Shopping On A Hangover: Sorry, I Can’t Carry All These Swords

“If everything is fun, is anything truly fun -- how do we know?” - Geralt of Rivia

Context is inescapable when it comes to most things. Take, for instance, a beer being enjoyed at three in the morning with your live-in beloved. It's a frosty Corona, fitted with a generous slice of lime. It comes as standard with a helping of 90s dance music, something like, I dunno, Dr. Alban. Now, in isolation this is one of the most wonderful of situations I could ever hope to find myself in. I'm dancing in my living room. I'm maybe having a small snack in between sips of beer. I'm jumping up and down, as if I’m really back in the throes of clubland delight. I'm reminded of why, for me, a good, well maintained, mutually respectful and -- of course -- loving long-term relationship is preferable in every way to actually being in a club --  in the 90s or any other period of time -- and trying to find that special someone. I already have. And I'm drinking a beer and dancing with her in my living room at three in the morning.

Playing Puzzle & Dragons: Pints of Guinness Make You Strong

I've got a hamster called Mr Jibbers. Every day I get in at about six thirty and have my tea (dinner to Southerners). After that he wakes up and starts banging about, flinging his food bowl around and raking it across the bars of his cage in a way reminiscent of my memories of the pound scene in Lady and the Tramp. I'm generally a perceptive kind of guy, so I take this to mean he'd like to come out of his little prison. I oblige of course, every time, and so open the little hatch on top and wait. After about thirty seconds he'll grab a hold of the bars and pull himself up onto the roof, much like a Michael Myers surprise from the ceiling (where he appears behind his victim, lowering himself down from a pipe), just in reverse. His speed and grace in dragging his furry little body weight what would be about seven feet for a human is wonderful and astounding to watch. I do so every time. 

Mordor Could Still Use More Shelves

I’ve recently moved house and spent a lot of time doing DIY. I’ve also been playing Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. DIY is full of intricacies and I’d go as far as to say these are pretty much limitless. The “Nemesis System” featured in Mordor - which generates unique foes for the player algorithmically - is full of intricacies, though these eventually run dry. That about covers the majority of the content of this aborted missive, which is far too unwieldy for me to ever hope of bringing under control. While I was lost in the maze of drivel, I kept bumping into myself asking the same question: why, when the differentiation between ‘story’ and ‘other’ content in open world games is often so slight, can I spend many, many happy hours labouring repetitively, only to lose interest in these same tasks the moment I’m not being pushed through by a narrative?

Big game hunter: Our inability to hold games to equal standards (when they nick stuff from each other)

Last week Our Zach Alexander pulled the still-warm corpse of the last round of !!CLONING scandal!! discussions from our collective freezer and got me thinking about it all over again. Channelling Mattie Brice as if by séance from earlier in the year, he discussed the ugly head-rearing of the double standards we often encounter when the contentious topic of cloning is raised. Both Alexander and Brice are quick to identify that decrying something as a clone is a heavily subjective act, and that how one approaches the debate and frames their standpoint within it is highly reflective of their ideals both politically and humanistically. I’d like to take their sentiments and step back just a little, if I may, and try to unpack the contradictions surrounding why it’s often, but by no means always, seen as damnable to wear inspiration on one’s sleeve. 

So, this is what dying feels like, ey?

So, this is what dying feels like, ey?

10000000 is a match-three puzzle game.
10000000 is also an RPG of sorts.
10000000 is like Rogue Legacy meeting Puzzle Quest and ‘doing it’.
10000000 is better than both Rogue Legacy and Puzzle Quest.
10000000 is a bittersweet ode to life and the inevitable acceptance of our own mortality. 

Darksiders II is almost fourteen times as long as Beowulf (starring Ray Winstone)

Achieving a feat as lofty as saving humanity from oblivion should be difficult. It should be long, unforgiving, testing, exhausting: all those things we want a hero to overcome when realising their towering goals. Epic poetry is full of tales of daring men and women descending into the underworld or embarking on a perilous journey for the sake of something very important. These are characters used to getting things done, even if it takes them many years to actually accomplish their goals. As Valerie Valdes pointed out a while back and others have further explored since, games have been modelling themselves after the epics for some time. Darksiders II very much aspires to reach these same heights of dizzying heroism, and like a mythological journey around the Grecian peninsula - by way of Hades, of course - is really, really, really long for its efforts.

(Over) analysing The Bureau: XCOM Declassified’s chest-high walls (to within an inch of their lives)

I’ve done a close reading of the chest-high walls in The Bureau: XCOM Declassified and I’m happy to report that I think they could be a meditation on the tangible benefits of improved graphics. Furthermore, I reckon their implementation also questions if our lust to achieve increased verisimilitude between real and digital worlds is misguided.

In some of the Metal Gear games the player can take part in extracurricular virtual reality simulations. These largely take on the form of challenges, where the player is to focus entirely on their grasp of and prowess with game mechanics, unhindered by the troubles of setting, story, and the like. These VR excursions, in the guise of computerised training programmes, strip away all of these ‘distractions’ and stick the player-character in a glowing, geometric world made of cubes. In doing so, it could be said that the games are making a statement about where the real importance - the heart, if you were - of videogames truly lies. That while videogames are forced to inhabit the trappings of cinema, theatre and literature to attain wider cultural acceptance, the actual hallmark of the medium is, has and always will be the simple pleasures of the player moving things on a screen, and not some highfaluting screen moving the player. Pah.

Saints Row IV is the loveliest game ever made (and it loves you more than you’ll probably ever know)

The fourth entry in the Saints Row series sees The Video Game shed its mortal trappings and ascend to a higher place. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that in Saints Row IV we finally have the greatest example thus far of the video game in its purest form. While it is by no means perfect - it does regrettably give over a little too much time to characters and exposition - I see it as the closest humanity has yet come to unfettered goal-orientated mechanical perfection. To call it merely a video game is almost an insult, for SR IV operates on a plane far out of the grasp of its contemporaries. It is in fact closer to the likes of chess, cricket or professional wrestling: instances where rules and mechanics dance around one another, momentarily coalescing to create beauty, amazement and pure, magical, inconceivable beauty.