Blog
Hello and welcome to my blog. Here you will find musings on various topics from video games to mental health to fatherhood.
These thoughts are my own and not all content is 100% safe for work!
Latest Posts
View the latest posts below. Click on a category or tag to filter the results.
On the topic of game reviews...
08 Mar 2014
08 Mar 2014
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...
28 Feb 2014
28 Feb 2014
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
21 Jan 2014
21 Jan 2014
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?
23 Dec 2013
23 Dec 2013
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
28 Nov 2013
28 Nov 2013
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
04 Nov 2013
04 Nov 2013
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
01 Nov 2013
01 Nov 2013
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!
22 Oct 2013
22 Oct 2013
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...
Valve vs. The Next Generation
28 Sep 2013
28 Sep 2013
This week saw Valve (the developers behind games like the Half-life series and the Steam network) announce their new set of technologies that aim to bring the Steam gaming experience into the living room. Whether their intention was to simply expand their empire or to throw the gauntlet into the “Next...
Review: Guild Wars 2
22 Aug 2013
22 Aug 2013
Blizzard’s MMO giant World of Warcraft is now 8 years old and it is finally starting to lose its players, yet it is still the most successful online game out there. A few contenders have come along, but whether they were not as well-made or well-written or just lacked whatever it...