When I do find time to add something more substantial (and I will at some point), it will be original and with any luck entertaining. For now however, here is some of the work I have been doing elsewhere. Hope you enjoy.
Why do you do this to me Capcom? I want to love Resident Evil 6, but it has reached the stage that I am starting to doubt myself; perhaps I have been suffering from Stockholm syndrome for the last ten years. As the series has transitioned from survival horror, to action horror, to action game I have done my best to always find the core of what I enjoyed about the first game.
Games have come a long way in the past decade. Characters’ ability to emote thanks to the power of the current systems, and developers’ willingness to control the pace of stories, displays a new maturity for the industry.
Why is game journalism not close to a 50:50 split? Numbers show as many women are enjoying games as men, and every woman I have met in the industry is as good, if not better, than their male colleagues. What is telling is that there seems to be a far closer parity with video journalists than writers (to be clear I do not mean presenters, I mean video journalists).
Resident Evil is an incredible series. While recent incarnations may have shed much of what I loved of the original’s slow paced B-movie horror styling, they have continued to enthrall me. But Resident Evil 6’s three-pronged campaign has solidified a niggling trend in the series.
Read Only Memory (ROM) is a new kind of book publishing company. Focusing on gaming they mix carefully curated content from icons of the games industry with a beautiful design philosophy, these are books that promise to be the definitive record of their subject matter. The first volume is to be Sensible Software 1986-1999, and will offer a look behind the scenes of one of the UK’s most influential software houses.
I could talk about games, I could regale you with stories from the show floor or describe the tingling sensation I got saying ‘Hi’ to Keiji Inafune. But if you want to know about the games you can check out my previews at Play Devil (links below), instead I am going to tell you two tales from my journey home.
On occasion I let myself replay a game, but with the ‘grind’ of reviews this has become an increasingly guilty pleasure. With that in mind nothing prepared me for Dark Souls and how its tag line ‘prepare to die’ was not talking about anything in-game, but my social life.
I find the failings of Guinness World Records 2012 Gamer’s Edition far harder to reconcile. Facts are amazing fun, and while books like the Guinness World Records are basically trivial tat they can none-the-less be deeply entertaining.