Category: Video Games
Posts about video games, including game reviews, retrospectives, and other gaming-related content.
Posts
The following posts are in the "Video Games" category:
Reflections on the Year of Gaming Challenge
Last year, I set myself a challenge: to play a game that I’ve never played before from my Steam Backlog every month. And I succeeded… sort of! I tried games and genres that I’ve never played before. But what did I learn from it? And would I recommend it?
Deliver Us Mars - Year of Gaming 2025
And so we reach month 12 and game 12(ish) of my 2025 Year of Gaming challenge. This month, I decided to play another game that’s been sitting in my library for a while; something a little different from what I’ve played recently.
Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock - Year of Gaming 2025
I had a few things lined up on my to-do list, but I wanted to try something a bit different from the other games I’ve been playing recently. And so, I started playing Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock.
Tales of Kenzera: Zau - Year of Gaming 2025
Autumn is well and truly here, and for my October game, it’s time to check out one of the more recent purchases in my Steam backlog.
Next Fest 2025 Roundup
I got through the October game in my Year of Gaming challenge faster than expected, which gave me a chance to dive into some of the demos in this year’s Steam Next Fest.
Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun - Year of Gaming 2025
And so we reach September and the 9th (sort of!) game in my Year of Gaming Challenge for 2025. This month, I’ve been playing a game that’s been in my backlog for a very long time: Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun.
Hardspace Shipbreaker - Year of Gaming 2025
This month, I decided to try another game that pushes me out of my comfort zone. Hardspace Shipbreaker is a game that I was curious about, but wasn’t sure I would enjoy. Then, I had the chance to get it for free, so I decided to give it a try.
July Demo Roundup - Year of Gaming 2025
This month, I’ve done something a little different… I didn’t really get into the game that I was trying out, so I took some time to try out a few demos instead.
Hi-Fi Rush - Year of Gaming 2025
My ‘new’ game for June is the indie smash hit Hi-Fi Rush. It’s been a rocky few years for the studio, but I’d heard nothing but good things about the game itself. So, does it live up to the hype?
Marvel's Midnight Suns - Year of Gaming 2025
As a massive fan of the rebooted XCOM games, you’d think I would have bought Midnight Suns as soon as it was released. But, mainly due to its deck-building elements, I was hesitant. I eventually acquired it last year, and now, as part of my Year of Gaming, I finally got...
Streets of Rage 4 - Year of Gaming 2025
It’s April, and it’s time for a blast from the past. This month, I’ve been playing Streets of Rage 4, a sequel to a trilogy of classic beat-‘em-up games released in 2020 - 26 years after the series’ last outing!
Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) - Year of Gaming 2025
The game I’ve been playing for March is an atmospheric puzzle platformer based on a traditional native Alaskan story. It’s called Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna), and I remember that it immediately intrigued me, but - for no good reason - it’s been on my Steam backlog for years. So, I thought...
Viewfinder - Year of Gaming 2025
The next game from my Steam backlog that I decided to try was Viewfinder, a first-person reality-bending puzzle game.
Star Trek: Resurgence - Year of Gaming 2025
The first game I’ve been playing for my Year of Gaming challenge is Star Trek: Resurgence, an adventure game developed by former Telltale Games employees. On paper, this game seems tailor-made for someone like me (i.e. someone who loves single-player, story-driven games and is also a massive nerd!).
Year of Gaming 2025
Having abjectly failed my ‘Year of YouTube’ challenge last year (where I was supposed to post a new video every month), I decided to set myself a different challenge for 2025. (I do have more YouTube videos planned - subscribe here! - but I don’t want to just rush them...
Review - Star Wars: Outlaws
The Ubisoft Game. Now with a Star Wars skin!
Video Series: Cities Skylines 2
As someone who has clocked over 800 hours in the first Cities Skylines, I was naturally quite excited for the release of Cities Skylines 2. And, like most people, I was left thoroughly underwhelmed by the game we were given.
However, rather than writing about it, I thought...
XCOM 2: Mod Report 1
XCOM 2 has support for a range of community mods via the Steam Workshop. I plan to try out a few of these mods over the coming months and produce these “Mod Reports”, where I will discuss the good, the bad and the downright insane!
2016 Year in Review
Well, it’s that time of year again. All the game journalists are doing their ‘Top Tens’ and ‘Game of the Year’ lists and now I feel obliged to do the same…
The Cost of Gaming
So, apparently Assassin’s Creed Syndicate “isn’t that bad” - which is a great improvement over recent entries in the franchise at least, but that’s a rant for another time - and I have to admit that the idea of climbing around the rooftops of Victorian London has a certain appeal.
