A MOST AGREEABLE PASTIME
Video Games, Victorian Style
Month: February 2015
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My first impressions of Heavy Rain weren’t great. After a protracted installation session, I was wholly underwhelmed by the game’s glacier-slow and mind-numbingly tedious opening (see earlier post). However, Sir Gaulian assured me that the game picks up, and I’m glad I stuck with it. For a start, it’s a film noir thriller, and I’m…
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The following contains spoilers of Far Cry 4’s plot. Amidst the civil war raging in Kyrat is a more subtle but just as important war, one where tradition is being pitted against progress. On the surface it is a war of ideals. The people of Kyrat’s resistance, the Golden Path, isn’t just at war with…
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The following may contain mild spoilers of Far Cry 4’s plot. For the hypersensitive, consider yourself warned. I grew up in a very unreligious household. There was no anti-religious sentiment – after all I was only a generation removed from the anglo-christian upbringing of my grandparents in Europe – but there was certainly a dearth…
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I feel like we’re only a small sneeze away from having opinion polls in the games industry. It’s a popularity contest, a preferred Prime Minister racer, a two-party preferred poll. It’s indies versus the mainstream, hardcore versus the casual, high flyer versus the new comer. And with the bankrolling of large publicly listed companies, the…
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It was probably about 10 years ago that people were crying out for a return of the Adventure game. Driven by a perception that a bit of creative bankruptcy had perhaps set in, and the release of the stylus-driven Nintendo DS seemingly a perfect fit for the genre, all eyes were turning to the past…
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I’ll never forget the summer of 2006-07. I remember day after day of 40 degree weather making it impossible to keep cool. I remember sleepless nights tossing and turning in a loft apartment that practically transformed into an oven throughout the course of the day. I remember my first Christmas away from home and eating…
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“I’ve always liked Sandra Bullock”, said the world of cinema upon flocking to cinemas to see Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi ‘magnum opus’, Gravity, elevating that to a vocal scream once she was robbed of a Best Actress Oscar at the 86th Academy Awards. “I think that with her role in Gravity finally has the role to show…
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I’ve never paid for a day of Xbox Live Gold in my life. It looks weird to see that written down, given the ridiculously important role online implementation and features have played in defining consoles in recent years, but it’s a truth I think is worth acknowledging publicly. Games have moved on but what’s become…
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On Burnout Paradise – how Criterion Games’ opus perfected the art of letting players pissfart around
With the way people talk about open world ‘sandbox’ games, you’d think the designers had taken the afternoon off and forgotten to design half the game, under the guise of creating an ‘unguided experience’. They’re written about as if players were left to their own devices, free to do whatever they want without constraint, free…
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Nazis, robots, alternative timelines – on paper, Wolfenstein: The New Order (buy on Amazon) sounds like the sort of straight-to-video B-movie nonsense you’d bypass with a tired shake of the head were you to spot it in a video shop (if such places even exist any more). Yet it manages to be, as Sir Gaulian…
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While playing games our own little legends are born. The stories we form in our heads, the narratives we create to put context to what’s happening on screen, they always go on to become things of legend that tell our own personal tale of time spent with a game. In many ways it’s this imagined…
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In the very early days of video games they were primarily aimed at teaching the player how to progress. Improvement was a key driver of early arcade games, incentivised both through the per play pricing structure of the machines, and the most basic of desires to be the best by appearing on the high score…
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Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars The way consumers act you’d think the big publishers of the video gaming world have landed on Mayfair and Park Lane and stacked them high with as many hotels as the properties would allow, that they’ve landed on them, and they’ve had to mortgage their rubbish…
A MOST AGREEABLE PASTIME 