Love Beta – A passage through the wilderness – Introduction

Posted on January 22, 2010 by


A while ago I’d read about this intriguing mmo called Love by a fellow named Eskil Steenberg, a one man development machine who has singlehandedly brought his somewhat obscure concept to life and into fruition. Today I read an article on Eurogamer by Quintin Smith, announcing that he is currently holding a small open beta, so on a whim I shelled out the decidedly low 3 euros under little more pretence than “this is a game in which you explore ethereal, procedurally generated environments, and establish settlements with your fellow man”. Intriguing indeed. So I’ve decided to keep a short journal on this site, narrating my adventures throughout the unknown.

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Disneyitus – the fall and rebirth of a giant

Posted on January 19, 2010 by


It really doesn’t come as a surprise any more. Like all things, even the greats succumb to age and senility begins making choices that are beyond its rational judgement. Minds grow feeble, and are subsequently replaced by new minds that are evidently too bloated with cash to care anymore. This is when the greatest surprise of them all arrived – evidence that Disney, the undisputed father of contemporary animation seeks to reclaim its image of old and re-imagine what once made them great. This was the day that Warren Spector, of Deus Ex fame, signed up as designer on Epic Mickey. Continue reading →

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When Worlds Collide – The FPS/ RTS hybrid debate

Posted on January 8, 2010 by


This morning I was browsing through the list of games that would be coming soon to steam, and by complete accident stumbled upon a game called Nuclear Dawn. The game was all alone on the third page, innocently twiddling its thumbs and blending into the background, however I clicked on it out of sheer curiosity; after all I’d never heard of it before. Past it’s somewhat generic post apocalyptic tough guy façade, there was something there telling me to read on, for this ambitious little company was making a bold attempt at the little explored RTS FPS hybrid. This is understandable Continue reading →

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HUMOUR: Shadow of Insomniac – The power of funny in games

Posted on December 29, 2009 by

Fresh off the slate of finishing Ratchet and Clank Future A Crack in Time, I stopped and thought just how much I found myself laughing throughout that game, so I figured, hey why don’t I write about humour in games. Man, that Miles guy is like, the most unfunny person I know, SO WHY THE HELL IS THIS SOUR OLD GIT WRITING ABOUT HUMOUR?! Because I’m interested, alright? Now let’s get this show on the road. Continue reading →

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Adventure-Novel Book-games

Posted on December 22, 2009 by Jack McNamee

If you’ve been around the web a bit, you’ve probably seen the recent trendy thing where video games are given covers similar to those of a classic old book series. Well, what better series of games to perform this bit of Photoshop Magic on than the Lucasarts series of Classic adventure games?

Classic Adventure games like THIS ONE RIGHT HERE?

For my graphics assignment on the last term of school, I made up 3 classic adventure-game covers, and I figured, hey! The internet might want to see these. Check them out:

Continue reading →

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Immersion, and the heads up display of the soul

Posted on December 18, 2009 by Miles

In a recent piece on the upcoming title Metro 2033, in PC Powerplay, the journalist raved at lengths about how 4A were striving to create an incredibly immersive experience, and this immediately grabbed my attention from a design perspective, and as a point of innovation. But how, I wondered, could a game create a feel that was so radically different as to garner the attention of an article? Some very fine attention to detail. Everything about the game has been designed in order to make Continue reading →

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MASOCORE – The satisfaction of the struggle

Posted on December 12, 2009 by Miles


It’s the strangest thing. The human mind is designed to work towards things that will bring it pleasure, mostly because we’re all treacherous hedonists, but generally because we like the feeling of accomplishment, so why the hell would we involve ourselves in an activity that deliberately crushes us, time and time again, with the knowledge that we’d most likely fail? The answer, dear gamers Continue reading →

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A Glance into the WORLD OF TOMORROW

Posted on December 8, 2009 by Jack McNamee

The future! Forget 2012, the Nuclear Apocalypse, Robot Uprisings, the Zombie Apocalypse and the ever-watching Totalitarian Governments for a moment- I, Jack Shandy, Gentleman Journalist, have a list of reasons the future is going to be juuuuuust fine. Well, for video games, at least. For better or worse, games and gamers are going to look a lot different in a decade or so: Hit the jump for 6 educated guesses at the shape the future’s going to take. Continue reading →

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Indie games aplenty, and what we're up to

Posted on December 8, 2009 by Miles

Well, for one Jack and I are now on holidays, and he’s going to be writing more for this blog. This is a good thing, he can wax a mean poetic; this also means that we will be doing collaborative posts now and then.

In light of this recent trend in playing through a game with a permanent death mentality, we’ll be partaking in an experiment with the game Fallout 2. The objective of this experiment – get as far through each of our respective games as possible with the knowledge that a single death equals game over. The reason why we have done this, apart from the inherent curiosity, is to Continue reading →

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The "One page game design philosophy"

Posted on November 28, 2009 by Miles

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about methods of game design for more interesting, simple flash games, and this is when I had a moment of inspiration after sitting around in the hot sun of a car par for an hour. I opened the back of a work book and decided to break the boredom ice by designing a game fundamentally simple in nature, in light of a lot of stuff I had played recently, but most of all, Noitu Love 2 by Joakim Sandberg. In a recent interview I watched with Sandberg, he discussed Continue reading →

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