January 2010
31 posts
30 - Korea's got Seoul
The pun, not sarcasm, is the lowest form of wit if you ask me. They can be put to good use, for sure, but its an absolute art form, a dark magic not to be touched by the uninitiated lest you sound like a jackass. Video game writers, however, seem to revel in them. Eurogamer almost gets away with it because they’re just far too ludicrous to be taken seriously - if “back to skull”...
4 tags
29 - Paranoid Android Phone
I quite like my Android now. It took hours of fiddling about, plenty of Googling and a brand new homescreen to do it, but I think I’m starting to understand why people would actually buy one. I mean, outside of being an Apple contrarian who just wants to champion things because they’re not the most popular thing in the world. It’s cool, I’ve been there. I had a Zune. But if...
28 – One a day was a silly idea
Doing a blog a day was a pretty bad idea. It’s a misnomer anyway, you don’t actually have an entire day to devote to blogging, you have to eat and work and play and commute and relax. When it comes down to it, I can find maybe one or two hours to blog, and I’d rather use that time to just sit back and enjoy a game or a TV show, and not engage my brain. I mean, let’s go through what it takes to do...
1 tag
27 - Choo Choo
The Legend of Zelda: The Spirit Tracks is awesome. I mean, its Zelda – right? Amusing little in-jokes, at least 15 hours of fun and incredibly cool dungeon designs; it would be faster to name all the Zelda games that aren’t incredibly amazing games. I just played a dungeon that was a mix of fire, ice and bell ringing. Now that’s a combination I can get behind. Oh, and you freeze pathways into the...
26 - iDont Care
By the time I post this, all the iTablet or iSlate or iBook or whatever mess will be announced and all out in the open. I absolutely cannot wait.
Not for the actual information, of course. I can wait quite happily to learn that. And not for the actual device, either, I won’t be able to afford one at launch and Apple will no doubt forget to put on a handful of features (to all the Apple fanboys...
4 tags
25 - The next stop is Peggle Circus. Change here...
The best thing about the iPod Touch (or iPhone, if you’re fancy), or just digital distribution platforms in general, is the wide range of experiences on offer. With no set prices, no framework for amount of content and no nuisance discs or cartridges to manufacturer, you can release everything from Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars – a giant sprawling sandbox adventure - to Canabalt - a one button...
2 tags
24 - Bacon Double Cheeseburger please
I freaking love fast food. I know it’s terribly unhealthy and it’s tacky and it’s not an appropriate place for an adult to have lunch, but god damn do I prefer McDonalds or Burger King over any other food establishment that exists ever. Here are some ill thought out reasons why:
1. The food is heavenly.
I mean, that’s why we don’t just eat food pills all day long, isn’t it? Because we are...
4 tags
23 - If immersion is a bullet, Bayonetta never...
I’m finishing up my review of Bayonetta for Wired and, as is usual practice, I’ve headed out into the wild world of Metacritic to find what other critics think of the game. I’m not out there to crib ideas, emulate style or help decide on my score, just to know if I’m totally off in my assessment (so I can be ready for the comments) or if I’ve neglected to mention some super important detail. The...
3 tags
22 - He had sex with a panda
My review for Army of Two: The 40th Day is now live at Ready-Up - another thing, alongside daily blogging and maintaining mental sanity, that I’ve had to fit in with my ludicrous commute. Don’t blame the lovely chaps and chappettes at Ready-Up though, I put my hand up to review the game before it dawned on me that I’m a little short on time, lately. The review comes down to this: fun in co-op,...
1 tag
21 - Completed
Game reviews are governed by all sorts of little rules, caveats and policies – generally unwritten ones like whether or not it’s necessary to actually complete a game to adequately review it - the answer to which changes from editor to editor. It’s a particularly thorny dichotomy and there’s never been an industry standard. Most websites and magazines would aspire to such completeness, but in...
20 - Music
The audacity of some developers, the absolute unabashed narcissism of some game creators just totally bugs me.
