Challenge One Shelf: Assassin's Creed

It looked nice.

Is there more to say?

If there is, it's probably on how the game embodies everything that is wrong with modern game design.

Challenge One Shelf: Animal Crossing

 Mario can't croon boy, don't ya agree?

Now this is an important one.

Whilst Nintendo had always positioned itself as a family-friendly company, it wasn't until Animal Crossing (which debuted on the N64 in Japan) that we saw the beginnings of the open-to-all design philosophy that subsequently allowed Nintendo to dominate the market with the DS and Wii.

A string of identikit sequels later and it's easy to forget just how forward-thinking the first Animal Crossing was. Before this, games almost always punished ineffective players with virtual death and/or the undoing of progress they'd made. Here players lost virtual friends. Inevitably, that stung more than losing virtual lifes.

Challenge One Shelf: Air Combat

After our inauspicious start yesterday (which was basically, “err, yeah, I haven't played this for ages”), I felt I ought to at least fire this one up again before writing about it. Seems some people think that's an important part of videogame criticism. Anyway, here are my thoughts:

Challenge One Shelf: The Adventures of Alundra

A sneak peak of what's coming

What an awkward place to start. I haven't played Alundra for a very long time and it's far from one of my favourite games, but it's probably kept its place on my shelf for being the very first Playstation game I bought entirely with my own money (previously older brothers had made financial contributions towards purchases).

Challenging One Shelf

There's a small shelving unit next to the TV in my living room that has the majority of the disc-based console games I own on it.

Today, on a whim, I decided I'd organise it alphabetically, irrespective of format. In what's got to be a definitive sign that my nerdiness is increasing rather than diminishing with age, I'm quite pleased with the results:

A Fine Fantasy VII

The number seven was clearly on my mind at the end of last year. What follows is a re-worked version of an article I orginally wrote for GAMES? in October 2010. Sadly it seems GAMES? has more-or-less died now, which is unfortunate because I thought the concept of an online champion of left-field/indie games that didn't take itself horribly seriously was a good one.

Anyway, the piece was simultaneously grumpy and silly - in keeping with the previous FF(P)S column I'd written. I'm pretty pleased with most of it, except maybe what I've written about UFO: Enemy Unknown...

Pretty Graphics

If it's true that the cutscenes of the current generation of videogames give a pretty good idea of what the in-game graphics of the next will look like, then it seems we'll be hitting proper photorealism a little earlier than you might have thought:



Slightly astonishing, no? And if you're sceptical about the theory, here's the once jaw-dropping intro to Resident Evil: Code Veronica (released on Dreamcast and PS2), which could now easily be mistaken for an average-looking 360 or PS3 game.

Hungover and Hung Up on Power

Last weekend, Beefjack began a weekly series on "videogames to play when hungover". I sometimes play videogames when I'm hungover, so I volunteered to do the first article for them. You can read it here.

Granny's Garden Retrospective

I've written a few words on the true face of terror over at Beefjack. It's also sort-of the story of how I got into videogames, (which basically means it's not very informative on how the game works).

Valkyria Chronicles (PS3) - Review

Valkyria Chronicles sees you take control of a small military force, fighting a series of increasingly difficult skirmishes against a bunch of evil dudes from the east. It's a turn-based game, meaning that instead of struggling to keep track of what's happening at six different locations on the battlefield all at once, you only have to worry about one thing at a time. Personally, that's how I like my strategy games: thoughtful rather than frantic.

What's Wrong With Games Criticism?

Over the past couple of weeks, Stuart Campbell's been running an excellent series on why videogame reviews don't matter. It's all stuff that chimes with my own concerns about why I should bother trying to write interesting words about videogames, but he leaves the really important questions unanswered:

i) What's causing videogame reviews to be irrelevant?
ii) What can be done about it?

