Video-Games on Shrieking.net

Death Stranding

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 09:00:00 +0000

In the midst of a pandemic, in a locked down country where we weren’t allowed to see other people, I played Death Stranding. It is a game about reconnecting people who have been scattered across America, unable to go outside, trapped without communication. The invisible threat in the game is rather different to our own virus but the parallels between what the characters experience and our experiences of a pandemic are clear: Kojima imagined a world in which we hide indoors and rely on couriers. Those who go outside wear protective clothing and are made hard by the world.

Junk Food

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 09:00:00 +0000

In 2020 I played Watch_Dogs, Ubisoft’s 2014 open world game that functions very much like every other Ubisoft open world game. It is generic, and very triple-A, and it’s absolutely fine. The story is bold and basic and predictable. It’s a 6 out of 10. It’s fine. It’s fine. It also isn’t fine in a bunch of ways I’d love to talk about but I don’t know enough about politics or sociology to be educated about it, but that’s not the point. Well, it sort of is the point.

Games I Played In 2021

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 09:00:00 +0000

In a way I had a year off from gaming last year - I took a lot of time out to figure out what I was actually enjoying and whether or not I wanted to play at all. At the start of the year I’d pretty much planned to get rid of my gaming PC, but by the end of it I’d upgraded it and I’m excited for next year. Its good to take time to evaluate what you do.

Half Life: Alyx

Tue, 25 May 2021 13:08:20 +0000

These days, I’m pretty skeptical about Valve. I’ve waited so long for so much, and I’ve seen so much abandoned and left behind that I try to avoid the hype surrounding them. I love Valve games, they’re free to operate however they like, and I certainly don’t believe they owe me anything, but I always take the approach of believing it when I see it when it comes to their releases. All that said, it was pretty hard not to be excited about a new Half Life game. Hype is a difficult thing: once you get swept up in it, the thing you’re waiting for needs to be everything you expect in order to pass muster.

Far: Lone Sails

Sun, 19 Jul 2020 09:34:33 +0000

I picked this game up on Nintendo Switch after The Computer Game Show recommended it a year or two ago, and it took a while, but I finally got round to it. It’s a short game, 2-3 hours or so, and it’s pretty simple. It is described as an “exploration adventure” game, which is definitely true, but it doesn’t tell you what makes it special - Far: Lone Sails is a game that manages to be about exploration when you can only move in one direction.

Games I played in 2019

Fri, 03 Jan 2020 09:46:59 +0000

I wrote down all the games I played in my diary this year, so this is a complete list of everything.

I’m sure this is very few games in the grand scheme of things, but it is a lot for me. I completed 8 games, and played quite a few hours of multiplayer games. This year I re-discovered that I’m much happier digging into things in depth rather than playing as many games as possible - I cancelled all of my gaming podcast subscriptions and just got on with playing what I wanted. The Nintendo Switch has been a huge enabler for me - playing on my commute has been a delight.

Sekiro

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 21:06:38 +0000

A long time ago I did a bit of martial arts. The art that I learned practiced pushing hands, which is a very slow, controlled kind of “fighting” - it is a way of being in the moment with another person, focused entirely on their next move and the flow of the battle. It is meditation in motion. My teacher said he grew up reading about masters of the arts fighting for hours and, as a young boy, he believed they were locked in fierce combat, but as he grew up he learned that they were, in fact, moving slowly, pausing to consider their movements, consider each other, slowly choreographing the entire meditation together.

Horizon: Zero Dawn

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 19:06:44 +0000

I wrote this a long time ago, and only finished it off recently. Figured I might as well post it. I actually played Horizon from March - December 2018.

It’s rare that I play a triple-A game, but Horizon somehow caught my imagination and dropped at a good time: just as I was returning to work after my paternal leave, when I felt in need of buying myself fun things, so I decided to give it a go. I played it slowly, over 9 months, racking up about 30 hours.

Breath of the Wild

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 20:11:11 +0000

I only commute once a week, so I played Breath of the Wild almost entirely on the train every Tuesday, for 40 minutes in the morning and evening. It is a staggering game to experience in a handheld machine: a whole world lives inside that tiny cartridge. I am not a huge open world fan, so my opinion might not mean much here, but I’ve never played anything that feels so much like a living, breathing world.

Games I Played in 2018

Fri, 11 Jan 2019 19:49:29 +0000

I posted nothing last year, apparently.

2018 was a very busy year, but somehow I found time to play some games. Here they are, in no real order. Overall this has been a year of trying to figure out what genres I really like: I’ve put some time into games I didn’t get on with to try to push myself, and I’ve tried games that I think I’d otherwise have ignored. I’ve paid more attention to where I’m having fun and where I’m not.

