A MOST AGREEABLE PASTIME
Video Games, Victorian Style
Author: Lewis Packwood
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I decided to treat myself. I bought the rather lovely book Commodore Amiga: A Visual Commpendium from Funstock, and it is awesome. At 30 quid it’s not cheap, but it’s worth the money – the book comes in at around 400 pages and has beautiful colour images throughout, in addition to some fascinating developer interviews. I…
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Like the rest of the gaming world, I was utterly shocked to hear this morning of the passing of Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, aged just 55. I knew he had been diagnosed with bile duct cancer last year, but recent reports suggested that the surgery had gone well and he had returned to work, seemingly…
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My article on Russian ZX Spectrum clones – ‘The Land Where the Spectrum Lived On‘ – has just been published on Kotaku UK. This was a fascinating article to research and write, but it took an absolute age – there’s not a huge amount of information on the Russian Spectrum scene in English, so piecing…
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I’ve set myself the goal of finishing all three ‘Operation Rainfall’ RPGs, but finishing the second game on the list, Xenoblade Chronicles, is proving to be something of a challenge. I’m already 91 hours in, and the game just keeps unfolding like a never-ending carpet of multi-coloured delights… and frustrations. I’ve already blithely ignored my…
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Following a spate of excited pre-orders a few months back, and the many trials and tribulations I went through in trying to order a Woolly Yoshi amiibo, all of my chickens have come home to roost, so to speak. That is, a tonne of amiibos descended on my house, much to the alarm of Ms.…
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What-ho, chums! You may well have noticed my conspicuous absence from this illustrious online tome over the past month or so – my endless thanks to Sir Gaulian for keeping things ticking over with a steady stream of fantastic articles. I have a good excuse for my blogging slackness, however – the birth of my…
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My article on the Xbox One Rare Replay collection just went up on Kotaku UK. And there’s one game I’m particularly looking forward to playing again: Solar Jetman. As I say in the Kotaku article, this NES game wasn’t hugely successful in terms of sales, but it garnered huge critical praise – and it had…
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What-ho, chums! So, Ms. D’s two lovely sisters came a-visiting recently, and we ended up chatting about their video game habits of old. It turns out that the sisters three were once enthralled by the Sega Mega Drive as youths, and would happily spend hours passing the controller back and forth through epic sessions of…
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The Last Story was great, and so is Xenoblade Chronicles – although they’re not without their niggles. One quirk is that both games use British voice actors, which makes for a refreshing change from the usual American voices in video games. But having said that, the acting isn’t particularly, well, awe-inspiring, and in Xenoblade particularly…
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The number of games I want to play far outweighs the number of games I have the time to play (a subject I’ve touched on before). And with a baby soon to enter the Merriweather household, that gaming time is set to shrink even further. There are a few things I’m doing to make the…
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Good news everyone! With the arrival of Robin and Lucina, my set of Fire Emblem amiibos is complete! At least until they decide to release any more Fire Emblem-themed amiibos, that is. Lucina, of course, is one of the main characters in the recent Fire Emblem: Awakening for the 3DS, whereas Robin is the player’s…
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What ho, chums! Well, what a wonderful week I’ve had. I downloaded Affordable Space Adventures for the Wii U on Saturday, and it has proved to be an instant hit in the Merriweather household, with even the normally video-game-reticent Ms. D singing its praises. The game is one of those rare beasts – a Wii…
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Success! After the ups and downs of the past few days, I’ve finally managed to pre-order a Yarn Yoshi amiibo. I received a tip-off from this Reddit forum that GAME are taking in-store pre-orders for old yarn-face himself, even though you can’t currently pre-order through the website. So after confirming this was the case with…
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Regular readers will already be familiar with my current obsession of obtaining a Yarn Yoshi amiibo. Sadly, that dream seems further away than ever this afternoon – I just learned that preorders for Yoshi’s Woolly World – including a Yarn Yoshi amiibo – went up on Zavvi’s site on Saturday and sold out almost immediately.…
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OK, so I think I’m getting a bit obsessed with obtaining a Yarn Yoshi amiibo. Tantalisingly, GAME have uploaded pictures of said amiibo, and yet there’s no option to pre-order. Have they gone already? Am I too late? If not, when do the pre-orders start? Why am I so obsessed with a woolly plastic toy?…
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What-ho, chums! Since my last missive back in January, events have continued apace. The expected arrival of Merriweather Junior is now mere weeks away, after which I expect all gaming exploits will cease, at least for a time. So in the run up to the big day I’ve been luxuriating in my precious gaming time,…
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I’ve recently been playing through Xenoblade Chronicles for the first time, and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying it (well, apart from a few minor niggles, but more on that in a later post). After spending so much time in the company of Shulk and his mates, I began thinking how great it would be to have…
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For some time now, the UK music chart has combined numbers for streaming with physical and digital sales. The UK game chart, on the other hand, only counts physical sales, and as a consequence it bears little resemblance to the reality of what games are actually the most popular. This week, trade publication MCV attempted…
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Little Inferno launched alongside the Wii U, but I only picked it up recently in a sale – and what a fantastic little game it is. It’s the sort of thing I imagine Tim Burton would make if he ever turned his attention from films to video games. Conceptually, it’s defiantly odd. You’re presented with…
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I just read on Eurogamer that Borderlands: The Handsome Collection is getting a 16 GB day one patch on Xbox One. 16 GB. That’s actually bigger than the hard drive on my Xbox 360 (that’s right, I never upgraded, and somehow I’ve managed to make it this far through judicious deleting and a reliance on…
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I picked up Weapon Shop de Omasse for a pittance in a Nintendo eShop sale a few months back, and I’ve dipped into it a few times over the past few months. It’s the perfect example of a game with a winning idea that’s let down by poor execution. The set up is that you’re…
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The big gaming news this week was that Nintendo are going to start making games for smartphones in coordination with the mobile games company DeNA. Speculation has been rife, and many have been pointing to DeNA’s reliance on free-to-play games as a worrying sign of things to come. Want to play as Super Mario? Pay…
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We’ve known for a long time that gaming is no longer the preserve of sweaty, bedroom-bound teenage males (if indeed it ever was). But I was intrigued to read this article on Kotaku UK about just how much the gaming demographic has changed over the years. This was probably the most interesting part for me:…
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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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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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What ho, chums! So no doubt you’ve already heard the news by now: Club Nintendo is to close later this year, which will be very sad news for fans of free tat. Perhaps ‘tat’ is being a bit harsh, but there’s no denying the fact that the stuff being hoiked through the UK site is…
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The next wave of amiibos is released today, and look what was waiting for me in the post box… Ike will now be joining Marth on the fireplace as my collection of Fire Emblem-related amiibos grows steadily larger. I’ve pre-ordered Lucina and Robin too (although they won’t be out until April), and I’m hoping that…
A MOST AGREEABLE PASTIME 