Richard Moss

It may be two Grand Theft Auto generations and 11 years old, but GTA: San Andreas is still very much alive. Its two most popular online multiplayer mods currently have a million or more active players between them — one, Multi Theft Auto, had 616,000 players in July (up from just 33k in February 2010), while the other, SA-MP, oscillates between about 15,000 and 50,000…

Truck driving games like American Truck Simulator [official site] and Euro Truck Simulator 2 [official site] are popular because they offer a routine, almost meditatively romantic simplicity — there's no lengthy checklist of deadlines to meet and stakeholders to please, no paperwork, no family to feed, no monsters to slay, nor anything else to raise your heartrate. Just you, the open road, and a cargo…

I like to tell people that the brilliance of SimCity 2000's art style rested on the fact that it was not isometric but rather used a technique called dimetric projection. In simple terms, that means the tiles were the same length in all directions horizontally, but they followed a different, flatter scale vertically. It created an iconic angular look and, functionally speaking, it was huge…

After a whopping seven years in development, Jonathan Blow’s follow-up to Braid is finally here. The Witness [official site] throws out much — though not all — of the pompousness of its predecessor to deliver a less obtuse, modernised riff on Myst. And it’s actually quite brilliant, if you can ignore its layer of self-satisfied philosophical grandiosity. Here’s wot I think.

Scant few games stand the test of time and retain a large active player base sixteen years after release. But not only has Age of Empires II endured, it has thrived. It's gained new steam thanks in part to an official high-definition re-release but mostly due to the ragtag group of modders-turned-developers who made that release possible. Forgotten Empires filled the game with new stuff…

Chris Crawford is a contradiction: mythologized for his bold vision for the future of games; criticised and dismissed for his lifelong failure to accomplish that bold vision. His numerous critics see him as out of touch and over the hill. A washout. An unrepentant failure. Someone who should give it up and walk away. But he can't bring himself to do that. He has a…

A strange thing happened in the Civilization community r/civ on January 10, 2015. Inspired by similar, smaller-scale offerings by a Twitch.tv livestream and fellow redditor DarkLava (from whom he explicitly sought permission), user Jasper K., aka thenyanmaster, shared the first part of an experiment he was conducting wherein he put 42 computer-controlled civilisations in their real-life locations on a giant model of the Earth and…

It's hard to believe that Lara Croft's been cavorting around stealing priceless artefacts and killing endangered animals for nearly 20 years. But rather more amazing is that she's been doing it in fan-made levels since November 2000's Tomb Raider Chronicles PC release, which gave anyone with the inclination the tools – in the form of an official level editor – required to send her on…