Games I Played in 2017

Sun, 31 Dec 2017 11:12:08 +0000

I started 2017 with a 4 week old child. I took the first 3 months off to look after her, and the games I played were fever dreams, played at all hours with a child asleep on my chest or while my family slept in another room and I struggled with sleep deprivation. I played bits and pieces of lots of things. Here is a list.

Street Fighter V

I’m terrible at fighting games, but I did really enjoy learning how to play them with SFV. It’s a good game for playing just a few minutes of, although the load times are rather long on the ps4. This version of street fighter is wonderful, a beautiful implementation, and I hope to play it more in future.

Firewatch

Thu, 02 Nov 2017 08:45:12 +0000

Following on from Cibelle in my reviews, here’s another game that doesn’t offer much of a challenge and chooses to focus on story. It seems unfair to put the two together though: while Cibelle offers almost no gameplay, Firewatch is built on it. Campo Santo use the first person view coupled with some chunky animations to put you into the headspace of the character in a way that few games achieve. I’ve been a huge fan of Idle Thumbs, the podcast produced by Campo Santo members, for a long time, so I’m quite biased towards them, and it’s no surprise that I loved this game.

Bloodborne: The Old Hunters

Tue, 03 Jan 2017 11:23:38 +0000

I wrote about Bloodborne on this blog a year or so ago, here.

In so many ways, The Old Hunters wasn’t about playing a game. For me, it was weeks of reading wikis, digging up lore, watching VaatiVidya - drinking in an absolutely endless quantity of information. I loved every second. Bloodborne’s story runs deep, deep down, and each area in The Old Hunters draws you into it further and further until you hit the very bottom. Finishing this expansion leaves you with a lot more knowledge, but a lot of new questions to go with it. It is a wonderful execution of the Lovecraftian mythos concept - the more you learn, the harder it is to comprehend the whole idea.

Cibele

Thu, 24 Nov 2016 14:30:38 +0000

Hello folks. I wrote half of this review a year ago and never finished it. Finding it now, I don’t really like my writing in it, but I’m fed up editing it, so here it is.

The negative reviews on Cibele’s Steam page seem to come largely from people who had different expectations, so I think it’s best that we address them first: I don’t think that it’s accurate to call Cibele a video game. While there are game-like elements, it doesn’t really contain any challenges and I wouldn’t really say that it’s something that you “play”.

Steaming: Braid

Tue, 05 Jan 2016 14:58:17 +0000

My steam library is comparatively small, but it still contains a fairly substantial pile of shame. The only way out is through. In alphabetical order.

I’m not sure how I missed it, but somehow, I forgot to talk about Braid. I played through it after Binding of Isaac, I suppose - that’s where it’d be in alphabetical order, so that must be when it was.

I’d heard a lot about Braid. One of the true original indie stars, it catapulted its author, Jonathan Blow, into the headlines and did the same for indie games development. Suddenly, anyone could make a game. It was an interesting time to be into games and the industry. I read a lot about it, but I didn’t actually play Braid. It was released in 2008 and I was catching up on games I’d missed while I’d been away travelling. I think I was knee-deep in Bioshock. Well, it’s time to fix that. This is a puzzle game based around time travel, and the manipulation of time: throughout the various worlds, you gain various powers over the passage of time and the world reacts to them in unusual ways. You must collect puzzle pieces in each world to complete a series of jigsaw puzzles.

Bloodborne

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 15:11:51 +0000

Bloodborne is the other game that I absolutely had to buy a PS4 for. The latest in the Souls series of games, it throws out shields, replaces them with guns, and goes all Lovecraftian. I’m all over it.

The first thing you notice, coming from Dark Souls to Bloodborne, is that the game moves a lot faster. It’s smoother, too: I was initially pretty sceptical about the worth of quick-stepping when locked onto a target instead of rolling, but it allows for a rather neat fine-tuning of your position in fights versus the rather long and unwieldy Dark Souls roll. Bloodborne wants you to dance lightly around your opponents and avoid hits, rather than survive the pummelling or get well clear every time an enemy swings their sword. It does away with any kind of encumbrance too, opening up the entire wardrobe of armour to every character. It’s hard to argue with these changes. Sure, they reduce the number of fighting styles available to you in the game, but Dark Souls’ heavy-set warrior build’s slowness was a punishment, not a boon: if you could have had the fast rolling with the heavy armour, you’d have taken it in a second. In Bloodborne, that’s what you get. Sort of.

Batman: Arkham Knight

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 19:37:15 +0000

Arkham Asylum is probably on my all-time top 10 games list. It features no filler, no nonsense, no missed opportunity for comic book brilliance. It set a trend for combat in games. It managed to feel like a complete world without being so open that you get lost, and it managed to maintain a sense of “levels” that made it feel somehow arcadey. It was a wonderful mix of everything that makes a game good. Arkham City threw a lot of that out the window, and, in spite of itself, managed to be a pretty good game, but it never managed to make me care about the side plots: there was absolutely no way I was collecting all those Riddler trophies. The central plot was outstanding in itself though, so I was willing to forgive the sprawling open world aspect that added nothing to the game and only detracted from the beautiful setup it was granted by Asylum. I skipped the next in the series, Arkham Origins, based on its poor reviews, but that didn’t stop me getting all excited for its sequel, Arkham Knight.

