A MOST AGREEABLE PASTIME

Video Games, Victorian Style

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The first game that Lewis ever played was “Horace Goes Skiing” on the ZX Spectrum. Yes, he’s that old.

Month: October 2015

  • Project Zero: Maiden of Black Water has arrived!

    So this turned up on my doorstep this morning. It’s quite strange to buy a Wii U game with ’18-rated’ emblazoned all over it. It almost feels naughty. I’m mega impressed by how much you get in the collectors’ edition, check it out: Look at all that: a poster, postcards, art book and steel case……

  • Syndication: Assassin’s Creed needs to be less euro-centric

    History is a sensitive topic to approach with me.  No, I’m not a denier of the holocaust or anything quite so dramatic or silly, rather I find the lens we tend to look at history through to be a tiny bit skewed.  From the outset I find it a tad odd that Australian history wasn’t…

  • From The Armchair: Bring On The Scares

    What-ho, chums! It’s been an inordinate amount of time since our last tete-a-tete, but you can blame this dearth of communication on the heavy mantle of fatherhood, which I now carry proudly across my shoulders. As such, the lightweight blouson of gaming has been left hanging on the neglect peg, although of late I’ve had…

  • Review: Pokémon X

    I seem to always be way behind when it comes to the Pokémon franchise. The original games, Pokémon Red and Blue, passed me by on their European release in 1999 – I think at the time I dismissed them as being ‘for kids’ (I was at university at the time). But by the time Pokémon…

  • The game about the internet before there was an internet

    I’ve been a big fan of the work of William Gibson for a long time, but it was only recently I found out that his first novel, Neuromancer, was turned into a video game back in 1988. I found this especially interesting because Neuromancer (and its short-story prequel of sorts, Burning Chrome) essentially predicted the…

  • A visit to a real-life Fallout Vault

    Back in the summer I found out that there’s a decommissioned nuclear bunker not far from where I live in Edinburgh, just at about the same time I heard the announcement of Fallout 4. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to write an article on what life in a real Fallout Vault would be like…

  • Post-democratic capitalism and government acceptance of social inequity

    Remember Me is at its heart a depiction of post-democratic capitalism.  Set in Neo Paris in 2084, the story is as much about providing a word of caution about our world as it is, with the fight against what is effectively corporate slavery put right at front and centre of main protagonist character Nilin’s story.…

  • Two racing games and a rotary engine

    I find that the start of any Civilization game is always the most exciting. It’s the excitement of anticipation, of mystery, knowing that there’s a whole  world out there to explore. There is still a palpable giddiness that comes with your first military unit, your first settlers unit, your first granary, and of course your…

  • Big Ant Studios is swarming America’s cultural monopoly

    There’s a very good reason that cultural victory became a central part of the Civilisation (read: Civilisation) series’ vernacular, because while the first half of the 20th century was punctuated by a couple of rather large conflicts, the latter half was most certainly dominated by a global culture war at the hands of the United…