A couple of paragraphs I worked up for PC Gamer, for a forthcoming article, but I didn’t end up using. To the tune of: Tenacious D – The Government Totally Sucks Prior to the 2010 election, all three national parties had pledged to give UK games developers tax breaks; despite being something the Tories and
All dreams begin and end with an elipsis… …so I’m feeling a bit lonely right now. My friends have all bummed off and left me to entertain myself, except one who I’m just walking up to the top floor of the hotel to say goodbye to, before I go and find something to do. We…
Oh, mum! I’ve got ichor in my beard! I’ve got ichor in my nose! I’ve got bits of demon stuck in my chainmail shirt! HOW DO YOU CLEAN CHAINMAIL? Calm down, calm, calm. I’m lucky to be alive; I don’t mean to worry you, but when the demon fizzed and exploded I was standing right…
To the tune of: Count Basie – Board Meeting – Original I’ve been playing lots of board games on the iPhone. Many of the old family favourites are on there, normally produced by EA, and accurately represented; but, let’s face it, the mechanics of most of those are highly simple or broken in key ways.
(Panning montage of serious-looking people talking, national institutions, angry fingers being pointed, people walking around and behind things.) (Tenor voice-over). “It’s a blight on the national psyche, an easy way out for hundreds of people who want easy answers. Politicians condemn it, Doctors say it destroys lives. But what does documentary-making really do to Britain?
Continuing my naif fanfic from our WFRP group. If you’re wondering why my dwarf student speaks Yiddish, and why Dwarvish sounds so much like Hebrew, it’s down to Tolkien. He created some parallels between Jews and Dwarves; both were “at once natives and aliens in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with…
To the tune of: The Durutti Column – Trust The Art Not The Artist Fuck provenance. The joy of many modern critics seems to lie in the attribution of intention to the auteur, or at least cause to the auteur, focusing on the backstory more than the object of study; the importance of something is
To the tune of: Guns N’ Roses – Sweet Child O’ Mine I gone and done wrote something about Minecraft: Gamers, especially PC gamers, give the impression of being more than averagely intelligent. It’s a self-selecting set – a group of people who have the desire for and capability to buy a top-end computer and
To the tune of: Bloodhound Gang – Your Only Friends Are Make Believe GamesMaster Kieron has persuaded Quinns, Matt Sheret and I to join a game of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I’m playing a dwarven student called Grok. I’m already addicted. Stupid Human Year 2252. Dear mother, da, and family. Well, here I am in the Empire! I’m writing
Games journalism isn’t that clear. Some people don’t think it’s journalism, and they think that using the word ‘journalism’ in combination with games is bad for communication, as it weakens the acuity of the language, and especially bad for journalism, as it associates journalism with something distasteful. It’s something I’ve heard repeatedly over the years,…