Posts with tag: Joy
 

Toejam & Earl
Posted at 12:37 on 1st March 2015

Some extremely welcome and long-awaited news came last week: Greg Johnson, designer of the original Toejam & Earl games, has started a Kickstarter campaign to fund the creation of a new game in the series. You can pledge to the Kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1578116861/toejam-and-earl-back-in-the-groove The original Toejam & Earl for the Sega Mega Drive is my […]

Go to article →
 

“Get Lucky”
Posted at 19:47 on 20th January 2014

As performed at the One Life Left 2013 Christmas party. In my defence this was written last Summer before Get Lucky got played to death and became Boring Geoff Keighley’s favourite song. Enjoy. “Spelunky” – after “Get Lucky” as performed by Daft Punk (Verse 1.) This game is unforgiving Go back to the beginning Try […]

Go to article →
 

Doom is 20
Posted at 22:18 on 10th December 2013

Doom is a game that has left commentators struggling to come to terms with its impact for the last two decades. Retrospectives of the game first started appearing fifteen years ago. These days only a total plum would fail to recognise it as one of the landmark achievements of 1990s popular culture. Terminator 2, Nirvana, […]

Go to article →
 

Transport Tycoon
Posted at 19:03 on 13th October 2013

For the past few months my team at AppyNation has been working with publishers 31X (Chris Sawyer’s company) and developers Origin8 Technologies to help bring Transport Tycoon to iOS and Android. Transport Tycoon is one of my favourite games of all time, and one that has always seemed like an obvious fit for mobile (particularly […]

Go to article →
 

GameCamp 2013 (#gamecamp6)
Posted at 19:36 on 19th May 2013

The UK games scene’s very own Treehouse of Horror, GameCamp, returned to LSBU’s Keyworth Centre yesterday. (You can read about previous GameCamps here: 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012) The main difference to the setup this year was that attendees were encouraged to bring work-in-progress games to playtest, and as such there were two large rooms set […]

Go to article →
 

Isoball is go!
Posted at 17:37 on 12th December 2010

Earlier in the week we finally hit the big scary launch button on Isoball, the iOS/Android puzzle game that I’ve been producing at Zattikka for the last few months. You can get the lowdown in the launch press release, and versions for iPhone/iPad Touch, iPad and Android are now available on their respective App Stores. […]

Go to article →
 

Why APB must succeed
Posted at 01:55 on 30th July 2009

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw, again In the previous post, I complained about the Dead Space franchise, and the prevalence of “pot-boilers” in publisher’s catalogues – games that tick […]

Go to article →
 

King’s Bounty: The Legend
Posted at 00:23 on 11th January 2009

King’s Bounty: The Legend (KB:TL) is the latest product of the burgeoning Russian game development scene to have piqued the interest of Western PC gamers. It was brought to my attention by Rock Paper Shotgun whose initial puzzled amusement seems to have snowballed into championing the game as a shining example of where PC games […]

Go to article →
 

The Mega Drive is 20
Posted at 19:30 on 6th December 2008

I’m slightly late with this one (the Mega Drive’s birthday was on the 29th October) but I realise that I’ve never written anything on this site about the console that was in many ways Sega’s greatest contribution to gaming outside of the arcade – and certainly the system that had the greatest transformative effect on […]

Go to article →
 

Droid Assault
Posted at 11:55 on 15th October 2008

I’ve always been a big fan of robots. From an early age I was immersed in a culture of Usborne books, Tomy-bots (I’m still working on a plausible sounding reason to spend £200 on this little guy), Asimov’s Laws, Capsela, Kryten, Marvin and Nono. (Although no Transformers, oddly.) Aged six I even won a prize […]

Go to article →
 

Smoke and mirrors
Posted at 19:46 on 24th August 2008

Games developers are illusionists. Convincing players to mentally conjure places, people and stories out of rudimentary arrangements of switches and blinking lights demands something more than just engineering skill. As hardware has grown ever more powerful and sophisticated, the need for creative sleight-of-hand has not diminished. That whizzy new console may provide a leap in […]

Go to article →
 

Stunt Island
Posted at 22:44 on 24th February 2008

In the last couple of years, the line between PC and console gaming has been (in some respects) almost completely erased. The simultaneous release of high profile titles on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 is becoming the norm. It’s easy to forget that before the mid-1990s, computer and console gaming were completely different worlds – […]

Go to article →
 

Super Mario Galaxy
Posted at 01:59 on 11th December 2007

2007 has been a banner year for games. Not the best year ever, but at least the best year of this century, with each format seeing their share of classics. Having gotten out of the habit of playing regularly, I’m currently scrambling to assimilate as many of this year’s ‘must play’ games as possible, so […]

Go to article →
 

Resident Evil 4
Posted at 23:49 on 14th June 2007

“Resident Evil 4, to sum up, is the best game on the GameCube. But it’s not just the best game on the GameCube.It’s the best game of this generation, it’s the best game- “It’s the best game.” Robert Florence, Consolevania Series 1 Episode 7 It’s easy to be cynical. These days, when any moderately entertaining […]

Go to article →
 

Silent Storm
Posted at 18:18 on 25th March 2007

Silent Storm is a turn-based tactical combat game for the PC, in which the player controls an elite commando unit during an alternate universe World War II. (The fantasy setting becomes more obvious later in the game as the existence of various improbable experimental weapons is revealed.) The game was developed by Russia’s greatest PC […]

Go to article →
 

older entries »

Back to top