Read me: my writing on other sites

My writing: guaranteed* to make you smarter! * - Not a guaranteeIn December last year, I was contacted by a games website called D22 Zone. They liked my blogs here and, based on that, asked me to contribute to their site; I’ve been writing a couple of articles a week for them since then. Around about that time, I also submitted an article to a fledgling games criticism site called Medium Difficulty. All of which should go some way to explaining why this blog hasn’t seen any updates in a good many months.

By co-incidence, this week saw Medium Difficulty finally launch, at the same time as D22 Zone was undergoing a major relaunch, with a new theme, hosting provider, and regular writers. So, that seemed as good a time as any to update my own blog and, in lieu of a proper new entry, to post some links to all the great things I’ve written elsewhere in the past few months.

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Percute terram

Oh, sure. It's all fun and games until the undead, winged ettin turns up and someone loses an eye.Every game of Dwarf Fortress begins with a simple imperative: “Strike the Earth!”. If I ever take it upon myself to create a family coat of arms, it shall be emblazoned with that motto. I can truly think of no more useful and rousing wisdom to pass on to future generations.

Both battle-poem and epitaph, it deserves to become part of the canon of geek-proverbs along with “May the Force be with you” and “The cake is a lie”. But whereas those two simply mean “good luck” and “this is obvious deception”, respectively, “Strike the Earth!” is an exercise in pithy Dwarven brevity; while it may sound to the uninitiated like a simple “good luck” or “go for it!”, to any veteran of a few failed fortresses, it means much, much more.

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Wham, bam, thankyou, LAN

Of course, all this does produce enough CO2 to choke every single polar bear in the world.They say the LAN party is dead.

But what the hell do They know, anyway? They said PC gaming was dying. They said Duke Nukem Forever would never launch. They told me that tuna fish, cheese and jalapenos don’t belong together in a sandwich, and by God were they ever wrong about that.

Sure, developers have more or less given up on LAN support in new releases, on the grounds that not enough people use it. And sure, the technical obstacles that made LAN parties necessary in the first place have been steadily eroded by ever-faster internet connections and welcome improvements in things like online matchmaking and VoIP, but LAN events are as popular as ever. In fact, online gaming titans Multiplay UK recently announced the relocation of their signature LAN – the i-series – to larger premises in Telford in order to accommodate twice as many people.

So what, if not necessity, is the magic sauce still attracting thousands of gamers up and down the country to clamber behind their desk, disembowel a nest of cables and drag their heavy PCs to some far-flung hall to play – broadly speaking – the same games they could be playing online?

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Puerility Assurance: Saints’ Row and Penthouse publicity

I don't get it. Saints' Row is a game about... washing cars? With boobs? Or something?Last week, in the run-up to Comic-Con, THQ produced an unusual press release. It announced the appointment of a new “Quality Assurance” team for Saints’ Row: The Third. Sort of. See, the new team members are… well, they’re porn stars. More precisely, every single one of the six new hires is a Penthouse Pet.

Now, I’ve worked in a games studio. QA is a job about dedicated bug-hunting, repetitive testing and meticulous documentation. So exactly why it is that Volition, the studio behind Saints’ Row, thought the best-qualified people for the job would be a bevy of attractive young ladies who are enthusiastic about removing their clothes in exchange for money is unclear.

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Stay frosty: Frozen Synapse out tomorrow

It's a gun that shoots optical fibres!Each and every turn in Frozen Synapse is Clint Eastwood leveling an over-sized revolver at your face, asking if you feel lucky. Maybe you do, so you send your shotgunner barrelling in the back entrance, blazing away. Maybe you don’t, so you pop a grenade in the window and cover the door with a machine-gun. Either way, 5 agonising seconds roll past, someone’s faithful soldier ends up a crumpled sachet of ketchup on the floor, and you’re asking yourself Dirty Harry’s famous question again.

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Teach n’ preach: Don’t take it personally, babe…

"Well, sir, it's your hair. It's just too damn cool for a 38-year old English teacher."Christine Love, creator of heartwrenching Uplink-meets-Romeo-and-Juliet game Digital: A love story, is back. Don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story is an interactive novel with anime art set in a high school in 2027. I can hear the corners of your lips curling into a sneer. Now, hold your horses. She made Digital, remember? That was great! I’ll just bet she can elevate this above the clumsy dating game / porn wrapper that seems to dominate perception of the genre. Right?

Well, mostly, anyway.

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Loss of Blood: Emergent narrative and emotional impact in Far Cry 2

This was a shot at NGJ that I originally wrote about 18 months ago, and posted into the RPS Writer Hive (where it enjoyed a fairly lively discussion). It’s not quite the article I’d write now, but I’m pretty proud of it nonetheless, so I figured I’d re-post it here.

Far Cry 2 – released in October 2008 – is a divisive game. One only needs to look at the gulf between the critic and user ratings on metacritic to see that. I’ve griped hard about it in the past, mostly on the grounds that it ultimately falls short of the brilliance so obviously within its grasp. These days, I just tell people it’s “probably worth a play” and leave it at that. Recently, it showed up in a Steam sale and in a couple of blogs, and that set me back to thinking about the hours I spent immersed in a violent Africa. I feel I owe FC2 more recognition than I’ve given it. While a blow-by-blow account of what’s great and what’s horrific about it could fuel hours of interesting discussion and shed some light on the disparity in those metacritic scores, I’d rather just tell you about its best feature. The one that sets it apart from anything I’ve played since.

And to do that, I must recount a gaming moment I kept quiet about for over a year.
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Futilitarianism: Fate of the World

But hey, no sign of Pestilence yet. Something to be grateful for, right? guys?Okay, it’s official; the world is up Carbon Creek without a paddle.

If Red Redemption‘s numbers are even approximately in the right ballpark (and they ought to be: their scientific advisor has a masters in “Environmental Change and Management” from Oxford, their climate model was crafted by a professor with “a D.Phil. in Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics” and they have an advisory board with more PhDs and professors than you can shake a peer-reviewed journal at), we can reasonably expect that within sixty years or so, the global economy will collapse to pre-industrial levels, widespread famine will kill everyone in North America and hundreds of endearing fluffy animals will have been consigned to the history books by massive deforestation.

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Robot, run: BIT.TRIP RUNNER

Spring!BIT.TRIP RUNNER – only the second of the six BIT.TRIP games to make the crossover to PC – is the product of a gene-splicing experiment between the BIT.TRIP games’ standard chiptune rhythm-game precision and the thumb-bleedingly difficult indie platformer zeitgeist of Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV.

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