Keeping score

 
Ever since I can remember being conscious of videogame reviewing as something to think about rather than something that simply existed, there has always been a general unease about scores and scoring. And possibly rightly so: often, a review can live and die on a score in the minds of some readers (need I mention a [...]

Living in Fable

What follows is a slightly more personal and subjective account than I’d normally post on this blog. I hope you forgive me. It also contains heavy Fable II spoilers, so read at your own peril.

Cultural objects are often infused with our own individual meanings. Our lives intersect with media in uncontrollable and unpredictable ways. As a [...]

Great Game Spaces: Majora’s Mask’s Clock Town

 

Majora’s Mask is the forgotten step-child of the Zelda series. Smaller, shorter than Ocarina of Time, with a depressing story about a suicidal moon and a deranged child kidnapping horses and fairies, it nevertheless received good reviews at the time. Since then, though, I’d argue that the game has become an also-ran, a second [...]

Adaptation

There are many predictable aspects to the gaming industry. I am no analyst, but even I can make some pretty safe predictions for the next five years. Nostradamus says that EA will continue to release yearly sports videogames; first-person shooters will remain the genre with the most ‘hardcore’ credibility; and the industry as a whole [...]

The Sphere of Influence: Journey to the Centre of the Earth

 There, upon a granite slab, appeared two mysterious graven letters, half eaten away by time. They were the initials of the bold and daring traveller:
      “A. S.,” shouted my uncle. “Arne Saknussemm! Arne Saknussemm everywhere!”
- From the Malleson translation of Journey to the Centre of the Earth

This is the first in a second series of posts [...]

Blog pause

Just a quick note: I’ll be out and about for the next three days covering eGames, so blogging will be put on hold temporarily. I hope to resume with new energy and ideas come Monday.

The pacifism of violence

 
I’ve been meaning to write on this for some time now, and with Owen Good posting a remarkably clear-minded commentary on the latest and truly horrendous Call of Duty: World at War trailer over at Kotaku, there doesn’t seem to be a better time.
I often stop and wonder at my own ethical contradictions. I have [...]

The glory of subjectivity

 
Today, I bought a Nintendo DS. Immediately, I was faced with the problem that all late-adopters of consoles face: that of sifting through a very large back-catalogue in order to choose my initial purchases. While in the store, I went with my heart, and what I remembered being told was good. I left with New Super [...]

Rolling Yahtzee

I think that by this point, it’s probably safe to say that Yahtzee, and his Zero Punctuation series is not only the most viewed videogame commentary on the internet, but also probably one of the most highly viewed video series going around. By all reports, he gets about 5 million hits per video, which by anyone’s estimation [...]

The videogame miniature

 

“The miniature is power: over the world of things we would like to possess but do not.”
- Sarah Higley, “A Taste for Shrinking: Movie Miniatures and the Unreal City”, Camera Obscura
What if the worlds we inhabit in videogames aren’t huge, but are in fact microscopic? Not sweepingly epic stretches of geography, but instead the tiniest [...]