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.
Worms Retrospective
19 Jul 2013
19 Jul 2013
I used to really enjoy playing the Worms games when I was younger, but I feel that the franchise has become somewhat stale in recent years. Last year they brought out a new instalment: Worms Revolution, that finally tried out some new ideas, but it didn’t quite manage to renew my...
Mass Effect Retrospective
18 Jun 2013
18 Jun 2013
The games of Mass Effect Trilogy have become some of my favourite games of all time, but (apart from my discussion about the Mass Effect 3 Ending) I haven’t actually reviewed any of them so far. So this week I thought I would take a quick look these games and...
MICRO-transactions - The clue is in the title, people!
14 Jun 2013
14 Jun 2013
As I’ve already discussed, I am quite happy with the Free-to-Play game concept - where you can create an account, download and play a game for free, but you can buy extra stuff via in-game purchases. The best free-to-play games give unrestricted access to all features, with the upgrades being mostly...
Do we really want or need a new console generation?
11 Jun 2013
11 Jun 2013
This week marks E3 2013, one of the year’s biggest gaming conferences, which included more information about what we can expect to see from the industry in the next year-or-so. With all of this going on, I thought I would sound off about some of these announcements and ask quite an...
The XBOX ONE Reveal
22 May 2013
22 May 2013
Well, Microsoft has finally unveiled their next games console: the XBOX ONE (which has already earned various nicknames, perhaps the most flattering of which is the X-Bone). The pretentiously named console, which resembles the monolith from the movie 2001, was revealed at a Microsoft press conference yesterday. I thought I’d throw...
Open-World Games
20 Mar 2013
20 Mar 2013
Lots of video games these days feature some sort of open world, or at least places that you can explore for hidden rewards and the occasional side story. Only a few games, however, seem to integrate these mechanisms properly into the wider game. So, I thought that for my latest rant...
Review - Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm
15 Mar 2013
15 Mar 2013
It’s been nearly three years since Starcraft 2 - Wings of Liberty was finally released. It was the sequel to a game that is one of the best-selling and most critically-acclaimed strategy games of all time and a personal favourite of mine. It was also a sequel that, itself, was released...
Review: Tomb Raider
12 Mar 2013
12 Mar 2013
Just to be clear, I’m talking about the 2013 reboot/origin story ‘Tomb Raider’, not the 1996 game! I realise that doing this is something of a trend at the minute, but quite why they couldn’t have called it ‘Tomb Raider: Origins’ or ‘Tomb Raider: The Dragon’s Triangle’ or something is beyond...
Writing: Working with Wikis
09 Aug 2012
09 Aug 2012
As part of the process of creating the world for my story, I was working on a mini-website called the Databank, which contained information about the characters and the world. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was difficult to maintain and ultimately fell by the wayside....
Mass Effect 3: The Ending & Extended Cut
12 Apr 2012
12 Apr 2012
The Mass Effect Trilogy recently came to an end with, you guessed it, Mass Effect 3. It should be pointed out that it is one of my favourite game series of all time and that the final game was suitably epic and brilliant… but then there was the ending. Now, I’m...