Lately I've been feeling as though my attitude towards gaming has changed. Not so much that I feel as though I want to stop playing games in general but enough to make me feel as though my gaming tastes may be changing, if only ever so slig...

Picture the scene - flowing fields of green, green, grass sweep before you, trees rustle in a light wind, a single blackbird perches on an old stone wall pecking at the moss as the ground disappears behind you, then you see it, in the mi...

I find it immeasurably hard to write about Sweet Home, though I love the game and feel it's largely been overlooked by gaming culture I also know that in the past it has had a lot of attention from horror enthusiasts – anytime there's a Hor...

And the original (much larger) Mario always sounds so goddamn chipper all the time in his games, for no apparent reason. It bugs me, nobody's that happy - atleast not without medication. The only way I could really think of to break som...

The Following is an In-depth Study into the History of Exploding Barrels in the Games Industry ...or just some words on a page that vaguely make sense! ;o So why do we still have exploding barrels in videogames? Anybody? Anybody know ...

What makes good TV, films or games? Is it just about fantasy fulfillment, or is there more to it? Do we just look for the perfect or do we also look for the complicated, the difficult, the realistic in our fiction? In horror, it's often th...

And the original (much larger) A rare glimpse behind the scenes of where bosses come to learn their trade - I mean they must all learn it from somewhere, right? Somebody obviously must be teaching them all these conventions and contrived...

So lately I've been thinking a lot about the Fourth Wall in games and more specifically how that relates to how seriously games take themselves, after a desire to replay MGS4 caused me to think about the Metal Gear Solid series and its rela...

It's not often games buck the trend, there's a lot of money out there in being able to copycat or toe-the-line when it comes to the industry standards for a genre, and it's often easier to do that than try and stand out. In the strategy g...

A couple of days back I had some trouble with my internet: it suddenly cut out inexplicably. It turned out in the middle of switching providers our previous provider had shut us off before we'd even had a chance to switch over, and thus no ...

There aren't many franchises I keep tabs on, in fact I can probably name them on a hand or two (mine or yours, doesn't really matter), there are fewer still series that I approach with anything less than pure scepticism at announcement an...

So I picked up a copy of  Michigan: Report from Hell not too long back and started playing it at a fairly piecemeal rate and having completed it I wanted to put down a few thoughts on paper (ok, on screen). Granted, it's not the sort of g...

Horror games don't always do well, it's a hard genre to make work just right; unlike, say, racing games or action games where aesthetics and atmosphere are secondary to the mechanics horror is all about atmosphere; a game can be great horro...

That is the question. Whether it tis... ok screw that, I won't bore you with a bad Shakespeare joke! XD But I thought I'd ask the question which seems to be getting more and more pertinent in gaming today: Do we really need to shoot stuf...

I typically tend to write about big issues in gaming, long-running trends or themes about gaming as a whole but from time to time it's interesting to take a step back from modern gaming and examine some forgotten gems of classic videogaming...

In the last generation or so of consoles character design has become increasingly important in games, not just in the sense that characters need to be well-designed to be appeal to players but also in the sense that player choice in the mat...

Where do stories come from? How much about the games we play is made up of our sense of cultural identity and how much is driven by creative urges? I wondered this the other day when I saw a piece about Iranian videogames; the report it...

With a new Syndicate game on the horizon and an X-COM reboot in the pipeline you might be forgiven for thinking we'd fallen into some sort of time-warp and been whisked back to the giddy heights of the early 90's - where mobile phones are t...

I've had Skyrim about a week now, and though there's undoubtedly a ton of blogs, articles and reviews out there already that probably go into a lot more depth than I ever could about Skyrim I thought I'd write down a few of my impressions o...

What's the point of games? People have been asking that question since... well since games were first created! Is a game just about flashy lights and loud noises or is it a medium to convey meaning and messages? Are games dumb fun or are...

Remember Dynasty Warriors? I do, vaguely. The lovingly crafted historical inaccuracies The camp men The bad voice-acting in almost every game. Dynasty Warriors (I'm going to write in the present tense and assume Koei are still ...

I've always been a big fan of horror in all it's gaming forms. For me the start of this was Resident Evil 2, probably the first really terrifying game for me as a kid; the height of it probably the slew of Japanese horror games of the ear...

Something struck me (not literally) when I was playing Fallout 3 the other day, as I was trapsing across the wastelands, randomly encountering giant scorpions and protectrons and scavenging through the wrecks of abandoned buildings. It was ...

Ok, so I'm going to talk about something nobody's ever heard of - Operation Flashpoint: Red River. At this point in the blog you've probably raised an eyebrow or are poking the screen (please don't do that, you'll only get it mucky), and ar...

I find myself querying this from time to time when playing games (in a totally non-racist way) and it makes me wonder about why developers make characters the way they do – like why are so many videogame characters white? Why are so many l...

I'll be honest, I lied - there are no hookers in this blog, but wipe your tears away my friend, for I have to tell you about how evil the games industry is and how we must all hate it: right from this second! ....yeah this second, no, yeah,...

I use that word 'choice' with a certain degree of scepticism when it comes to Heavy Rain - generally based off my own experience of the game; Heavy Rain was a game billed as something of a revolution in terms of videogame design by it's dev...

Back in 1993 Syndicate was a Isometric Shooter in which you controlled a team of cyborgs and navigated them around a small town/city-scape map to achieve various objectives all in the name of your corporate overlords. It was a fun game an...

I want to start by saying that I, like pretty much every other gamer, have a long list of pet hates when it comes to the videogames industry and I'm not going to sit here and bore you with a ten hour rant about why I think some things are d...