First Impressions - Grey Goo
I was intrigued when I first heard about Grey Goo. A strategy game that recreates the classic Real-time Strategy (RTS) formula from classic games like Starcraft (one of my favourite games of all time)? Sounds great, I thought, but I decided to wait and see what happened with it. Then, the...
Free to Play Is Currently Broken
Just a quick post today - This is exactly the sort of rant I've been having over and over again in the last year-or-so, but more eloquently stated in this video by the guys at Extra Credits.
Heart of the Swarm: The Leaked Ending
I have an issue with the ending of Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm. It’s apparently not as controversial as the ending to Mass Effect, but the thing that bothers me is the same: it just doesn’t quite make sense! Part of the problem is that I’ve seen an alternative...
The Price of Freedom
I occasionally delve in to the world of Free-to-Play games (and have ranted on the subject before), but here’s a question: how much are you prepared to spend on a ‘free’ game?
Review: Space Run
I don’t have any real interest in the new consoles or any of the big titles at the minute, so I’ve decided to take a few more punts on smaller-scale/indie games instead. Hopefully, this will expose me to more genuine creativity and new ideas and, who knows, I may discover a...
Jack of all Trades
So, Destiny is out and I’m hearing a lot of buzz saying that it has elements from Halo, Borderlands, World of Warcraft and many other different game genres all rolled into one, and that it is not necessarily succeeding at emulating all of them. As someone who wasn’t a fan of...
Batman: Arkham Origins | Review
Well, I finally got round to playing Batman: Arkham Origins. I loved Arkham Asylum and Arkham City was pretty good to, but I’ve been putting off playing this one because a) it is a prequel, b) it’s been developed by a different studio and c) didn’t feature the original voice cast...
Retrospective: Discworld Noir
Anyone who follows me on a semi-regular basis might have noticed that I’ve been on something of a Discworld binge recently. I’m a massive fan of Terry Pratchett’s universe and have been through all of the audiobooks in the series in the last year-or-so (which is why there are so many...
Stop Over-hyping Things!
So, a few weeks ago, Watch_Dogs launched to a universal chorus of ‘Meh!’. I haven’t played the game myself, but the general consensus seems to be that ‘it didn’t live up to the hype’. But, as Yahtzee said in his review, how could it?
In Defence of... Changing Things
Given my interests and line of work (i.e. the fact that I am a massive nerd), you probably won’t be surprised to know that a large number of my friends were the sort of people took great delight in pointing out (and complaining about) every little detail that was changed from...
Why don't I do 'proper' game reviews?
I haven’t had any questions or comments on my blog yet, but if I were to get any, I think this would be one of them: why do I rarely write game reviews in the window immediately after a game has launched? ‘Real’ reviewers get the games early or on launch...
Doing Free-to-Play Wrong
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...
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...
Valve vs. The Next Generation
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...
MICRO-transactions - The clue is in the title, people!
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?
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
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
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...
Mass Effect 3: The Ending & Extended Cut
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...
Free-to-Play Games
I have spent a lot of the last few weeks trying out some of the ‘free-to-play’ games that are now available on Steam. I’d like to share some of my ideas and opinions about these….
Boss Fights
Boss fights are a common element of most games, but are something that I frequently find frustrating. I’d like to take a moment to look at some great (and truly terrible) boss fights to look at how they should be done.
Sonic 4 vs Sonic Generations
I’ve already talked about Sonic recently in my Retrospective, but that was before I had properly played either Sonic 4 - Episode 1 or Sonic Generations. Both of these games seem to be trying to shed some of the stuff that has made the recent games so bad and trying...
'Maturity' and Video Games
I’ve mentioned before that I have no particular problem with sex, violence and gore in video games. I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of it, any more that I am a fan of violent films. But juts because I wouldn’t buy the, doesn’t mean I’m not going to try and stop...
Console vs. PC Gaming
Today, I would like to discuss one of my fundamental rules of gaming, primarily my view of the different gaming platforms and why certain types of games should only appear on the ‘right’ platform.
Games and The Rating System
One of the things that really annoys me about working in the games industry is the stupid questions people keep asking me, and all the media nonsense that accompanies the release of many games. Whenever a new game that includes any amount of sex or violence, people go out all over...