Blogroll

Planescape Torment: Retrospective – What can change the nature of a fan?

The shadows swarm...

Amidst the dusty annals of video gaming, there are games only mentioned in hushed tones. There are games that are traded in back-alleys, games where the few extant copies are guarded in by hooded, pale-faced men who worship the old gods Mintah, Ammygah and Com O’door. Games where only one person has ever played it, and he whispers its plot endlessly from his isolated, padded rooms in Bedlam… [more...]

E3 Day Zero: Paranoia

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It was when the morbidly-obese man’s armpit started sweating on my shoulder, as the Armenian driver hurled the minibusload of LA entrants around the corners of downtown, that I realised my hands were aching fit to burst. ‘That would be from all the hand-wringing’ I thought, ‘which would be a natural lead into a flas…’ FLASHBACK I’m sat in the plane. I’m going to be deported [more...]

Horde It Through The Grapevine: Neologisms in Game Genres

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Pretending to have read Wittgenstein, I often bang on about how words symbolise ideas, whether coherent or incoherent, and how this association comes about. To explain that in more depth; videogames are excellent non-verbal communicators, alongside paintings, movies and sculpture. Words need to be coined for new ideas drawn from important common stimuli drawn from these objects of perception. Like art, the descriptions the creator puts on something aren’t always the ones that stick. [more...]

RPS: Mnemotechnics and Ultima Underworld II

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This is a piece I’ve written for Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I’ve reposted the whole thing below because a) my hits aren’t going to hurt them and b) it’s very personal to me. If you want more information about the game, go read it on RPS – the commenters really know their stuff about Ultima. [more...]

Holidays in the Kaiber Kush

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All dreams begin and end with an elipsis… …so I’m feeling a bit lonely right now. My friends have all bummed off and left me to entertain myself, except one who I’m just walking up to the top floor of the hotel to say goodbye to, before I go and find something to do. We get to the top floor, and it’s a bit like an modernist pub, with banquette seating and high windows that show arid, impossible old mountains scraping at the air. It turns out my friend is meeting a buncha people including Peter Kay, the northern comedian, so I do my balloon trick (something involving a highly-inflated balloon and pratfalls, as far as I can remember) and Peter Kay outdoes me, without even getting up, by punning about balloons, whilst doing a trick where the balloon cord is trapped under his buttocks. [more...]