A MOST AGREEABLE PASTIME
Video Games, Victorian Style
Tag: Video Games
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What better way to proclaim your love for the WORLD’S GREATEST VICTORIAN-THEMED VIDEO GAMES BLOG than with some beautifully designed apparel? Thanks to our multi-talented resident designer Simon Bradbrook Esq., we’re proud to present our exclusive range of MOST AGREEABLE T-shirts, available in PREMIUM or PEASANT forms and in a RANGE OF EYE-GOUGING COLOURS to suit…
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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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There seems to be no game series that is more self aware of how it has evolved over the years than Sonic. Which is why it’s so hard to understand why SEGA is still unable to troubleshoot where exactly it all went wrong with the long-running mascot’s appearances. Sonic may take his steps at a…
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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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The first horror film I ever watched was a VHS of the less-than-B-Grade 1980’s ditty Chopping Mall. And what a terrible film it was, combining somehow wooden and simultaneously overact lines delivering a truly retarded script, and a story that involved rampant security bots preying on the orgy-happy group of horny teens who were left…
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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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“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…
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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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Video game designers have taught us, through intricately designed HUDs throwing all manner of information at the player every second, to pay attention to our surroundings. Visual cues are more often than not integral to success, and much research and effort has gone into cramming as much vital information on screen in the most efficient…
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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…
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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…
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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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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…
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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…
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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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Playing through the original Halo again its hard to not be transported back to early in the new millenium. It was the sort of game that made jaws drop at the time, from the way light reflected off of the shiny surfaces in a way I at least hadn’t thought possible on a console, to…
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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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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…
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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…
A MOST AGREEABLE PASTIME 