One Piece Mansion

Why do we play stressful games? I find this sort of question is both easy to answer and still a bit puzzling. Of course stress can help to give a sense of accomplishment to completing a game's challenges - giving the player adrenaline enough to feel as if they've just made it, just managed to get through and time everything perfectly. But it still seems strange to me to fill  one's past-time with, not just adrenaline, but irritation, frustration, and sometimes breathless moments of panic. One Piece Mansion, a PS1 oddity I recently found in a 2nd hand games shop, seems to courts this type of stress like it were the essence of life. One Piece Mansion (which strangely has no affiliation with the Manga and anime series One Piece) is a puzzle/management game which, to all intents and purposes, is driving me mad.

Ico on the big screen

This is hardly worthy of any mention really but I love it when games crop up in everyday places, it acts as a sort of validation that games are brilliant artifacts. It also allows me to show off my game spotting skills! This one wasn't too hard and in many ways is a bit of an unfortunate cliche in the Games/Art discussion. It's Ico of course! A brilliant game which I haven't really played all that much, but it's the one which always comes up in many peoples' lists of Best Games.

What I've Been Playing

There is of course only a limited number summers one experiences before life finally turns in upon itself, forcing itself from the present into the half-existent past. Therefore, it would seem more pertinent to be out there experiencing what many of us name Life and not instead be turning in slow circles in order to shoot Eastern European scary-humans before they grab you and start shouting! Also massive Eastern European chainsaw guys! And weird magicians or something! I've been playing Resident Evil 4 which is making me want it to be winter again.

Screenshot Appropriation: Illusion City by Cameo

Infinite Possibility... a couple of criticisms

Such was the presence of Ken Levine throughout the marketing truncheon of Irrational's Bioshock Infinite that I was a little surprised not to be greeted by his muscular face finally introducing me to the finished game. The numerous interviews with Levine were, for those who had eagerly followed the game's development, the main inroad into the vivid imagery which Irrational was putting out. It certainly looked like a striking game; but, for me, it was Levine's suggestions of how those visuals would function within a narrative that really excited  me. His descriptions of the game's radical imagination; of how the character relationships would develop depth and significance with the player; of the game's unique perception of history, of reality. All of these ideas simmered in the endless interviews with Levine - acting like a one man sales team, showing a sincere passion for his product as nothing short of an incredibly important work. And, in a way, that is what Infinite is: important.

Hmmm... More Treasury Adventuring?

So, over the past few days on Twitter Stephan Orlando of Robit Studios - responsible for the excellent, and very much free, Treasure Adventure Game - has been teasing an announcement coming this week. I sometimes wonder why these people can't just tell us without having to stretch these things out but in this case I'm becoming just a bit excited.

Proteus to be released 30th Jan

It says it all in the title really, but it's great news! Ed Key and David Kanaga's game Proteus will be available on Steam and through the game's website. Priced at $7.50, which makes it around £5, its a smashing deal as well! From what I've played of the game it's beautiful and very exciting [read my thoughts about it here] and I can't wait to play it as a finished piece. Proteus ahoy!

Top Five Games of Twenty Twelve

Argh! is what I think when I look back on new game releases in 2012. What have I played? Why haven't I played all these other games? I could make a far more encompassing list of all the new games I was meant to play, should have played, and was this close to playing, than that of the meagre number I did actually play enough to say, however arbitrarily, 'I have played this and I liked it very much.' New games be damned, is what I think, before hunching over and feeling like I've missed out on everything. Well, anyway, out of that meagre crew of games I really, really, actually played this year I've pulled together a list of 5 which were my favourite - in a very specific order of magnificence! [And all imfho of course] Here they are:

My name is Guybrush Threepwood...

Ah! Someone, somewhere has seen fit to turn the the The Secret of Monkey Island's sword fighting/insult throwing into a playable browser game. It's just as enjoyable/torturous as I remember. Perfect. Now you can remember all the correct answers before you're able to use them!

SLAVE OF GOD

Slave of God is a free game whose unique visual presence seems to have inspired a few big games websites to comment on it. Most notably RPS had an excellent guest article written by Cara Ellison, who described the game in experiential terms as a kind of expressionist depiction of a night club. This is pretty spot on and therefore I would urge anyone interested in the game to first of all play it and then read Ellison's article. And then, if the day seems to be leaving you with nothing else, there's always me and this. Hi!

Thirty Flights of Loving

When playing Brendon Chung's short game Thirty Flights of Loving I can't help but be reminded of the sporadic energy which seemed to enthuse the early films of Jean-Luc Godard. A florescent mixture of ideas, influences and oblique storytelling propels this short into a dream-like state which crosses in an out of playful parody, postmodernist tangles and artful themes of memory, love and loss. In equal measures it plays out as a heist, a love story and a dream. Yet at its heart Thirty Flights of Loving remains a fun and inventive piece of interactive fiction.

