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Feature: Gamers Should Be Heard And Not Seen
It's mid-May and it's raining outside. Someone I can't see is making me laugh. These omens suggest that it is time to return to my Idle Musing column. Something else inspired this, too, which was last week's Planetside 2 Call To Arms. I had intended to film the whole thing and then chop it up for YouTube commentary, but once I was on the Mumble…
Feature: If Only We Could Eat All The Monsters
Occasionally – just occasionally, mind – games choose to add some of our real-world bodily functions to the characters we control in them. Hunger, thirst, even nausea and sewage creation. For some reason, this is peculiarly satisfying, and as such is almost always popular with players: as most strongly evidenced by the popularity of The Sims, with its filling bladders and exponential human smelliness. But…
Feature: The Action Before The Action
In the real world I am not much of a tinkerer. I can fix a few bits and pieces on a car, and build a PC, but when it comes to actual tweaking and tinkering, figuring out what I can be boosted, what can be overclocked, and what must be tuned, my talents – and my ambitions – are fairly limited. Not so in the…
Feature: For Hi-Score
With the Easter weekend coming up and my family poised to descend upon me in an inexorable tornado of baked goods and idle gossip, I realise with a heavy heart that I won't have much time for games in the next few days. That's okay, though, because I know I'll make time soon. I'm also comfortable in the knowledge that I live a relatively charmed…
Feature: Glitch Me Happy
However hard games try to create worlds, they remain artifice. They are stage sets. Painted boxes. And when you step outside them, you get to see how unreal that game world actually is. This, from time to time, can be a wonderful thing. Let's raise a glass to the strange lands that lie outside the game you were meant to see, that glitchy empire of…
Feature: That Tiny Carton Of Milk
Remember the bit in Fight Club where Ed Norton is sitting on a plane and he explains to the guy sitting next to him his theory of “single-serving friends”? Well, something similar is true in multiplayer games.
Feature: AFK In The Stars
Many games feature invisibility in some form. An excellent moment I recall from my days in World Of Warcraft was necking an invisibility potion to run past a load of mobs I couldn't fight, while my rogue friend stealthed his way through. (If only that game had more such emergent highs.) Anyway, the Invisible Bastard joy I want to talk about is probably only applicable…
Feature: Non-Player Carnagers
Over Christmas I drew up a list of little things about games that have always intrigued, interested, or appealed to me. I've been adding to it over the past couple of weeks, and I'll be writing about these little nuances of gaming in the coming months. These are just idle musings, but I hope you'll find them to be food for thought. Today's is about…
Feature: Relaxing Meatgrinders
Or at least against the odds skirmishes. This is an afternoon ode to that time when you set up a skirmish mode in an RTS and pitch yourself against extraordinary odds (perhaps with a chum to help you). It's one of those little pleasures that I think most RTS players understand, but is probably unknown by, well, the rest of humanity.
