A MOST AGREEABLE PASTIME
Video Games, Victorian Style
Category: Opinions
-
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:…
-
I found myself replaying 2011’s Mortal Kombat the other day. Not because I wanted to relive some sort of crazy bloodlust, not because I wanted to hear Scorpion’s “Get Over Here!” one more time before the new game, not even because I wanted to get myself hyped for what I think is one of the…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
“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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Mutant League Football eh, yeah, that old chestnut. You know the one that everyone talks about seemingly every five minutes, pining for its return, practically begging to take to the field as a mutant with tracks instead of feet? Yeah, well it was one of seemingly hundreds of ‘fantasy’ sports video games that took a…
-
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…
-
Being a migrant-built country founded by Brits and living in a city made home by a wave of Italians and Germans, it isn’t surprising that Football of the soccer variety came naturally to plenty of kids at my school in Australia. While Adelaide is a city in love with its Aussie Rules football, for a…
-
Bats and Balls. That’s where the similarities end. I grew up on a healthy diet of cricket. Sport is so entrenched in Australian culture that it’s kind of hard to escape, with backyard cricket an afternoon and family gathering staple, and television programming and ratings being quite literally dictated by what sports are on the…
-
If you’ve ever sifted through the pre-owned section of your local games store, or scrolled through the seemingly endless video game listings on ebay, you know just how little value we as people place on old sports games. Every year like clockwork, developers and publishers push out a new version of their sports simulator, while…
-
When I was a kid I was fascinated by Monkey Magic (commonly known as Monkey). I would watch reruns on Saturday mornings, staring at the screen in sheer wonderment, admiring just how different it was from the world I lived in. The design of the costumes, the demons, the world, not to mention the stark…
-
Having played video games from a very early age, it was inevitable that they’d somehow influence the person I’d become. But while the pre-classification world I grew up in was concerned about the impacts of violence, of sex, or of staring at a screen for hours on end, it has influenced my personality in a…
-
If you can say one thing about the capitalist system its that its players are risk averse when it comes to one things – that is decisions that negatively impact revenue. The rise of the publicly traded publisher was, in some ways, accompanied with a proportionate reduction in risky development projects. While the days before…
-
All this excitement over the launch of the new 3DS in the UK has put me in mind of those fantastic Japanese adverts that came out last October. For the launch of the new 3DS in Japan, Nintendo brought in Japanese pop singer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and created the most colourful, upbeat advert I’ve ever…
-
The massacre in Port Arthur, Tasmania, haunts Australia’s collective memories. With 35 people killed and 23 people wounded, it was the impetus for then Prime Minister John Howard’s gun reforms that saw the Government ban, buyback and destroy more than 700,000 firearms. It was the day we became a country that knows guns are the…
-
I’ll be honest, I think that pixel-perfect recreations of retro game experiences is a bit played out. In Super Meat Boy it was cool, but seemingly hundreds of indie games and Shovel Knight later, it was a bit old. I was there too, and it was a great time, but I think it’s time to…
-
Sadly it seems I will have to jump through several hoops in order to enjoy my new 3DS XL (buy on Amazon) on the day of purchase. I’ll be trading in my old 3DS on the day, so I’ll need to transfer all my old games and saves to the new 3DS: unlike with Apple…
-
I spent my lunch break yesterday happily watching the latest Nintendo Direct, rather like a Victorian child with his hands pressed against the window of a sweet shop, licking his lips in delicious anticipation. For a Nintendo fanboy like me, the range of wares on offer was intoxicating. The biggest news was the announcement of…
-
Fighting games are pretty incredible things really. Sure, they’re amazingly complicated, perfectly balanced and almost mathematical in the precision of their design. But they also happen to be great at doing so much with so little. Whether it be their limited scope for impressing graphically, or the amazing maximisation of “wow” from a very limited…
-
As a group – that is thirty something people that play games – we are pretty lucky. Having practically grown up alongside the medium, we witnessed first hand the ups and downs and trials and tribulations the industry has gone through pretty much from its beginnings to its relatively recent explosion into mainstream popularity. From…
-
What ho, chums! After struggling to enjoy Assassin’s Creed III, I finally decided to permanently shelve the game this week. It’s not often that I’ll leave a game unfinished – I hate abandoning things halfway through, and the same goes for TV series, books and pretty much anything really. So that gives you an indication…
A MOST AGREEABLE PASTIME 