost any other form of culture, they are interactive – you, the player, control the experience. Nowhere is this more true than with immersive role-playing games (RPGs), in which the player embodies a character

Among the many destructive after-effects of the pandemic, the impact of two years of lockdowns has had serious consequences for public museums and galleries, particularly so for our national museums and galleries. More than two-and-a-half years since the last restrictions were lifted, visitor numbers to many of the big London institutions have yet to return