Occupational Thoughts -

It’s been double-checked and confirmed: the first meeting of the Oxford Game Network is being held on the 29th June 2010 at 19:00 at the Jam Factory. Feel free to come along, myself and Graeme will probably be lurking somewhere around and it’s really not that large a space so you’ll find us easily. Drinks [...]

At the weekend I went and bought Tomb Raider: Underworld and Kameo: Elements of Power on the understanding that they were both British games and only £5 each. So far Kameo has truly entranced me as a Fable-eqsue fairytale fantasy directly influenced by Lord of the Rings. Despite this I’ve been playing Tomb Raider the [...]

Last tweet-up Graeme Hunter approached me with the suggestion of creating a sort of framework for gamers in Oxford. The idea behind it being that it’s akin to a tweet-up, and if it’s possible to gather people in one space to talk about social media, why could the same concept not be applied to video [...]

Yesterday I finished playing Perfect Dark Zero. And I liked it, especially when I go to meet Carrington the fat Scottish man who’d been organising/narrating all the operations so far. I was really surprised when Chandra betrays Joanna, or at least I think she betrays her… It had just the right amount of Cyberpunk style, [...]

The first episode of Doctor Who: the Adventure games is meant to launch this Saturday. However it was made available for download yesterday from the BBC site. Without spending too much time working out why it was released early I seized the opportunity to download and play it. So here are my first impressions: Unlike [...]

Over the holidays someone borrowed Forza Motorsport 3, and I’ve been playing it in spurts, doing the occasional race. I’m not a big fan of many racing games so they all seem the same: GRID, Blur, Split/Second, PGR 4, Need for Speed: Shift, Gran Turismo. All apart from Burnout Paradise, which I actually own and [...]

Yesterday, at about 17:00 GMT, the Modern Warfare 2 Stimulus Package came out. Matthieu bought and downloaded it, and then went running, leaving me to explore it. There’s not really that much interesting to see, it’s just barren landscapes designed as the ultimate battle arenas. I went through and took a few screenshots in 1080p. [...]

Much as it would pain some of today’s popular social commentators, video games aren’t just massive depraved murder simulators designed to spread immorality. The anti-gaming rhetoric took a bizarre form today, yesterday, last week in the Alan Titchmarsh show. I hadn’t watched it until last night week but I will know in future to avoid [...]

Yesterday some people came round to play Castle Crashers, we moved on from that to Guitar Hero: World Tour, then to Halo 3′s Multiplayer, then to Worms 2. In short it was good fun. I was also lent Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones and a Gamecube. Today I tried it out: You can see [...]

Back from my last post I was thinking about design and I remember having played Bioshock this week. I returned and took some pictures: Apparently the game is a critique Ayn Rand’s philosophy. I don’t know Ayn Rand, or her theory of Objectivism. But I gather it has something to do with leaving humans to do [...]

I’m back from holiday, while the parents went out running I stayed in the Youth Hostel and played Secret of Monkey Island. I clocked up over 6 hours of play time and finished it. I think it’s the first point-and-click adventure game I’ve ever completed, the story is engaging and brilliantly simple. The characters are believable and easy to [...]

Today it is the 25th of December, and we’re going off to Derbyshire Staffordshire later on this morning. But before we do, here’s my vlog on the arguments for piracy: It took me ten takes, I was using a sheet of notes and after the 6th one I dropped that and wrote out a script. It’s [...]

Steam is currently running a five-day-long-one-day-only sale. This is because of the American Black Friday celebration of consumerism. Due to the magic of the internet this special day has been exported around the world. It retains it’s sense of Americanism by defining it’s ‘days’ with American time (their midnight falls at about 16:00-ish here). The result of [...]

This post is about the level “No Russian” in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. In the weeks leading up to the game’s release we were puzzled why it was rated an 18, all other Call of Duty games have been rated 15 and this one didn’t look any different. This classification information from the [...]

The overall result of this observation is that if you like Halo you should definitely play ODST. I advise against buying it now as it seems like little more than an expensive expansion to Halo 3 but root around for a second-hand copy in the bargain bin in a few months time. The new gameplay [...]