I have. And I’d do it again, and will do it again. I’ll tell you why later, but first I want to explain a few things. On the whole, I and most of you dear readers probably hate hackers and cheaters in online games. In shor...

This could be a mistake. Presidential Election 2016 (IRL[reviewed]) Developer: United States of America Publisher: Republican Party and Democrat Party Release Date: November 8, 2016 MSRP: National Dignity   Every four years the ...

As we look at the global embarrassment that is the US General Election, and as the Brits watch a pack of lies crash faster than the pound, it is very tempting to escape away from our politicians into the world of games. They are desig...

I love my fictional universes, but what I like more is to take a peek behind the curtain and discover the influences behind the polygons rendered in front of me. I enjoy seeing how the developers have taken real work concepts and tran...

I’ve been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic on and off since it released five years ago and for five years SWTOR has suffered a problem: it’s not KOTOR 3. Whilst I don’t find it particularly fair on the game, compa...

Battlefield 1 purports to be the Lord Flashheart version of WW1, with flying aces whirling about zeppelins and with tanks blitzing across the French countryside. It seems it will do little to explore the impact of the machinegun on wa...

So, err… I’ve been here a year. As of this blog, I have been here exactly one year. How time flies. So, what have I achieved round here? Well, in a single year I have 1 blog on the front page, joined the reservists, joine...

A couple of weeks ago, I bought Fallout 4. I've been loving it. But I have two major criticisms. Firstly, the settlement building is too buggy and restrictive. Secondly, I don’t think I’ve gone on a single proper ‘Qu...

Here’s a little thought experiment for you. You are walking down a street and a clearly very wealthy guy some distance in front of you drops his wallet; you find it, open it, and find that it contains $50. Do you keep the wallet? Now rep...

Let’s talk cities. They are meant to be busy hubs of trade and discourse. They are supposed to be a mix of decadence and squalor. They should be big. They should feel alive. They should feel like Novigrad. I consider Novigrad to be th...

I had high hopes for Knights of the Fallen Empire, SWTOR’s episodic expansion. But it is off to a dodgy start. The first 9 chapters were excellent, they moved quickly, giving us good characters and action in equal measure. Chapters 1-9 di...

Lots of Images Edition Welcome back to Questing For Immersion Redux, if you don’t know what that is, here’s Part 1. So you’re up to speed? Good. Let’s talk mods and landscape porn.  According to the Nexus M...

Laying the Groundwork Last year I tried to make Skyrim as immersive as possible using 106 mods, which you can read here if you want. Most of them altered small things like individual textures or altering individual weapons such that, when...

I often see sentiment like ‘why does anyone give Bioware money, SWTOR and ME 3 are crap’ or ‘Assassin’s Creed is just boring now, why buy it?’ or ‘Rome II was shit! Why would you buy Total War Attila!?’ We also have the rather...

Not The Witcher 3, The Witcher 3 is probably my favorite game of all time, if not it’s certainly in the top 3. I’m talking about The Witcher 1, that 2007 game that almost nobody took notice of other than to ridicule the sex cards. Howev...

I don’t like episodic games - games that split their story over multiple sub-games, including trilogies. So many episodic games are well written, brimming with awesomeness and then… they fall flat and leave a sour taste. ...

'I have the patience of stone and the will of stars' -The Sith EmperorIt can also be said of SWTOR's core playerbase. We waited for more story, and for every moment we waited we bitched on the forums. Makeb only sated us for so long and Sh...

I have spent many years studying the First World War (which wasn’t actually the first globally fought war, but whatever). I’ve been to the battlefields of the Western Front, seen the row...

Welcome to the post-fresher’s week write up, in which I will beguile you with stories of my first week at uni in the hope that you give a damn. If you missed Egotisms #1 – it’s here. Let’s get started. (And I’...

In the long, long ago – 3 years to be precise – I developed a new hobby. The art of minecraft builds. In the space of a year I placed tens of thousands of blocks by hand, and hundreds of thousands more by WorldEdit. As the need...

The word ‘quest’ has a lot of connotations. In the world of RPGs, it is the idea of some grand adventure to achieve some goal, in which the journey is just as important as the ending, if not more so. There is something intrinsi...

I will get back to proper blogging soon, I promise. I’ve been a bit ill lately, played a tonne of Witcher 3 (which is today’s strangely appropriate picture theme) and there’s so much stuff happening in my life, so that&rs...

Now, I don’t own any games involving college students. So I’m going to enlighten you to the great meta-game of studentry that is the critically acclaimed Playing Videogames Without the Teacher Noticing. IGN gave it an 8. Pictur...

The Mass Effect trilogy is something rather special, a series in which all the great things (and not so great things) about gaming can be found. Great dialogue, outstanding sound design, shitty DLC practices. Each of the games is a flawed ...

Whilst some think Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is the second coming of walking simulators, it really isn’t – more like a false prophet than the messiah some seem to think of it. I’ll stop with the religion jokes ...

Today I was listening to this video from TotalBiscuit, Jim Sterling and Let’s Player veteran Slowbeef in which they discuss Konami’s doling out pre-launch copies to select Let’s Players so they can publicise the game befo...

You know what it’s like, you go onto a games news website expecting to read about Fallout 4 or what shirt Phil Spencer is wearing under his jacket today - but instead you get a load of pointless list articles in an attempt to seem &l...

Take a look at that screenshot of Sins of a Solar Empire. It's pretty, but it’s a game I don’t like. It’s too slow, the superweapons break the balance of the endgame and Titans are just a focal point of battle created to ...

So, today I read a study (that I was alerted to via Kotaku) about a meta-study into potential causal links between videogames and aggression. Note that they were looking at aggression, and not violence. That bird flew years ago, but aggres...

‘Those with great power now have great responsibility.’ That was you, yesterday. I detect a disheartening mix of irony and hypocrisy. As someone who can change our community in a weekend you have a responsibility to be good to t...