Imagining Dunwall

Dishonored is a game. Most of us who play computer games regularly (and even those that don't) are most likely aware of this. It's a game which gives the player control of a character with the ability to knife people, teleport, possess living beings and peek at a bathing lady - amongst other things. It  has also been widely praised for its breadth of player freedom; not so much in terms of critical narrative choices (though there are a few of those too) but within the gameplay itself. Much like it's spiritual forefathers Deus Ex and Thief, Dishonored lets the player make gameplay decisions for themselves. Questions such as: "How shall I infiltrate this building?" and: "Do I want to kill all these people?" are important and actually answerable by the player. In this respect Dishonored recalls the playgrounds of late nineties, early 2000s PC gaming; it is a toy box in which the player can use the toys any way they wish. So there is Dishonored: very much a game. And then there is Dunwall.

Review: Deadlight

Here Lies a review I wrote for Critical Gamer about the XBLA (and now available on PC) game Deadlight. Its a mix bag of a game and though I remember shouting bad words at the T.V. quite a few times while playing it I also believe it to be a pretty unique vision of the inevitable zombie apocalypse. Visually stunning and quite scary/tense in places. Check out my thoughts after le break. 

A little bit of Halloween - HOME

This represents Halloween

Halloween past without much of a mention in my house. I've never been one to celebrate the "holiday"/festival (or whatever it is) but less so this year I seem to have completely missed it. There were no trick or treaters tentatively knocking on my door, nor did I watch any scary movies in an attempt to celebrate the wonderful feeling of being scared. I did however, without real forethought, end up playing a game.

The Steam Halloween sale saw a few really great deals but my purchases were pretty limited. The only game I bought which I really wanted to play was Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines a game which I missed when it was first released. I also bought Closure - a puzzle based platform game with what looks like quite an inventive conceit - and Home.

Twitching on the Floor: Hotline Miami

My eyes sting and my hands hang claw-like over the mouse and keyboard. I have spent the last three or so hours hunched over my glowing laptop dispensing quick precise death. Or at least for part of the time. The rest has been taken up with frantic gasps between badly aimed gun shots, misplaced punches, and strange backward movements which more often than not have left me leaking florescent red stuff over some indistinguishable hotel lobby.  

Horrible Murdery Game Out Tomorrow

Sooo.... Hotline Miami is out tomorrow and, though there's loads of other important, life maintaining work to be done, I'm really looking forward to spending the evening bludgeoning and being bludgeoned within a sleazy 80s neon malaise (bloody remains apparently spewed over a post-modern hotel interior).

Torchlight et al : A Haphazzard Defense of Genre Refinement

I posted a  review a couple of weeks ago on Critical Gamer for Runic Games' RPG sequel Torchlight II. As the review attests it's a superb action RPG in the vein of Diablo etc. Despite the much aggrandised looting I actually found the most exciting and enjoyable aspect of the game to be the combat. This was mostly down to two things:

1) lots and lots of enemies

2) variety of enemy attack patterns.

So a  lot of the time during combat I was a bit lost amidst the flashing colours; which also left my puny laptop struggling for breath. But I never felt like my many, many deaths were unfair; my mortality only ever recalled thanks to me taking my eyes off the Diablo style health-bubble-thing for too long. It was a lesson quickly learnt - though also one surprisingly easy to forget when being pummelled by masses of tentacley djinni-beings.

Book Review: Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

The subtitle to Tom Bissell's book is so ambitiously vague that it at first appears like something of a moot point when approaching the cultural history of computer gaming. The lengthy issue of Why Video Games Matter could possibly be segmented and approached in a veritable spiral of niches and areas of study - culture, technology, art, to begin with - without ever having to propose to your reader: This is why videogames matter. Such ambitions therefore seem admirably grand for such a modestly sized book. And yet when first starting the book it instantly becomes clear that such ambitions - or at least perceived ambitions - were never really intended.

GOTW: Alan Wake

Throughout the strange, unbalanced thread of Alan Wake's narrative, the writer, who gives the game its name, is mockingly referred to as, among others, Stephan King, Raymond Chandler and, most strangely, James Joyce. Personally I felt more like Garth Marenghi, but it's Stephan King, and his supernatural thrillers, whose presence is most heavily felt throughout. Alan Wake exists in that same liminal place inhabited by many of King's novels - where trashy fiction can be both utter nonsense and kind of important; kind of profound - well, at the very least genuinely enjoyable. Alan Wake gets away with a great deal because it seems to know this; it's trashy nature slips into the game as a whole, leaving memories behind which skitter between pure joy, genuine scares, ham-fisted acting, awful smiles and a few large holes in which moments of the game just disappeared into shear ordinariness. But, as with Deadly Premonition -  the cracked-out Japanese brother to the more straight-faced Wake - the game's faults and instability help it to become endearing. It's a bit messy, but when it hits the mark it does so incredibly well and the messiness only helps to underline the moments of quality.  

Gaming Report: June

A screenshot from Proteus, showing at Rezzed

Hello, hello! So, just a few updates on a couple of reviews I've written recently and a coming plug for a few further articles. Unfortunately I've recently fallen victim to a very slow case of the internet so I haven't managed to play that many new games - so if the head of BT is reading this: Sort it out! I've been trying to download Resonance for bloody ages now. Ok, sorry I'll be quiet....