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Review: Dead Space 2
Dead Space 2 had a Hell of a lot to live up to. Despite meagre sales, the original Dead Space was one of the best games of 2008, with its macabre gameplay and ‘no one can hear...
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Review: Eternal Sonata
Like all games of its kind, Eternal Sonata treads a very narrow margin of error. Its grand finale moved me to tears. It would probably move many others to vomit. Eternal Sonata...
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on an assassin
The phrase “late to the party” springs to mind whenever I boot up my xbox360 these days and spend the evening guiding the assassin Altair over the rooftops of Damascus. When...
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review: enslaved, odyssey to the west
Pinning down a title like Enslaved is hard. It’s a good game. I would go so far as to say that it’s an amazing game. With big names like Alex Garland pitching in on the...
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review: fable iii
Fable III picks up many years after Fable II left off: the Hero of the previous game has shuffled off this mortal coil and left their eldest son, Logan, in charge of Albion. ...
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review: the broken world by tim etchells
Rarely do video games and any other medium meet, and when they do it’s usually a massive disaster – think the Super Mario Bros movie or the video game adaptations of every blockbuster released in the last ten years. From cash ins to published fanfiction, it’s a sorry state of affairs. So, when I discovered a novel about video games that wasn’t utterly repugnant and lacking in soul, I thought it might be worth a gander.
The Broken World is portrayed as a walkthrough of a game of the same name, written by an unnamed narrator who cannot help but let his personal life interrupt his Internet duties. At first dedicated and detailed in...
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People don’t like change. Anyone who has read their Facebook feed after another of many re-designs knows that Change Is Bad. New things are terrible. Technology is suspect and will probably be used for nefarious purposes. Big Brother is watching you and cyber criminals want to steal your credit card and run up a $1200 bill calling dodgy sex lines. If only we’d stuck to the old ways, living in mud huts and dying before the age of 25 without ever seeing any of the world beyond our village. We’d have been safe from all the vaccines, the airplanes and the Internet.
Perhaps I got a bit too tongue in cheek there, but it’s a pretty...
the new xbox dashboard
People don’t like change. Anyone who has read their Facebook feed after another of many re-designs knows that Change Is Bad. New things are terrible. Technology is suspect and will probably be used for nefarious purposes. Big Brother is watching you and cyber criminals want to steal your credit card and run up a $1200 bill calling dodgy sex lines. If only we’d stuck to the old ways, living in mud huts and dying before the age of 25 without ever seeing any of the world beyond our village. We’d have been safe from all the vaccines, the airplanes and the Internet.
Perhaps I got a bit too tongue in cheek there, but it’s a pretty...
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The long silence has not been laziness or forgetfulness. On the contrary I’ve been working (reasonably) hard and playing a lot of games and considering writing about them on Press Triangle. I don’t work as hard as I should, or as hard as I want to, but hopefully once I gain a sense of direction I’ll find the motivation which powered me through my A Levels (and nearly drove me mad). Until then, there’s a lot of ruminating and reading to be done.
Over the weekend I visited one of my best friends to hang out, eat food, watch fun TV shows and walk along the Dawlish coast in memory of my late-Grandmother. He’s currently working on a PhD...
I want to study games because of reasons
The long silence has not been laziness or forgetfulness. On the contrary I’ve been working (reasonably) hard and playing a lot of games and considering writing about them on Press Triangle. I don’t work as hard as I should, or as hard as I want to, but hopefully once I gain a sense of direction I’ll find the motivation which powered me through my A Levels (and nearly drove me mad). Until then, there’s a lot of ruminating and reading to be done.
Over the weekend I visited one of my best friends to hang out, eat food, watch fun TV shows and walk along the Dawlish coast in memory of my late-Grandmother. He’s currently working on a PhD...
2
On Wednesday my University played host to a low key live demo of the Windows 8 operating system, in a free for all lecture that took place over the course of an hour. In that time we were introduced to and shown the workings of Microsoft’s latest plaything, which left a lasting if not wholly positive impression. First, we were shown a trailer. This trailer, to be precise:
Which left me feeling a bit fluttery in the stomach thinking I’d stumbled into a Windows 7 demonstration for the chronically out-of-the-loop, but no, the speaker reassured us we were indeed there to see Windows 8. After a PowerPoint presentation outlining its new...
windows 8 live demo
On Wednesday my University played host to a low key live demo of the Windows 8 operating system, in a free for all lecture that took place over the course of an hour. In that time we were introduced to and shown the workings of Microsoft’s latest plaything, which left a lasting if not wholly positive impression. First, we were shown a trailer. This trailer, to be precise:
Which left me feeling a bit fluttery in the stomach thinking I’d stumbled into a Windows 7 demonstration for the chronically out-of-the-loop, but no, the speaker reassured us we were indeed there to see Windows 8. After a PowerPoint presentation outlining its new...
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It’s always a shock to go back to games of old, perhaps on the SNES or even the NES, to find there’s no difficulty setting. You press start, and you go, and you get your ass kicked. Mastery of these games is pretty admirable in itself, because back in ‘the good old days’ video games rarely held back (if anecdotes are to be believed, anyway). The phrase Nintendo Hard has been coined in homage to this era of insanity, but their legacy has dwindled as games grow to be more approachable, “intuitive” and, well, friendly.
The first ever commercial video game, Computer Space, absolutely bombed because it was too hard for the general...
taking it easy
It’s always a shock to go back to games of old, perhaps on the SNES or even the NES, to find there’s no difficulty setting. You press start, and you go, and you get your ass kicked. Mastery of these games is pretty admirable in itself, because back in ‘the good old days’ video games rarely held back (if anecdotes are to be believed, anyway). The phrase Nintendo Hard has been coined in homage to this era of insanity, but their legacy has dwindled as games grow to be more approachable, “intuitive” and, well, friendly.
