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I found the discussion on Episode 15 of the Big Red Potion podcast fascinating. Sinan, Joe and their two guests were attempting to come up with a definition of what a “video game” is. They weren’t saying that this was a necessary or even particularly worthwhile endeavour, but rather (as with many Big Red Potion episodes) just using it as a good excuse for an intelligent conversation about gaming.

It got me thinking about how I’d personally define what a video game is. I suppose, like Big Red Potion, I should start by thinking of a good definition of a “game”.

For me, a game is ‘play’ within the boundaries of rules. These rules could be agreed beforehand by the participants, exist already as part of their shared culture or arise and develop organically through the action of play. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve never really understood people’s fascination with zombies. I think that some of that is down to my complete disinterest in the horror genre. I’ve just never been one for blood, guts and scary movies. As a result I’ve missed out on all the “classic” zombie films, such as Dawn of the Dead.

Of course, to be cool, these days you don’t call them zombies… they’re “infected”. They’re not the dead, come back to life, they’re victims of some disease or experiment. Is it just me… or is that just not quite as scary?

Despite my complete ambivalence towards the brain-munching hoards, I’ve somehow found myself playing three zombie games this past month… Read the rest of this entry »

Cranky Gamer’s Replay game for May was the Oblivion Knights of the Nine DLC…

Playing through The Knights of the Nine content was a really interesting experience for me as it meant revisiting a game that I hadn’t played for well over a year.

Now, there are some games that you can just jump right back into but I don’t think Oblivion is one of them. I’d like to think I was a veteran player, having spent over seventy hours on the game, but I’d forgotten so much… like what spells I had access to, what weapons I used to use, where my house (with my stash of equipment) was and…erm… exactly what it was I’d done to upset the guards in every city in the land. Luckily that last problem was more a case of mistaken identity and , in general, the process of acclimatising was made a little easier having just played Fallout 3. Read the rest of this entry »

How would you like to come face to face with an eighteen year old version of yourself? It’s what I feel I’ve just done and it was a very weird, but wonderfully nostalgic experience. Strangely, it wasn’t through finding an old diary, letter, photograph or videotape. It was from playing a game. Let me explain…

Back in the early nineties, when all the cool kids were playing with their Amigas and Atari STs, I was still well into the adventure game scene on the ZX Spectrum. These were proper adventure games. No flashy graphics (in fact, usually no pictures at all) but lots and lots of highly descriptive prose.

Back then classic text adventures, such as Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure, Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Magical Scrolls The Pawn and Melbourne House’s The Hobbit were filled with more head-scratching puzzles, devious mazes and slimy monsters than you could shake a pointy stick at. Most of the games tagged “adventures” these days are a walk in the park in comparison.

In a text adventure your greatest enemy was usually the software parser which attempted to translate your two or four word instructions into something the game would understand. Many hours could be spent attempting to come up with the right “verb noun” combinations. Did you have to OPEN BOTTLE or UNSCREW LID or perhaps PRISE TOP? It was certainly a good way to build up your knowledge of synonyms. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been playing about with Apple’s Garageband software recently. So I could get to grips with the application a little better I decided to put together a short audio “review” of Fallout 3’s previous batch of downloadble content “The Pitt”.

It was really done to give me some experience recording, slicing, splicing and manipulating different audio. If you’re feeling particularly bored, and don’t require high standards of production and presentation from your “podcasts” then you can listen to my experiment by using the audio player in this post.

Just two brief warnings. The first is that this is really just a complete bit of fun that’s more for my ears only than a wider audience but, as it didn’t come out too badly, I thought I’d put it up here.

The second warning: Although this audio presentation doesn’t contain much more detail than your average written review, if you plan on playing Fallout 3 “The Pitt” DLC spoiler-free then you would be better off avoiding listening to the podcast.

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