Blogs

When is comes to games journalism, there’s a lot of useless crap out there. I’m not in any way sectioning myself off from that. I’m as guilty as the next man; "I love this game, but such and such hates it". Even today, my own opinions on White Knight Chronicles have flown in the face of the common hegemony among all of the games magazines which operate out of this office, who largely shun it – that the game is actually rather brilliant.

Have you levelled up recently? This fundamental ingredient has been around since the inception of the RPG genre, but what does it really signify and does it make sense?

Issue 94 of games™ is out soon and features the following reviews:

I have a spare room in my flat known as ‘The Museum’. It’s a wonderful place full of consoles and gaming machines from the past. I don’t play with them as much as I should, but for me, part of the fun is collecting them and just knowing they are there. The ownership of the thing is equally, if not more important than the playing of them.

The announcement of the PlayStation Move (a subject on which we’ll be expounding upon in greater detail as we discover over time how developers intend use it in contrast to Microsoft’s Natal) got us musing about its possible impact on the growth and dominance of the FPS on 360.

I was in New Orleans studying Economics and Mathematics at Tulane University (minored in theatre too). I was planning on following in the footsteps of Sir Mick Jagger and attending the London School of Economics, only not dropping out to become a rock star. Although that can be a wise career choice. I walked into a sandwich shoppe for lunch and there I saw my first coin-op game console… Space Invaders. I took one look and knew instantly this was going to be very big. I did not think for a moment, however, that I would become as involved with it as I did.

This may be a little behind the times we’re aware, but ploughing through the quite excellent original Mass Effect of late has highlighted various inevitabilities regarding the human condition. For the same reason that Tails the fox was often deliberately propelled to his spiky doom via the addition of a second controller, or Virtua Fighter characters were always forced into that additional ground slam (causing them to pratfall face fist out of the ring), it’s hard to resist playing the bad guy.

Leonardo DiCaprio is a name I never thought would appear in this column. But there it is. Nolan Bushnell is a name that makes total sense in this column. So, other than name-dropping, what’s my point?

Well, Activision’s finally come out and made an official statement about one or two things. While it partly covers the ‘were they? Weren’t they? fired’ shennanigans of yesterday – and yes, says the statement, Jason West and Vince Zampella have officially gone – things take a turn for the interesting, or horrifying, depending on your perspective, when you learn the details of Activision’s further plans for the Call of Duty series.

In honour of Sony’s potentially catastrophic failure to put a fully functioning clock inside early models of the PS3, I’ve decided to put together this Top 5 of the worst console faults of all time, just to put things in perspective. At the time of writing it’s unclear whether the PS3mageddon bug has been fixed by Sony or has simply righted itself. Either way, the panic is over and we can all laugh about it now.