The first ever commercial video game, Computer Space, absolutely bombed because it was too hard for the general...
0
Dead Space 2 had a Hell of a lot to live up to. Despite meagre sales, the original Dead Space was one of the best games of 2008, with its macabre gameplay and ‘no one can hear you scream’ philosophy. Drawing on the sci fi horror greats in all ways imaginable, the first Dead Space game was a landmark in modern horror. Isolated in a chaotic new mythos, the player stepped into the shoes of Isaac Clarke to escape the doomed husk of the USG Ishimura, which had become overrun with a Necromorph blight following the Ishimura’s recovery of the obligatory mysterious artifact, the Marker. And what comfortable, and yet silent, shoes those...
Review: Dead Space 2
Dead Space 2 had a Hell of a lot to live up to. Despite meagre sales, the original Dead Space was one of the best games of 2008, with its macabre gameplay and ‘no one can hear you scream’ philosophy. Drawing on the sci fi horror greats in all ways imaginable, the first Dead Space game was a landmark in modern horror. Isolated in a chaotic new mythos, the player stepped into the shoes of Isaac Clarke to escape the doomed husk of the USG Ishimura, which had become overrun with a Necromorph blight following the Ishimura’s recovery of the obligatory mysterious artifact, the Marker. And what comfortable, and yet silent, shoes those...
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I went to the London Science Museum today and they had a teeny tiny segment on home computers. Inevitably, a photograph was taken. I have been promised an Atari 2600 as a present at some point, which I’m pretty excited about. What amused me most was the ZX81 computer on display is identical to the several semi-broken ones we currently have upstairs, taken to pieces and fitted back together into a single, working model. Perhaps we should show the museum our efforts at DIY… or perhaps...
something fun
I went to the London Science Museum today and they had a teeny tiny segment on home computers. Inevitably, a photograph was taken. I have been promised an Atari 2600 as a present at some point, which I’m pretty excited about. What amused me most was the ZX81 computer on display is identical to the several semi-broken ones we currently have upstairs, taken to pieces and fitted back together into a single, working model. Perhaps we should show the museum our efforts at DIY… or perhaps...
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I recently joined MCV UK, a nice round up of game industry news thats less academically driven than much of the content on Gamasutra but more serious and informative than Kotaku. If you’re interested in the games industry it’s definitely worth a look in, you can register for free and access the digital edition of their weekly publication in a PDF to browse at leisure. While reading the most recent edition, however, I came across a piece of (admittedly not stringent) data which startled me:
There is a pretty impressive gap in the market right there which isn’t being targeted right now. Perhaps it’s because the...
a concerning precedent
I recently joined MCV UK, a nice round up of game industry news thats less academically driven than much of the content on Gamasutra but more serious and informative than Kotaku. If you’re interested in the games industry it’s definitely worth a look in, you can register for free and access the digital edition of their weekly publication in a PDF to browse at leisure. While reading the most recent edition, however, I came across a piece of (admittedly not stringent) data which startled me:
There is a pretty impressive gap in the market right there which isn’t being targeted right now. Perhaps it’s because the...
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Like all games of its kind, Eternal Sonata treads a very narrow margin of error. Its grand finale moved me to tears. It would probably move many others to vomit.
Eternal Sonata is a combination turn-based real-time action JRPG, based on the dying dreams of legendary classical composer Frederic François Chopin. It’s not your average panda. Of course, some extreme liberties are taken with the concept, as I’m fairly certain that Frederic Chopin probably didn’t dream about hanging around for a prolonged length of time with an underage girl, or about battering a variety of sheep, fish and dragons to death with a conductor’s...
Review: Eternal Sonata
Like all games of its kind, Eternal Sonata treads a very narrow margin of error. Its grand finale moved me to tears. It would probably move many others to vomit.
Eternal Sonata is a combination turn-based real-time action JRPG, based on the dying dreams of legendary classical composer Frederic François Chopin. It’s not your average panda. Of course, some extreme liberties are taken with the concept, as I’m fairly certain that Frederic Chopin probably didn’t dream about hanging around for a prolonged length of time with an underage girl, or about battering a variety of sheep, fish and dragons to death with a conductor’s...
0
The phrase “late to the party” springs to mind whenever I boot up my xbox360 these days and spend the evening guiding the assassin Altair over the rooftops of Damascus. When Assassin’s Creed was the newest kid on the block I encountered it both in console and PC form, and both iterations failed to impress me. The PC port controls were crippling even on my unusually spidery fingers, and the xbox360 version was sampled while sitting in a gaming chair which stole the show by miles. For several years, then, Assassin’s Creed passed beneath my notice, and only in the last month did I finally come back around and find it in a 3 for 2...
on an assassin
The phrase “late to the party” springs to mind whenever I boot up my xbox360 these days and spend the evening guiding the assassin Altair over the rooftops of Damascus. When Assassin’s Creed was the newest kid on the block I encountered it both in console and PC form, and both iterations failed to impress me. The PC port controls were crippling even on my unusually spidery fingers, and the xbox360 version was sampled while sitting in a gaming chair which stole the show by miles. For several years, then, Assassin’s Creed passed beneath my notice, and only in the last month did I finally come back around and find it in a 3 for 2... About us
Laura Buttrick is a Computer Games Production student at the University of Lincoln. This website is a place for her musings on the game industry and its offerings.Bookmark Us
