The Games Machine 410 has arrived, soon in the subscribers’ box (that 2025 marks subscription-only diffusion? It cannot be ruled out), in the digital versions and in the best newsstands which still heroically resist. Allow me, however, to make a more personal incipit than usual, for the cover game but also for my family who, at times, I have not been able to be close to as I would have liked, almost unfairly jealous of my difficult health vicissitudes.
And so, while I am preparing to talk to you about high sci-fi, the only one that I personally believe can come close to PK Dick’s vision despite coming from the old continent, I thank you and the editorial staff as well as my two beloved children, one splendidly started in his studies classics, because he believes that “language is the engine of the history of peoples, and I want to get to the latter”, demonstrating a maturity and uniqueness of intent that are more unique than rare, and the other to the Multimedia Arts of the Carrara Academy , in a form so profound and heartfelt that I almost blush when a professor – it has happened several times – sits next to me to tell me that he is a student with exceptional qualities (some, since we are on TGM, have to do with that “tame and not let yourself be tame” associated with generative AI in the last issue).
Coming back to us, an important part of Dick’s love for illusory worlds – the one that sees us projected, already in the youthful Eye in the Sky (did the Alan Parson Project think about him a little?), into cruel worlds where someone is another to control reality, without true free will – it also appears sublimated by the Polish author Stanislav Lem with the novel Solaris, stuff that would make even Clarke and Asimov pale; moreover, Lem considered the mad Californian author to be the only overseas voice capable of writing science fiction at the highest levels, almost totally overriding the “overrated” human condition (except for being denounced as a Russian spy by Dick himself, an undoubtedly progressive intellectual but also known paranoid, terrified of the “Witch Hunt”). The coordinates to be identified are common to Lem, to the authors of Picnic on the Side of the Road Arkadij and Boris Strugackij and, if one reads carefully the very essence of the Exclusion Zone, also to the authors of STALKER.
In reality it is a less central factor in the novel Roadside Picnic, as if the Strugackij brothers had only prepared the way for the screenplay written side by side with Andrei Tarkovsky for the film adaptation Stalker. Here, more than in the novel, a sentient Zone appears in directing, sometimes cruelly, sometimes sublimely, the exploration of the three characters in search of the object capable of fulfilling any desire. Although magnificent, not even the ingenious theory about the Visit, called “Picnic” for reasons that we explain in depth in the dossier (page 18) and which still have to do with the inferiority of man compared to the alien species that has visited Earth. The point that, however, connects the film Stalker with the deeper meanings of Solaris and STALKER 2 concerns a sort of “environmental mind”, something that not only governs the living world of Lem’s novel, but seems to be at the basis of the true and the Zone’s own sentient actions, both in the film and in the GSC Game World games (one scene in particular from S2 comes to mind, but it would be a spoiler). It is precisely the enormous disproportion between the human mind and those of Solaris and the Zone that makes us so small and insignificant, a tangible representation of the fragility and almost uselessness, at least at this evolutionary stage, of our species, still prey to wars and problems ecological ones that could even annihilate us without even having overcome our difficult technological adolescence.
Naturally, however, TGM 410 is not just this. Still in the in-depth area, we offer you the last episode of the investigative dossier on the Italian Game Dev, dedicated – although not exclusively – to the thorny reasons for layoffs and closures in the industry at all levels, AAA, medium and small productions. Following, the usual sea of reviews: there is the latest talked about Dragon Age, alongside the new and valid CoD: Black Ops, the remaster of Red Dead Redemption, finally also on PC, and the other leading remaster for the relatively recent Horizon Zero Dawn; good performances, then, of Life is Strange: Double Exposure, of Metro Awakening in virtual reality (we plan, in this context, to revive the VR column in the next issue) and of the smaller Forgive Me Father 2, the Italian Alaloth :CoTFK, the metroidvania Voidwrought and (REDACTED), roguelite set in the Callisto Protocol universe; Finally, the Dragon Quest III HD-2D remake is definitely excellent, even one of the best JRPGs of the year. You will also find more or less interesting games in the Reviews in Brief – a portion in which we allow ourselves, but only here, to also include tests on consoles; however, in reference to the “A” reviews, we are truly sorry for the lack of inclusion of the excellent Indiana Jones and the Ancient Circle by MachineGames, whose review arrived slightly too late for inclusion in this issue. We will not fail to remedy this on the next one, the first of 2025, but if you want to immediately know everything there is to know – advice that we very rarely give you on paper – you can find the PC review on our beautiful site.
All this without forgetting our excellent columns: from the review deck, where it is also present, I extract Metal Slug Tactics to point out the exceptional retrospective of the game to which this turn-based tactical variant is inspired, obviously the first chapter of the run & gun Metal Slug, followed by a TecnoTGM for once in the software area, in which we tell how the backbone of bullet heaven like Vampire Survivors was technically born, before leaving room for the hilarious Bovabyte and to the inspired interview with Charles Cecil. And what about RetroTGM? Alongside the usual crowd of conversions and new games for ancient platforms, in our magnificent insert you will find the hands-ons of two prestigious retroconsoles, the Atari 7800+ and above all The Spectrum, to which the qualitative scepter of workmanship and features goes.
At this point, however, the time has come to let you delve into reading – and in the Zone, for a lot of pages – one of the most particular issues in the history of TGM.
Click here for the full summary and to order the new TGM!