I'll happily admit to being a reviewing novice who still hasn't really worked out how to do it properly, but it seems to me there are three pretty fundamental things that the kids who write reviews for a living already almost always fail to acknowledge:

What Am I Playing At? #3

It's been a while since I last did one of these (see parts one and two), so we've got a lot to cover. Let's cut to the chase:

Heavy Rain (PS3): One of the main reasons I ended up buying a PS3 last month was because I kept seeing descriptions of this that said, "if you care at all about videogames you MUST play this game". And it certainly is quite something: at moments mind-blowing, oftentimes an embarrassment, but nonetheless consistently compelling throughout the first play through. I'm hoping to eventually write something meaningful about it, but think I should probably play David Cage's earlier games Fahrenheit and Omikron: The Nomad Soul before I do.

Heavy Rain: Are we now over halfway through the Uncanny Valley?

Worms Reloaded Review

My original text for this asked no forgiveness for being crude, and used "wank" instead of "you-know-what", but I guess if you start a review with a masturbation simile then you can't be surprised if your editor feels the need to fiddle.

Damn, must get out of innuendo mode.

Here's my first piece for BeefJack.

20 Years of American TV Videogame Reports

Then



Now


SIGH.

(Both vids shamelessly stolen from UK-Resistance.)

Games?

Do do do please check out this hip new online magazine I've somehow blagged my way into becoming a staff writer for. It's all about videogames that perhaps shouldn't really be called games, and it cuts a jib I very much like. I've only got one short piece on Psychosomnium in this issue, but I'm looking forward to getting more seriously involved in forthcoming ones (the publication of which hopefully won't clash so much with my musical commitments).

Anyway, here's a snippet from Ashton Raze's editorial to whet your appetite:

"Sure, gaming narrative may not have reached the sophistication of Shakespeare, and we may not have found our Citizen Kane, but that extra level of interaction, that control we have, the resonance with our avatars and their fates, it's really something else. Games can do almost anything, they can allow us to be almost anyone, they can provide virtually any experience and in time, as the medium grows and matures even further, they will. Games can be anything they want to be, or the player wants them to be, and with GAMES? we intend to show this."

Super Mario Galaxy 2 Review

It's very hard to talk about something you think is brilliant without just saying, "it's brilliant!" over and over again, so it's lucky Lewie lets me do more-or-less whatever I like when I write for him on Savygamer. I realise now that in this review of Super Mario Galaxy 2 that got published today, I spend more than half my time talking about the history of the series instead of the game itself, which is probably not the most balanced way of approaching things. Ho hum.

How to Keep Busy (part one)

For reasons that for the moment have to be kept hush-hush, wink-wink, shush-shush, pinch-your-ear, look-at-the-sky, no-not-here-over-there kinds of quiet, I need to work on improving my knowledge of the independent videogame scene. The neat little video below of 235 free-to-play indie games has given me a terrifying indication of the scale of the challenge ahead. I've played barely 20 of the games shown. THE SHAME.

Yet if there's anyone capable of staying glued to their PC for hours on end, obsessively twitching at their keyboard, and trying to find the "looks-like-a-bog-standard-platformer-but-is-actually-a-paradigm-shift-inducing-wonder" game among them all, then I hope it might just be me.

Wish me luck.

Disregard Females, Acquire Currency

Compared to my last couple of videogame articles (that talked about foolish women and being all gooey-eyed over them) the piece that's gone up on B4HD today about the Playstation masterpiece ISS Pro Evolution is a lot more traditional. Hopefully that means "less self-indulgent", rather than boring.

You tell me.

Shenmue Revisited

This is what academic types might call fetishization. I'd call it an okay piece of writing. Whatever it is, it's my first piece for B4HD, the newly launched retro gaming site. You might wanna have a nosey around the rest of the site if you like that kind of thing...

Players Will Be Players

I'm simultaneously proud and utterly ashamed of the piece that's just been posted on Resolution. It's 87% fictional, which is probably a betrayal in itself, but that 13% is still enough to make it hugely embarrassing for me to re-read.

Anyway, it's here if you want to check it out.