By John Walker on July 23rd, 2008.
A lot of love and hard work went into a remarkable feature in the current PC Gamer (UK) – 365 free games. And now you can read the entire damn thing on Games Radar.
It was a mad labour of love/hate for half the Gamer team, as well as Jim and me, taking far longer and far more people than any feature ever should. And well worth it.
By John Walker on June 27th, 2008.
The new PC Gamer is well worth a look. Especially for a mighty feature offering details of 365 free games. It’s one of those ideas that sounds good, right up until you sit down to try and write it. Poor old Graham Smith nearly died trying, and Craig Pearson blushed red and fainted at the size of the task, at which point Jim and I were enlisted. Like mighty heroes we strode into the office, rested our broadswords against the filing cabinet, and joined Graham and Craig quivering in front of the thing. The result is pretty great, and if you enjoy the links we put to free games, get hold of it.
Meanwhile, the same edition also contains my review of Turok, which PCG have put on their website for utter free. Key words include: “Turok isn’t dreadful. Its fits in that far less entertaining position of mediocre. It makes some ghastly mistakes, but at the same time has giant dinosaurs you can kill with a bow and arrow.“
By John Walker on April 21st, 2008.
How silly of me – I didn’t spot that PCG posted my review of Turning Point: Fall of Liberty last week. Well, now I have, and you can read it with an eye of your choice.
What if Winston Churchill had been killed by that car that hit him in New York in 1931? Apparently, Hitler would have done an awful lot better, and invaded America. All German soldiers’ brains would turn to mush, all worldly objects would become magically sticky, jumping would become nearly impossible, and people would gain super-strength and the ability to absorb dozens of bullets.
As if the phrase ‘Games For Windows’ wasn’t ridiculous enough, Turning Point makes further mockery of any meaning it might contain. No mouse cursor for the menus, no video controls, no ability to task-switch, and a controller setup based on a diagram of an Xbox 360 controller. This is not a game for Windows by any stretch – it’s a crummy port of a crummy 360 game.
Read the rest of it here.
By Alec Meer on April 15th, 2008.
A quick note on two two new word-pustules I’ve affixed to the internet’s mottled hide. First, Eurogamer’s new MMO channel is foolish enough to let me celebrate my beloved City of Heroes character, The Entomologist, for 2000 words. In theory I’m talking about how COH’s character editor and class structure offers a degree of self-expression no other MMO can touch, but mostly I’m jaffing off about my 4ft tall, power-jumping energy blaster. I also rope in comments from Jim and Kieron about why their COH characters warm their heart-cockles, and say things like this:
“Alright, so your Level 70 WoW Night Elf means a lot to you. He represents all your time in the game, a visual and statistical incarnation of all your achievements. His armour is his battlescars, a sign for other players to respect or fear him. But he isn’t you. He’s just a template someone else made. The Entomologist is me. I made him. From his appearance to his powers to his nebulous personality and back to a thousand new appearance tweaks later on, Ento is my proudest MMO achievement.”
Meantime, PC Gamer throws up an Aliens vs Predator retrospective I wrote some time back, this one focusing on the game’s dismemberment physics and the timeless nature of the Alien as a foe.
“That’s why playing as the Marine, which on paper seems to be defaulting to a stereotypical FPS experience, is the smart thing to do in AvP. The blip of the motion tracker, the trustiness of the Pulse Rifle, it’s like genetic memory, an experience utterly familiar and all the more effective for it.”
By John Walker on March 26th, 2008.
This is a short piece that originally appeared in PC Gamer, recalling a key moment in my gaming life. While playing Call of Duty I experienced something horrific. I survived a level by hiding. It was humiliating, and with Call of Duty’s emphasis on the cruelty of war, I felt broken. The piece was written for the Double Life section of Gamer, which adopts the voice of the character. Hence, it’s melodrama. But it captures an honest moment of horror in response to my own instincts. Have games affected you this way? Revealed your weaknesses, or made you feel wracked with guilt?
All’s not fair in love or war
My name is Alexei, and I am a coward.
I’m a conscript, and I don’t want to be here. This isn’t my war, this isn’t my battle, this isn’t something I ever asked for. I am not a soldier. I’m not interested in being a soldier. When I was a child, the other boys would spend their afternoons chasing each other through the woods, shooting each other with sticks, practising for this. I sat in my house, the door closed, and only occasionally looked out of the window. That was where I was happy. That is where I would be happy now. Now I’m being shot at by men who don’t know me, men who look exactly like me.
By Jim Rossignol on March 25th, 2008.