I feel like there needs to be a list of commandments or rules; a Geneva Convention that developers have to stick by or their tried in court by federal law.
And on the very top of this list, above letting you pause cutscenes (Bayonetta hooray!) and letting you change the difficulty at...
19 - !
The exclamation mark is funny. I feel like its lost its original meaning, and took on this new job as being used simply to denote that you’re parodying that sort of horribly upbeat prick who always laughs at his own jokes and says ‘no pun intended’. The type of person who sends out a Christmas newsletter to his family, litters the copy with horrible jokes… and then explains...
18 - Tired
I haven’t done a proper days work in a couple of years now. After college ended, I’ve been faffing about with freelancing to make cash, but today I started my first proper day at a job. Boy is it tiring. Up at 6:40am, back at 7:20pm, two hours a day spent on trains, one hour a day spent on tubes and eight hours a day spent in an office copy and pasting from PDF files. And then...
2 tags
17 - And the Winner is... Abadah!
I like Avatar as much as the next guy –well, not the guy who’s painted himself blue and memorised the Na’vi language, but definitely the next guy –but seeing it pick up awards leaves me with a slightly bad taste in my mouth. It’s pretty, it’s a pretty magical ride and yes, you could argue that it’s the first reason to actually attend a cinema in years, but it’s derivative, it’s predictable and...
9 tags
16 - On The Writers Guild of America
The Writers Guild of America’s nominations for 2010’s Video Game Writing Award… is an absolute mouthful. It’s also disappointing to anyone who hopes video games to have a little more going for them than inexorable violence and an electric headache. It’s also quite funny. I mean, WET? Seriously? WET is B-Movie schlock with an absolute childish obsession for Quentin Tarantino, but with none...
5 tags
15 - You can't spell 19th Century Hungarian...
IGN isn’t exactly known for its incredible journalistic integrity and creative output, but their recent spate of editorials really isn’t changing anyone’s opinion on the media giant. The latest, titled “Blinded by Mario” sees resident chucklefuck Daemon Hatfield spending twelve barely coherent paragraphs bumbling through the furthest reaches of his own muddled mind to belch out an opinion that...
5 tags
14 - Is Bayonetta Racist, Sexist, Trivialising War...
There seems to be this never ending line of games that inspire hundreds of pontificating bloggers and zesty forumites to discuss the latest video game issues. They take the form of interesting and thought-provoking essays and deal with thorny subject matter – far more exciting arguments than valiantly defending the consoles and giant manufacturers you support. It kicked off in a big way in 2008...
4 tags
13 - Arcade Fire
I must have looked like a right nob, slapping away at Bishi Bashi Special’s mushroomoid buzzers in a suit and tie. Thankfully, the London Trocadero arcade is a ghost town on weekday afternoons – a noisy, buzzing, electric ghost town that is, but devoid of human entities, so the ‘ghost town’ idiom still stands. If there was ever a argument for the death of the humble arcade, one hundred attract...
4 tags
12 - Hellish
“Today”, a press release says, “EA announced that a trade-paperback edition of the classic poem Inferno, part one of The Divine Comedy, will be distributed to booksellers nationwide on January 19, 2010. This special edition of the canonized poem commemorates the launch of the highly-anticipated Dante’s Inferno video game from Visceral Games.” I feel it’s not in EA’s best interest to be actively...
3 tags
11 - Movie studios: I like stealing from you
The audio is out of sync, the screen is blurry, a fat man stands up to go to the bog halfway through the most important scene and Robert Downey Jr’s face has a distinctive emerald tint: only the most hardcore, obstinate jackass would sit through until the end. This is of course, the “cam”, handywork of a surreptitious movie goer who points their camcorder at the movie screen in their local Odeon...
4 tags
10 - Something to Write About
Andy Kelly, the progenitor of this torturous exercise – equal parts self aggrandising and self loathing – apparently finds it deeply amusing to fluster the morale of his fellow one-a-day bloggers by posting such thoroughly unhelpful tweets as “Don’t worry, #oneaday crew – only 356 blogs left!” This leaves me asking a number of questions, like “why did I get myself into this?”, “why doesn’t...
