Posts with tag: PC
 

Some games I played in 2022
Posted at 23:15 on 31st December 2022

Previously: 2018 – 2019 – 2020 – 2021 Once again the year draws to a close and it’s time to do my homework for the internet. I realise I managed to avoid playing nearly all the big releases this year. This isn’t a boast. I’m not really a Dark Souls guy so didn’t bother with […]

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Some games I played in 2021
Posted at 18:36 on 2nd January 2022

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 […]

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Some games I played in 2020
Posted at 18:35 on 30th January 2021

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, […]

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Some games I played in 2019
Posted at 18:30 on 5th January 2020

Here are some of the standout games I played in 2019. It wasn’t a particularly notable year for new releases, in part because the current console generation is winding down. I ended up playing a mixture of small scale indie games (mostly on Switch) and revisiting games I’d missed from the last few years – […]

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Some games I played in 2018
Posted at 01:12 on 11th January 2019

I didn’t play a very wide variety of games last year: it was a pretty moribund year for big releases; most of my gaming time was dominated by three of the games listed below; and I don’t play a lot of new games per year in any case, not being a journalist, IGF judge, student […]

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Are Valve the baddies?
Posted at 23:27 on 9th June 2018

Valve have made an announcement about their review policy for the Steam store. This has resulted in several extremely angry editorials from the games press, who have (perhaps reasonably) interpreted this to mean that Valve intend to take an almost completely hands-off approach to moderating their platform, in the style of leading internet hellholes Reddit […]

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Rage
Posted at 21:02 on 2nd January 2016

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 […]

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Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number
Posted at 23:47 on 14th April 2015

How do you follow up a game like Hotline Miami? Hotline Miami challenged whole chapters of conventional PC game dogma. It was an indie game that didn’t slavishly pay homage to one of the handful of games the developers grew up with. There were no fantasy, sci-fi or military trappings. The player had agency in […]

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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, […]

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Mafia II
Posted at 22:29 on 12th September 2010

Before we can get down to discussing the long-awaited second installment in 2K Czech’s rich-simulation crime saga, we must first clear up a piece of mindless vandalism. I am referring of course to Eurogamer’s catastrophically mishandled review, penned by freelancer John “Who?” Teti. The review shows the downside of Eurogamer’s freelance review policy. Their reviewers […]

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Remembering PC Zone
Posted at 00:38 on 17th July 2010

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 […]

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Machinarium
Posted at 20:16 on 30th November 2009

Machinarium is a point and click adventure game for the PC by Czech independent development studio Amanita Design. I still dimly recall playing Amanita’s debut game Samarost in 2003, and thinking at the time that I’d pay good money for a full-length, commercially released game with the same gameplay style. (Samarost was more of an […]

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Deluxe Paint
Posted at 13:00 on 9th August 2009

It must be hard for the younger generation to imagine what gaming was like in the 20th century. A case in point: up until the early 1990s, one of the main motivators for playing (or completing) new games was seeing new graphics. The amount of computer imagery being generated anywhere in the world at the […]

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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 […]

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The Shareware Age
Posted at 09:10 on 24th May 2009

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 […]

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