A couple of my PC Gamer reviews have been posted on CVG. The Universe At War piece seems to have a random sentence out of place, but I don’t have a copy of the magazine handy to check their edit of it… and the Savage 2 review starts with “So games have souls?” When actually the magazine copy read “Do games have souls?” Which leads me to believe that it has subsequently discovered that games do indeed have souls, and the review has been edited in light of that. Anyway, this is what I was getting at:
Do games have souls? They certainly have personalities. Savage 2′s is warm, complex, and yet oddly unlikeable. He seems like a fine chap, but you’ll never be friends.
It’s a shame they didn’t post my review of 18 Wheels Of Steel: American Long Haul, which is altogether more satisfying. Instead, perhaps you could go and read this interview with the devs who make their living from mesmerically boring driving games.
By Alec Meer on March 20th, 2008.
Sorry, it’s a bit of a deluge of PC Gamer today, as they’ve just thrown a mega-ton of last-issue content up onto their site. Think of it as like visiting relatives on the other side of the country.
On my part, there’s my Audiosurf review, replete with entirely gratuitous Vonnegut quotation. It’s a significantly more upbeat take on the game than the RPS verdict (more Verdicts soon, promise), which arguably got a little sidetracked onto picking holes in the game – probably because by that point we’d already fired our happier hyperbole at each other at some length. And also because my own interest in Audiosurf tends towards the blissful edification of my ears and eyes, rather than trying to perfect the match-3 element. It’s not often that I stay with a game for a significant time after the review’s filed, but my most intense Audiosurf playing came in the fortnight following my word-fart. I suspect I’ll be voting it slightly higher in the year-end polls than most folks.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Jim Rossignol on March 20th, 2008.
I don’t hate indie games. But just so you understand the true nature of PC Gamer’s most recent Devil’s Advocate, I direct you to look at the title. Devil’s Advocate. It’s the column in which I argued graphics are more important than gameplay, and games should be harder, more boring, and free of violence. You know, I was being a Devil’s Advocate. DO YOU SEE? The latest one is here, and in it I slag off the recent Indie gaming trend:
Nostalgia will end up turning gaming into the Ouroboros worm, the snake that swallowed its own tail: the more we depend on this stuff, the more we backpedal, and the more stunted our gaming world becomes. Retro, you see, can mean ‘retrograde’ as well as ‘retrospective’.
Once you’ve had a read, take a look at the comments thread. JESUS CHRIST HOW STUPID ARE THESE PEOPLE. THE CLUE IS IN THE FRICKEN’ TITLE. HELLO? EARTH TO MOLE PEOPLE?! WHAT TIME IS IT ON YOUR PLANET? HNNGAARGH.
By John Walker on March 13th, 2008.
Dear me, a few days ago the fine-feathered folks at PC Gamer put my preview of Age Of Conan on their website and I didn’t notice. That’s being remedied RIGHT NOW.
Be tantalised by this excerpt, and read the rest here:
Six months ago, Conan looked to be in a spot of bother. The beta began, and the players let out a unified “Erk”. The problem? The combat. In trying to move away from the standard MMO fare, Conan’s esoteric approach to online fighting left many players bemused. Now, only about four months from the delayed release date, it’s that element of the game that’s seen the most work.
The good news is that it’s still different enough from every other MMO to be interesting. The better news is that it’s very easy to play. Perhaps even too easy. Every enemy in the Robert E Howard-inspired game has three points where they can be attacked: left, right and above.
By Alec Meer on March 10th, 2008.
PC Gamer’s Tim Edwards, a top-chum and occasional employer of the RPS hivemind, wasn’t terribly happy about Greg Costikyan’s controversial assertion that a game review is a different, lesser beast to game criticism – a nobler species Costikyan claims barely exists. So he’s posted a riposte on the PC Gamer blog.
It includes stuff like this:
Greg’s is a purely semantic argument based around trying to define what reviews and criticism should be, that doesn’t take into account what reviewers and critics are already doing. Games criticism doesn’t /have to be anything/. There are no rules of what reviews can and cannot include – the only question for writers should be: what will the reader gain from the review?
There may be blood. There already is in the Gamer blog’s comments threads, in fact – but you lot will, I’m sure, keep it civilized over here.
Which side of the argument am I on? Well, personally I feel that – oh! Look over there! It’s a badger, with a gun! Yoink!
Read the rest of this entry »
By John Walker on March 4th, 2008.
Every now and then when the handsome folk at PC Gamer aren’t feeling handsome enough, they put up one of my reviews. It’s approximately a 34% increase in handsome. Today they’re buffing up with my review of online money-spending opportunity, Kwari. It begins very much like this:
Games traditionally work like this: you buy it, you install it, and then you play it as much as you like until you grow old, wither, and die. Let me try and sell a different idea to you.
How about instead you install the game, and then pay and pay and pay every time you play it? Sounds good, eh? Oh, and you could win some money too! You know, after you’ve paid for your ammunition.
And carries on over here.