3 tags
09 - Genealogy
What do you call someone whose mother comes from Iceland and their father comes from Cuba? An Ice Cube. I’ve got a little German in me, and I don’t mean I’ve swallowed a midget from Frankfurt. It’s always interested me when people describe themselves as half this and quarter that, their genealogic heritage spooling out like a Broken Sword plot summary. But with a name as...
4 tags
08 - Boning Up
The term “boning up” is one of those fuzzy language ambiguities where the exact etymology is pretty much lost forever. Maybe it comes from the practise of using bone to polish leather, and references polishing and refining your knowledge, or maybe it’s from Victorian bookseller Henry Bohn. No one really knows. Whatever its origin, it means to study or catch up on a specific area of interest - or...
5 tags
07 - Snip the Blue Wire (X) or the Red Wire (B)?
The Hurt Locker was everything Modern Warfare 2 wasn’t; tense and suspenseful instead of non-stop shootouts and mountainous skidoo races, about personal conflict instead of imperialistic might and featuring realistic, three dimensional characters instead of unlikeable braggadocios. “This is a game that sends a message,” TIME magazine says of Modern Warfare 2, “video games have something...
6 tags
06 - Emergency
My review of Rogue Warrior is now up at Resolution. Read it, why don’t you. I wrote last week about how Bethesda is potentially in danger of sullying their impeccable reputation with this junk. Maybe they’ve forgotten that to some outliers, those not genetically entwined with the video game industry, there isn’t such a distinct blur between publisher and developer. I remember back at...
8 tags
05 - Incoming Twenty Ten: Movies
2009 was a little sparse when it came to movies – there were fewer blockbusters, but more subversive flicks that eschewed huge budgets (Moon) and massive talent (District 9). Avatar arrived so late in the year that, despite its colossal hype, release and reaction, it didn’t have quite the same gravity as 2008’s summer blockbusters (Iron Man and The Dark Knight). 2010 looks to be gearing up with an...
7 tags
04 - Movie Review - Up in the Air
Up in the Air Director: Jason Reitman - Release Year: 2009 – Distributor: Paramount Pictures Cast: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman
Up in the Air, a rom-com about a rootless bachelor who spends his life in transit, offers a light slice of breezy existentialism from Thank You For Smoking (2005) and Juno (2007) director, Jason Reitman. Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is a...
4 tags
03 - Little Problem...
One of the joys of Apple’s App store, bristling with over 100 thousand timewasters and timesavers, is that there’s always something new to find. I’m sure its absolute hell for anyone trying to actually sell something on the service, and it’s pretty troubling for anyone trying to browse it, but it definitely keeps iPhone and iPod Touch users busy. Surfing through the App Store, subscribing to App...
3 tags
02 - Fuggin’ Ninja Style: Rogue Warrior
One of the joys of renting games is being able to test all the poorly reviewed and negatively received junk that ends up on store shelves, without wasting your cash. Perhaps to squeeze a little enjoyment from a sub-par game, to laugh at shovelware and, by playing the worst of the worst, to remind you how good most games are. Rogue Warrior is the worst of the worst. You play as Dick Marcinko – an...
01 - The One a Day Project
As New Year Resolutions go, this one is quite frightening. It’s not something you can put off till June, it’s about actively doing something and not actively avoiding something, and it’s not something nebulous or intangible. One blog, every day, until December 31st 2010. Much of the blame goes to @ultrabrilliant on Twitter, who coerced @richmcc, @PurpleSteve, @JenJeaHaly, @JimMcCauley and others...
4 tags
Goin’ Down the Farm – Trying Facebook’s Farmville
Facebook, the omnipotent social networking hub with over 350 Million accounts, has become the latest platform for innovative developers and start up game designers to make it big. Boasting over 33,000 applications on the service, hundreds of which are games, popular time wasters can draw in millions of users and potentially become giant cash cows.
The games, often time management simulations and...