Giving and taking offence seems to be the flavour of the month. Or is it every month? The US military have banned the upcoming Medal of Honor from being sold in its bases because the game will have the option to be a Taliban soldier. Game developers continue to be offended by the used game [More]

A fairly good two-player game that I hadn’t noticed before, as performed below by Tim Key and Mark Watson, two leftfield comedians here in England. The idea is that you take turns naming celebrities, but introduce a new rule after each one. So for example you say ‘Barry White’ and introduce the rule of ‘no [More]

I’m reading The Design Of Everyday Things, a classic text on object design, at the moment, with half an eye on how it might apply to game design. The book’s crusade is to make us aware of the things in everyday life that have been badly or confusingly designed. A lot of it rings true [More]

A quick response to Jonathan Blow’s most recent blog post. Blow is the fantastic designer of Braid, one of the best games of the 00s. But he does get up my nose sometimes . Why can’t video games give me a powerful, high-density experience, so that after 3 hours I am satisfied, I feel like [More]

I’ve been swimming twice recently. It’s the summer holidays, the the most popular pools have queues running outside in London, and the Tooting Bec Lido, London’s biggest outdoor pool, is the fashionable destination for all of south London on hot days. The most common game among adults is pool lengths – most public pools have [More]

Erm… I’m redesigning DSF once again, for the umpteenth time. But it’s because I’ve switched gaming projects – I was trying to privately write what I thought would be a book about games history. But Tristan Donovan’s excellent new book Replay has kind of covered the same territory. It’s a fantastic read, but personally it’s [More]

Gamers didn’t react too kindly to infamous critic Roger Ebert dismissing games recently – his blog post ‘Video Games Can Never Be Art‘ on the subject attracted 3000 comments. Rightly so – he deserved a good shoeing for some really ignorant rubbish. Today he offered a begrudging retraction of sorts on his blog… I was [More]

I’m kind of deciding what to do with my blog at the moment. But I did enjoy a few things about God Of War 3 (PS3, 2010) that I wanted to remember… The first is the notion of (visual) scaleability, which apparently was a key consideration for this development team from the start, and was [More]

Well this week I completed Indigo Prophecy, Assassin’s Creed 2 and Dark Void, all of which I have written about elsewhere on the blog. Indigo Prophecy in particular was totally awesome and highly recommended. That’s a pretty awesome haul of completed games – amazing that I found time for anything else… I’m trying to work [More]

In September I wrote a short piece about some of the dubious reviews accompanying Halo: ODST‘s release. I wrote… I have to say that the usually-trustworthy Edge looks like a prime suspicious contender this time. Their review, which reads something like a 7.5, and with a lukewarm thumbs-up despite the lack of originality, inexplicably ends [More]

I certainly didn’t expect to spend much of last weekend with a virtual Vin Diesel, perhaps my least favourite movie star. But there was something about Escape From Butcher Bay (2004) and Assault On Dark Athena (2009) that kept my playing through this double-release. There’s just enough in small doses of various different game styles [More]

Along with a user on another website I frequent, we challenged ourselves to name the top 25 PC games of all-time. It was partly in reaction to what seemed like a dreadful IGN top 25 list. He (CrowleyHammer) gave me permission to reproduce his list here. I think it’s an interesting collection of titles, some [More]

My aim this year (2010) is to find and promote my own utopia in this vast spectrum of gaming that exists now. To find the place where I am most comfortable and happy. It isn’t in the dour and largely uninteresting mainstream triple-A titles – or at least it isn’t often. It isn’t in the [More]

Travis Fahs’ fairly exhaustive history of Pandemic Studios on IGN is well worth reading if you’ve played any of their games (Mercs, Star Wars Battlefront, Full Spectrum Warrior). If you follow gaming news you’ll know that the studio has effectively been closed by its parent company EA after the completion of their latest game The [More]

Many blogs seem to post a weekly round-up of things that were good to read. It seems a good way to organise my thoughts, and a reminder of what was stimulating. So, here… One of the most talked-about bits of journalism of the last week seems to be this article from the New York Times [More]

Soccer is often called the beautiful game, but videogame simulators of the sport have always struggled to really capture sporting grace and expression. With FIFA 10 they are getting closer to the goal. The FIFA games have gone through a very public blood-letting over the last few years, as the arcade beginnings of the simulator [More]

I’ve been fascinated by the structure of the single-player campaign in Uncharted 2 (which I reviewed here). For a game that tries to be ‘like’ a movie how do the two media compare? Some things here are immediately recognisable – good stories are good stories in whatever medium. A hero with which we can identify, [More]

More videos like this at TheFunTheory.com. A quote from the site – This site is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that [More]

A brilliant character can take just a moment to win us over. But what about a character we don’t even see? Gamespot ran a feature over the past few months, asking who the greatest game hero is. The winner is a character who you never see, who never talks, who never changes at any point, [More]

Frequency (2001) begins with a rave-style cutscene where futuristic 18-year-olds wearing 3D glasses do some Djing while others dance between streams of coloured light. This is the future apparently. Presumably us middle-aged folk were locked away early in the 21st century so the dance music pioneers could rave to their heart’s content. This is the [More]

Pretty chuffed that Frank Lantz, one of the creative types behind Drop7, commented on one of my posts last week. Part of his post is a little disclaimer about the quote I used from the chain factor website – he says it’s supposed to be spoken by one of the characters, rather than being a [More]

DropSeven is a brilliant game. I can say that with assurance because it has been my go-to game on the Iphone for a couple of months now. Invariably I play a few rounds before I go to sleep at night. I suggest it is the best Tetris-style puzzler since Tetris. It doesn’t look like much. [More]

Presumably this player is simulating an argument in a restaurant with his girlfriend. In two-player mode she presumably has a wine-throwing peripheral to respond. Yes, this is real. And yes, it is better than real life.

Bit quiet on here at the moment – this is because I’m fiddling about with the design of the site for a mini relaunch. It wasn’t quite doing what I wanted it to do before. A collection of posts on various minutae didn’t quite cut it for me. It is hard to navigate, and rather [More]

I was away at the weekend in Kiev for the European Poker Tour event, and came back with a nasty stomach bug, but at least that has freed me up to stack up some hours in videogames this week. Nothing that matches tournament poker, but some pretty decent games regardless. Shadow Complex is an outstanding [More]

Research And Development
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Ok, I’m trying to write a first draft of a weighty tome about gaming history. It’s the only practical way I can really settle all the ideas in my head. I’ve got my wallchart, and copious notes on lots of games, but I’ve found that the only way to actually understand everything is to write [More]

I felt a little bit of game fatigue last week. My backlog is getting jammed up with games that I feel I ought to be enjoying, but aren’t. I started the original God Of War in an attempt to catch up on the series. And the game is so exactly what I was expecting that [More]

It’s been a week of finishing things off for me. I’ve had both Call Of Duty 4 and Call Of Duty 5 on rental, so it’s been nice to compare the two. They’re both essentially the same game, and both excel simply with the feel of the gunplay – it just intrinsically feels right when [More]

Resident Evil 4 has an inventory system that feels as infamous as anything in the game. It wears the game’s design choices on its sleeve – in a survival horror game that depends on overcoming limitations, the inventory system is deliberately stressful and pressured. Using a grid system, the inventory screen offers you an enclosed [More]