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 Pratchett quotes on my Tumblr and Twitter feeds).
Following on from all that, I recently decided to sit down and have a go at getting the classic Discworld… Read more
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 the books to make the Harry Potter movies. Many of these are the same people who are now among the armies of angry monkeys kicking off after EVERY SINGLE … Read more
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 day, power through them and write reviews quickly to get them out around the same time as the game. Well, there are a number of reasons why I don’t … Read more
If you’ve read this blog before, you may be aware that I have ranted on the subject of Free-to-Play games before (including here and here) and on how it’s a great system that CAN work, but many people just aren’t doing it right, to the detriment of the gamers and the studios.
Well, now the team at Extra Credits have made a video talking about all these points and more, and it’s well worth a watch:
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…… Read more
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!… Read more
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 evolve to reflect the modern video games industry…… Read more
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…… Read more
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 is a justified expense, but I also think that people are being a bit harsh about how little improvements in graphics (and processing power) will matter…… Read more
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, makes a lot of people unhappy and, quite frankly, I just don’t understand it…… Read more
I’ve been looking recently at new ways to promote my photography online and, as an experiment, have created a ‘video scrapbook’ of some of my best work…… Read more