Steaming: Dark Souls

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 09:34:06 +0000

My steam library is comparatively small, but it still contains a fairly substantial pile of shame. The only way out is through. In alphabetical order.

I never thought I’d get to write this. I started playing Dark Souls years ago, but due to one thing or another, I’d never been able to put much time into it. Dark Souls is, to the beginner, punishing and frustrating. It doesn’t hold your hand at all and does little to guide you through any part of the experience. It’s hard to bring yourself to spend time on it when you don’t know what you’re doing. I decided, foolishly, to play through it blind. This was a terrible mistake.

Hotline Miami 2

Mon, 29 Jun 2015 17:10:18 +0000

I’ve struggled for a while with what’s worth saying about Hotline Miami 2. The reviews out there cover it quite well, and if you’re trying to figure out whether or not you want to buy it or not, I’d recommend you read Andi Hamilton’s words over at Midnight Resistance - I think he covers a lot of it very well, and I almost canned the whole idea of writing anything about it because anything else feels redundant. I can’t quite let it go, though: I feel like the great bits of this game have been missed by the masses.

Steaming: Binding of Isaac

Tue, 17 Feb 2015 16:00:31 +0000

My steam library is comparatively small, but it still contains a fairly substantial pile of shame. The only way out is through. In alphabetical order.

As far as I’m aware, it is impossible to not own Binding of Isaac, so writing about it feels a little redundant, but it was next on my pile of shame, and it was the next game I played, so here we go.

Binding of Isaac is a rogue-like that plays a little like Smash TV, designed by Edmund McMillen, one of the guys behind Super Meat Boy. The story goes that Isaac’s mum receives a message from god demanding the life of her son, so Isaac legs it into the basement which is full of monsters. He battles through until he defeats mom herself. It is quite quick to play through, but being a rogue-like (one of the first in the latest spree of them, I think?) you die and restart a lot.

Steaming: Antichamber

Mon, 26 Jan 2015 14:11:27 +0000

My steam library is comparatively small, but it still contains a fairly substantial pile of shame. The only way out is through. In alphabetical order.

Antichamber was top of my steam list. It is an indie, first person puzzle game, with simple graphics and a unique brand of puzzle. I picked it up in a sale a long time ago after seeing a let’s play video, thinking it looked like my kind of thing.

What I Played Last Week Stag Edition Pt. 3

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 13:13:23 +0000

Last, but not least, I wanted to chat a bit about the video games played at my stag weekend. I am so excited by the recent return to same-room co-op that we’re seeing in games, and I can’t pass up an opportunity to mention a few. Well, to be honest, I’m only really interested in telling you about one game: Mount Your Friends. The others are a footnote.

Mount Your Friends

I'm Still Dwarf Fortressing

Tue, 14 Oct 2014 13:51:28 +0000

Another fortress crumbles and I start again. I thought I was building near a river last time, but when I embarked, there was no river to be seen. Perhaps, I thought, it is underground, and my dwarves dug and dug until they all died of dehydration.

I start again, gazing once more upon the world screen where I chose the location for my next little (vast) dwarf house (fortress). This time, I make sure I am near a river. It transpires, through a conversation with Charlie, that I was not near a river at all. It turns out that, when on the embark screen, looking at the world map, the region map, and the local map, you don’t actually embark onto the entire local map. You embark onto a tiny square inside that, lit up, and movable using yet another set of keys that I hadn’t even spotted on the cheat sheet along the bottom of the screen. I was never near a river. My dwarves had dug in vain.

Dwarf Fortress

Mon, 22 Sep 2014 12:33:21 +0000

When you start a region in Dwarf Fortress, you set your computer the task of building the history of a world. You wait, and you wait, as it works through the ages. You see empires rise and fall before you in ascii art as your processor creaks and groans for whole minutes (which, of course, is a relative age, when you think about how long it takes for the average game to load), and, eventually, you’re presented with a map, and asked where you want to embark.

Video Games I Played Last Week, 16/09/14

Tue, 16 Sep 2014 07:54:55 +0000

Well, not strictly last week, but you get the jist. I’ve played a bunch of interesting things lately.

Dota 2

Finally back to my old habit. I’ve been playing Dota for about 3 years now, racking up 827 hours in-game. I am terrible at it. Really, really bad. I love it though, and after a few months of barely playing, it feels great to be back. It’s a game that really benefits from a consistent team, though, and I wish I had the time to play with one. Still, I have an amazing group of friends who are great fun to play with, so I’m never too lonely.