As some of you may have guessed, I’m a huge id Software fan, as a result of spending countless hours playing (and sometimes modding) their games over the last twenty years, and appreciating the vast amount of technical innovation they’ve achieved to the benefit of the industry as a whole. They’ve not always been the […]

A few weeks ago I was made aware of this Kickstarter project. (Which has since been launched.) For those who can’t be bothered to read and watch all that, in a nutshell, ‘Gameful’ is a not-for-profit initiative started by Jane McGonigal and associates intended to give funding and support to games projects – but not […]

As you have probably seen by now, it’s been revealed that PC Zone magazine is set to close, going out with a (hopefully) triumphant farewell issue, to be edited by stalwart OXM editor Jon Hicks. I’m slightly surprised that I’ve never written anything on this blog about PC Zone, a magazine which I took for […]

I’m a fan of Cracked (dot com), and I get that it’s supposed to be a humour site. I also get that complaining about a lack of journalistic rigour in one of their articles is like complaining that the presentation of a Happy Meal is too impersonal. They’re in the business of trading gentle laughs […]

Shortly before Christmas it was announced that Metaplace was closing its doors to the public on January 1st 2010. Metaplace (which I briefly wrote about last year) was the web-based virtual world construction kit masterminded by Raph Koster (of Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies and Theory of Fun fame), had shown a great deal of […]

I don’t want this blog to get mired in politics, but this issue is too important for internet users and members of the creative industries in the UK (regardless of their political stripe) to ignore. The Rt Hon Lord Mandelson wants to give the music and movie industries the power to force UK citizens (and […]

Yesterday EA and Playfish (makers of popular Facebook timesinks such as Restaurant City) put an end to weeks of rumour and gossip and formally announced they were “combining forces”, with EA paying $300m for the fast-growing social games company. Shortly after, EA announced plans to axe 1,500 staff and cancel twelve games in production. Nine […]

When computer games first took off in the 1980s, there were only two input devices in common use: joysticks and keyboards. It wasn’t until late in the decade that mice joined the party, having had to first achieve market penetration (as late as 1990, many entry-level home computers didn’t ship with mice as standard) and […]

Over the last few years the absence of a comprehensive reference site for games comparable to the Internet Movie Database has become increasingly frustrating. For a long time the nearest thing we had was MobyGames, but that was lacking in many ways – huge gaps in their database, and a weird inconsistent patchwork of data […]

The E3 press conferences have now passed and industry watchers are busy digesting the glut of information. There is now some form of motion-based control interface announced for each of the three home consoles. Each of these takes a different technological approach, and perhaps more importantly, each is perceived to address a different role by […]

A few hours ago Microsoft held their E3 press conference. It was a low key affair as these things go. A slate of solid-looking third- and first-party games were trailed, with a couple of surprise announcements that were vague enough to be enthusiastically overstated. (The MGS reveal, for example – obviously not an exclusive, possibly […]

Ten years since I started regularly writing words on the internet it has occurred to me that there might be people willing to offer me money to do this. The first fruits of this experiment can now be viewed on Eurogamer, where I’ve contributed a piece to their regular Sunday morning retro strand about the […]

The United Kingdom has had an incredibly rich history as a producer of video games. Historically we’ve been the only country outside of the US and Japan to have consistently enjoyed international success (although South Korea and China are on their way to joining us at the top table). Even though the UK games industry […]

An Ice Cream Van (or Ice Cream Truck in American English) is a mobile ice cream parlour, typically painted with gaudy images of frozen treats and/or unlicensed Disney characters. Ice cream vans are driven around residential areas to dispense ice cream cornets, lollies and cans of fizzy pop. I’m sure we all have fond childhood […]

A quick update to condemn this idiocy: “The Government’s Change4Life campaign upped the ante in drawing spurious links between games and premature death this week. The British Heart Foundation, Diabetes UK and Cancer Research have all lent their name to a new print campaign (pictured here), which shows a gamer risking an early grave by […]