Blog
Hello and welcome to my blog. Here you will find musings on various topics from video games to mental health to fatherhood.
Check out the categories, listed in the sidebar, or view the latest posts below.
Please note: My thoughts are my own and not all content is 100% safe for work!
Latest Posts
Lives are Dead!
Remember lives in games? Of course you do! Remember how they stopped using them when arcades stopped being popular and we no longer had to insert coins to play games? No, neither do I, and I cannot understand why…
In Defence of... Alpha Protocol
I want to talk about a game I’ve been playing recently, but which wasn’t well-received at the time. This allows me to continue my recent ‘In Defence of…’ series and write a game review at the same time. Who ever said men can’t multi-task!
On the topic of game reviews...
In my last blog I talked a bit about game reviews and how they might be improved so that they don’t just represent the opinions of one individual, with whom the reader may or may not agree. This time I wanted to continue to discuss how gaming journalism needs to...
From a certain point of view...
I’ve talked a lot recently about personal taste and opinion. In ‘Can’t we all just get along’, for example, I talk about how people seem to confuse personal preference with quality. Thinking along similar lines, I’ve also been wondering whether traditional video game reviews are actually a good idea…
In Defence of Next-Gen Graphics
Quite a lot of people are attacking the next-gen gaming consoles because ‘the only tangible improvements that they will make to games is to the graphics’. I have said before that the launch of these new consoles is badly timed and I do not own either because I don’t feel it...
Can't we all just get along?
This is going a bit off-topic for this blog, perhaps, but I want to talk about something that has been on my mind and that is the current popularity of ‘hate culture’; all the people who think its OK to be deliberately offensive. I think this sort of behaviour is unacceptable,...
XCOM: Enemy Unknown & Enemy Within
Last year saw the release of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a sequel to a popular gaming franchise from the creators of Civilisation. I didn’t expect to become a fan of this game, but (as with Civilisation) I ended up getting sucked in. This month sees the release of the game’s expansion: Enemy...
Video Games as a Storytelling Medium
I wanted to take a break from my usual ranting to talk about something quite close to my heart. As part of the argument that games are (or at least can be) art, I’d like to look at something that I find particularly interesting: storytelling. In particular, I want to try...
Rewarding Bad Behaviour
I like achievements. Achievements are a good way to add some challenge, variety and replayability to a game, as well as to make the player feel rewarded, encourage them to improve their skills and give them a sense of progress. So why do some games give you achievements for playing them...
Fix your Audio Settings!
This is a rant about something that has been getting on my nerves a lot recently; the fact that that developers (and not just indies, but big ‘triple-A’ studios too) seem to be happy to release a game without seemingly any effort going into the game’s sound design and/or without proper...