Video Games

Look, my question to you is simply this: have you watched Paul Robertson’s Kings Of Power 4 Billion %? No? THEN DON’T COMPLAIN YOUR LIFE ISN’T EVERYTHING IT COULD BE! It is special. You could watch it on Youtube: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSdoDjcI5VE] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYKe3lg8KfM] But actually the quality of the compressed vids is pretty shitty. My advice? Be … Read more

Apologies for the lack of updates recently. I know you must have been tearing at your hair and gnashing your teeth with sheer boredom, and for your fortnight of torment, I beg your forgiveness. A combination of tech problems, writerly busy-ness and lovely weather have left me with mere slivers of free time, and every … Read more

So if you’ve been doggedly following my blog for some time now, you’ll know I’m a capering ninny of a fanboy for Andrew Hussie’s MS Paint Adventures. I’ve posted several times before about the marble cake of win that is his text adventure meets webcomic meets ‘what if you could play the most awesome video … Read more

Since today marks the 25th birthday of Tetris, I thought meh, why not, I’ll chuck in a ‘bonus’ post. There have been many variants of Tetris over the quarter century since it first appeared, but none quite achieve the status of ‘Hatris’. Yes. It’s Tetris but with hats. WACKY. Playing Hatris is like waking to … Read more

Cotton Boomerang (full title Cotton Boomerang: Magical Night Realms) is a side-scrolling shooter that takes the hypercolour cutesy aesthetics of games like Pop n’ Twinbee and Parodius, dials back on the self-consciously wacky elements, adds a touch of R-Type, then finishes with smatterings of that deliciously cultish shoot-em-up sub-genre, ‘bullet hell’, to create a game … Read more

Appoooh is an early attempt by Sega to capture the excitment and sweaty, balletic majesty of pro-wrestling, without actually forking out for the rights to the WWF franchise. This 1984 button mashathon sees you limp and jerk around the ring, punching, kicking and grappling your opponent into a stupor before going for that all-important pin. … Read more

Tinkle Pit is the kind of hyper-cutesy epic bananas-ness that peaked in video gaming around the late 80s and early 90s. For the most part Taito had this market all sewn up, with the Bubble Bobble franchise, New Zealand Story, Don Doko Don, Rodland and Liquid Kids amongst others. Namco clearly decided they could go … Read more

‘Tim is off on a search to rescue the Princess. She has been snatched by a horrible and evil monster. This happened because Tim made a mistake. Not just one. He made many mistakes during the time they spent together, all those years ago. Memories of their relationship have become muddled, replaced wholesale, but one … Read more

So some of you may have caught The Sun’s ‘story’ about Heather Mills getting approached by Capcom to front the publicity campaign for the long anticipated next-gen sequel to classic platformer Bionic Commando. Appearing beneath the headline ‘GREEDY MUCCA’S OUT OF LUCKA’ the article frothed about how she had supposedly been asked ‘because of her … Read more

I love a lot of old video game music. Sure, there’s a hefty dollop of nostalgia at work, but many video game soundtracks are astounding in how they manage to squeeze sophisticated tunes out of limited sound capabilities. I think working with such heavy restrictions brought the best out of many composers, which is why … Read more

The first game I ever worked on was an RTS space sim called Nexus – The Jupiter Incident. It was developed by a Hungarian company called Mithis, who wrote a script, then had it translated into English by a native Hungarian speaker. This was where I came in. It was my job to take the … Read more

I’m a broken man. In my infinite naivety, I believed that any game called Ninja Clowns would have to represent some high watermark of human endeavour. Because, you know – they’re ninja fucking clowns, dude. Turns out that the obscure 1991 side-scrolling beat ’em up Ninja Clowns is literally one of the worst games ever … Read more

So yes, I do a bit of moonlighting on another blog, Mercy Recommends. For a whole bunch of weeks now, I’ve been posting a regular feature every weekend, one which I call: ‘Video Games: A Cultural History’. The tone oscillates between irritatingly flippant and a kind of Simon Schama esque middlebrow patrician didacticism, and I … Read more

Following on from yesterday’s post about MS Paint Adventures, I thought I’d point you in the direction of some funbox online adventure games. If you head to the ‘Games’ section of the Homestar Runner website, you can play a whole bunch o’ affectionate parodies that are actually pretty sweet games in their own right. The … Read more

So, a while back, the ever-awesome Metafilter put me onto this exchange, between gaming legend Tim Schafer – who worked on Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandago, amongst others – and joystiq.com. In it, Tim and his interviewers turn a simple email exchange into an adlibbed mini text adventure. It’s a lovely, … Read more

Here’s Guy from Final Fight looking understandably displeased: By inserting more money, you make a knife fall from the ceiling. Although it doesn’t appear to sever the fuse or your bonds, Guy appears nonetheless delighted:

I have nothing to add to this, except: ‘Nooooooooooooooo!’

Since I may be without internet access for a few days, I thought I’d go ahead and post another continue screen. This is one of my my favourites, winning the coveted ‘Most Shamelessly Manipulative Arcade Game’ award. What makes it worse is that Toki is one of the hardest platformers ever created. You’ve got a … Read more

Lest we forget, video games are commercial enterprises designed to cajole/extort as much revenue from punters as possible. With the decline of the arcade, comes the death of the ‘Continue?’ screen. Coin-ops used a variety of strategies to try to convince players to reinvest – over the next few weeks, I’ll post up some of … Read more

The story you’re about to read involves scandal, creative genius, and a 15 year conspiracy of silence. Oh – and Sonic the Hedgehog. So, after a long, long hiatus, I started playing Sonic 3 again. When I reached the Carnival Night Zone, a few bars of the awesome soundtrack were all it took to propel … Read more

So, some of you may have read the post I wrote last week, called ‘Why Gaming Matters’. In it, I complained that child literacy promoters too often present their task in terms of luring children away from video games, into the rich cultural world of books. I argued that video games have had just as … Read more

Hey. You should put Mercy Recommends in your favourites list. It’s a new blog by the talented folks behind Mercy, covering lots of their interesting artsy projects and random assorted fascinating stuff culled from the interwebs. I’m going to be contributing a feature semi-regularly (or at least until they tell me to bog off), where … Read more

BBC4 are starting a new season called Why Reading Matters. Reading and literacy are Good Things, I think we all agree. But it was a line in the Radio Times, previewing the season’s launch programme, where ‘Children’s Poet Laureate’ Michael Rosen ‘does for literacy what Jamie Oliver did for school meals’, that thumped one of … Read more

He came to power with an agenda of change, and in doing so, brought hope to a hitherto disenfranchised section of the populace. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you America’s first purple president: All great villains evoke guilty admiration. Though your official allegiance is with the heroes, you can’t help looking upon the motley havoc … Read more