A MOST AGREEABLE PASTIME

Video Games, Victorian Style

recent posts

about

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

Category: Opinions

  • Why I’m looking forward to Rare Replay

    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…

  • 80’s music and the flicker of an old telly let me live someone else’s video game history

    Yeah, I’m well versed in Atari’s sordid history, allegedly bringing the gaming market to a crash. I’m also aware of the meteoric rise of Activision in that same period, driven by recognition hungry developers who more than anything, just wanted their name on the box.  I happen to also have held an Atari 2600 joystick…

  • Like sands through an hourglass, so are the games of our lives

    I’m not scared on much. I balk at the ideas that spiders are to be feared, I ogle some of the most deadly snakes right in the eyes, and walk through dark alleyways at night like they’re fields full of flowers.  But the things I am scared of are stupid, inane, and quite simply irrational.…

  • Fallout and the splendid sound of silence

    “Speak to Colin Moriarty”. It was the task that will always define Fallout 3 for me. As I traversed the wasteland in search of high adventure, there it was, always sitting at the top of my quest log.  It was at around the 60 hour mark I finally made my way to Moriarty’s Saloon, took…

  • You had me at the sound of a V8

    “By my deeds I honour him, V8.” Like the rest of the world I was pretty stunned by just how good Mad Max: Fury Road was.  As I sat there at my local cinema and watched the mutant cars duel along fury road for a good two hours, I couldn’t help but notice my cheeks…

  • What’s going on with that Radio? – how broadcast is the perfect video game device

    Prey was a lot of things when it was released. It was the next big game for the transient Xbox 360 early adopters.  It was a technically proficient shooter that promised a unique take on online multiplayer.   And it was a technical showpiece that had console gamers scrambling to buy HD televisions. But one thing…

  • Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel was the killer

    I’ve somehow managed to float through life blissfully ignorant of the exploits of Jack the Ripper. And I for one thank my lucky bloody stars for that, because to be quite frank if Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper is any indication, Mister Ripper was a tiny bit of a dick.  It wasn’t just the…

  • “Capital-gate” is stupid.

    Of all the stupid things to be outraged about in the video games industry, people’s attention has turned to not whether developers are independent or not, but rather how independent they are.  It’s all a bit Blur crying foul on being called BritPop, really, as just being indie isn’t enough to appease anymore.  The traditional-modern…

  • The pursuit of perfection

    There’s something about racing games that just click with me.  The act of driving around the same stretch of road, navigating the same corners, and veering through the same chicanes ad nauseam brings me so much inexplicable joy.  The hours i’ve dedicated to perfecting my racing line are slightly embarrassing, and my ability to push…

  • There is nothing wrong with rose tinted glasses

    When I was a young lad first learning to drive, like most, I had the car I was aspiring to buy.  It wasn’t my dream car mind – that was and always will be the Lancia Stratos – but rather it was the car that was a little bit special but just not out reach.…

  • Racing games need to work on simulating sunglasses

    It’s been a pretty jam-packed 12 months or so for racing games, with Driveclub wowing some, Forza Horizon 2 wowing most, and Project Cars wowing all of those that aren’t absolutely over the genre yet.  For the most part racing games are tinkering around the edges, but they’re driving better than ever before, and certainly…

  • From The Armchair: Sega Sentimentality

    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…

  • Guilty Party – How player guilt made Nintendogs and Animal Crossing purveyors of game design perfection

    Like Animal Crossing before it, Nintendogs well and truly worked its way into my daily routine, evoking a sense of compulsion few games have.  It wasn’t obsessions necessarily, but rather a sense of responsibility, that saw me make my real life plans around my fake life obligations.  Whether it was my civic duty to perform…

  • Don’t F.E.A.R the remake (and eight other last-gen games I’d like to see remastered)

    With every man and his dog having a rip-roaring whinge about bloody remakes, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they were as contagious and worrisome as STDs amongst first year uni students.  But put away your frangers for a minute you horny little bastard, because if you believe me, remasters and remakes may be the video…

