The first of two new songs contributed this month to the Maraoke video game karaoke songlist – first performed 19/11/2022. A song about the puritanical “wholesome games” cult (now thankfully mostly abandoned) that sprang up a couple of years ago. Finding a satisfying replacement for the “jumping frog” line remains a challenge (“lump in frogs”? […]

Previously: 2018 – 2019 – 2020 2021 was not exactly a vintage year for games. It felt like the big publishers were playing ‘wait and see’, and the none of the handful of tentpole releases that did make it out this year really piqued my interest. As with last year, I’ve mainly been playing established […]

Time once again for a round up of the notable games I played in the last year. 2020 was a pretty solid year for games (if nothing else), although lacking any decisive raising of the bar in the AAA space (except Half-Life Alyx I suppose, which I don’t have the kit to play yet). Still, […]

Eight years since its announcement and four years since its release I finally got around to playing Rage, the last game from id Software before they were absorbed into Zenimax and waved goodbye to John Carmack. If you want a single game that demonstrates all of id’s historic strengths (aside from multiplayer) in a modern […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]