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The Way We Play Now: Max Payne 3
Max Payne 3 is an amazing experience. Max Payne 3 is not an amazing game. In fact, I’d go so far to say that Max Payne 3 is barely a game. Let me explain. With GTA4 and Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar...
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Shadow of the Colossus: An Ode To The Conferences Of E3 2012
I recently found myself recumbent, coffee in hand, musing and pondering how I could put my love for Shadow of the Colossus into mere mortal verse. It’s the game that swayed me into purchasing Sony’s...
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5 Reasons Why Computer Game Adaptations Seldom Work
I love a good film adaptation, me. Although I do appreciate an original story, nothing gives me a greater cinematic pleasure than seeing something I love translated from another medium onto screen. I...
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Rezzed 2012: A View from a Casual Gamer
As Jake wrote about yesterday, we went down to Brighton to attend Rezzed, a showcase of new PC games and talks. Not one to be outdone, I’ve given my thoughts – on being a gaming outsider, and yet...
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Good Co-Op, Bad Co-Op – what exactly is co-operative play?
Modern co-op gameplay tends to bring to mind voice chat headsets, paid subscriptions and getting cussed by teenaged strangers. It doesn’t have to be that way. The co-operative experience is as varied...
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Thirty Flights of Loving Isn’t a Game, It’s a Manifesto
Well, obviously it is a game, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Brendon Chung’s Thirty Flights of Loving, for those who don’t know, is a ten minute long, Quake 2-powered, short story. It’s about...
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Is a Scary Game Scarier if You Don’t Know How to Play?
In order to play Amnesia: The Dark Descent you will need the following: A decent computer Balls of steel Experience of WASD I have none of these. So you can imagine that, when Jake invited me to play...
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I Have Played: Dark Scavenger
Many of the best things in life derive from unexpected combinations. The peanut butter and jam sandwich, for example, is humanity’s single most glorious achievement, and yet a mathematical quandary:...
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Violence is the Pinnacle of Freedom in Games, not Narrative Choice
The large majority of games are violent. Not in the Manhunt, suffocate-you-with-a-plastic-bag-while-stabbing-you-in-the-neck sort of violent, but rather the core of many games involves some level of...
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Linear is Not a Dirty Word
I was watching one of those popular YouTube commentators the other day, playing through a game that he was reviewing and he said something that struck me. He described a game as “sickeningly linear”...
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I Have Played: BioShock Infinite
Jake played BioShock Infinite and has now sat down to write most of the things that he could think to say about it. This isn’t a review. There will be spoilers in this article. The important thing to...
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Becoming What You Fear the Most: The Vicious Cycle Within League of Legends
To me League of Legends represents a paradox of conflicting emotions that lie at extreme ends of the gaming experience. On the one hand, it is an incredibly good video game. Some of my finest...
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I Have Played: Brothers
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is a game that I had been vaguely aware of throughout 2013, but simply hadn’t given any thought to. I think there was something about the promotional art work that put me...
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Football Manager: What it Taught Me About Life
For all the pretensions I could contrive about gaming, I come back to a plain fact: games are regularly a form of fantasy-living for me. I write about games, think about games, and play a variety to...
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A subjective response to the style of new games journalism
On Wednesday 26 March 2014, Jake and I went to a panel discussion about the new games journalism – the idea that games writing should be about the player’s experience, not the game’s mechanics. Here...
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