  • Remakes and Remasters? She’ll be ‘right, mate

    It’s a bloody pandemic.  Turn back the boats, lock up your wives and daughters. They’re absolutely everywhere and they’re taking over.  Of course I’m talking about remakes and remasters, the plague upon our houses, the trend that is moving the Doomsday clock’s minute hand closer and closer to midnight with every passing day.  And I’ll…

  • Halo: Combat Evolved’s “The Library” is a textbook game design

    I love The Library.  There, I said it.  Every time I play through Halo: Combat Evolved it dawns on me that it is once Master Chief makes the acquaintance of 343 Guilty Spark that the game really picks up, and becomes justifiably one of the historical cornerstones of the medium.  Being trapped in the tight…

  • When English translation doesn’t quite work

    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…

  • I’ve set my gaming goal: finishing the Operation Rainfall RPGs

    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…

  • Through being cool

    When i was a young university-aged adult i wanted desperately to be a cool dad when i grew up.  By age 18 I’d met ‘the one’, which in my slightly over-studied and hormone fuelled mind, meant that I was on an accelerated path to parenthood.   In the heady days that were the early 2000’s…

  • Most Agreeable Moments – Viva Piñata and the nature of nurture

    There was something wonderfully magical about Viva Piñata. It was easy for tending to one’s garden to border on obsession, as building a sustainable ecosystem through both the comfort of nurture and the ruthlessness of nature, had me running home from work at lunchtime to briefly play god from the comfort of a beautifully manicured…

  • Most Agreeable Moments – DOOM

    I could write about Doom all day. And believe me I’ve tried.  And tried again.  For me it sits right next to Wipeout as one of the games that made me sit up and pay attention to games as more than just a thing that I did when the sun went down or the ball was…

  • From The Armchair: Affordable Fun

    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…

  • Fighting over Richie

    In case you’re not aware, cricket is a pretty big deal down here. Over the Aussie summer it takes over this rather large island nation, with every advertisement sporting crickets past and present spruiking any and every company’s products, every news bulletin seemingly topped and tailed with news of Michael Clarke’s hamstring or the latest…

  • From The Armchair: The Shorter The Better

    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,…

  • From orthodoxy to modernism: the finely tuned anatomy of stealth

    Games that spend so much time encouraging the player to do so little are always walking that fine line between boredom and rewarding.  If you can imagine being the guy(s) and girl(s) in the team charged with designing the levels, their only brief being to “make the player stop and think”, you’ll appreciate just how…

  • The UK game chart is complete nonsense

    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…

  • Is this the end?

    Like most kids that grew up in Australia in the 80’s and 90’s, I was a very active kid. Sure, video games were there and I liked them, but you were more likely to find me kicking the footy around or having a knock or two of backyard cricket before dinner, than you were to…

  • Day one patches: now it’s just getting silly

    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…

  • Placemaking: Dead Rising’s Willamette Parkview Mall

    The moment you step into the corridor that leads into the vast and open plaza that is the setting for Dead Rising, you are in Willamette Parkview Mall.  From the lazy Sunday afternoon muzak that plays across the loud speakers, the way the light pours in through the large pane glass windows onto the expensive…

  • Nintendo and the perils of free to play

    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…

  • Writing about Record of Lodoss War

    Another of my articles for Kotaku UK went up over the weekend – The Dungeons and Dragons Session that Became a Real-Life Phenomenon. A few people have been complaining about the ‘click-baity’ title – in my defence I should say that my original title was “The DnD session that became a Japanese phenomenon”, but one…

  • The problem with building character: Game of Thrones, Around the World in 80 Days, and a dhow.

    This post contains major spoilers for Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead: Season 1. Episode 3 of Michael Palin’s seminal travel adventure series, Around the World in 80 Days, makes for some of the most compelling television ever put to air.  In his bid to follow in Phileas Fogg’s footsteps, as told in the Jules Verne…