Mssv

The popular games weblog Joystiq regularly posts about promotional ARG campaigns, generally to do with new games or consoles like the XBox. Until today, that is. Today, they proclaimed that they were sick of viral marketing and sick of ARGs. Their list of complaints include the fact that ARGs are predictable, not entertaining (this is [...]

Regular readers may have noticed some subtle change in the appearance of my weblog - yes, I have in fact posted a new article in the ‘massive’ section. It’s not very long, but people into alternate reality games might be interested. Basically, it’s an edited version of the extended abstract I sent into the GDC [...]

In the past couple of weeks I bought Half-Life 2 and Sid Meier’s Pirates!. This is pretty exceptional for me since I can’t actually recall the last time I bought a computer game. After buying a new graphics card for HL2 (the game simply laughed at my pathetic attempt to get it to run on [...]

Some time ago, I wrote a long article about a fascinating way of playing the strategy computer game Civilization 3. That article - A Clash in Civilization - has now finally been published online at Kuro5hin, where it successfully ran the gauntlet of the highly cynical and hostile reviewers and emerged unscathed and on the [...]

I’ve finally gotten around to setting up the weblog editor in Newsnetwire on OS X, which probably means nothing to most people but means that I can post entries here a little easier than before. Hopefully that small reduction in time will be enough to break my iron-clad procrastination.
In the past few days I’ve developed [...]

(Arrrgghhhh! Safari just crashed on me, right on the verge of finishing a long post, reconstructed below. Let no man give Apple unqualified praise now - they have erred, and they have erred greviously in allowing such a shoddy, slow, pre-beta, crash-prone piece of bug-ridden garbage such as Safari to be released to the general [...]

GameCube dev kits for UK universities - the story isn’t that interesting in itself, but the spin is great. Nintendo have just given four ‘leading UK universities’ GameCube development kits. Who are these universities, you might wonder? Are they Oxford or Cambridge, or Imperial or UMIST or Warwick or some red-brick institution? No.
They are the [...]

I’m becoming increasingly irritated by the lack of quality of writing in newspapers these days, and specifically, newspaper supplements. I have no problem with the main reporting, but the ‘lifestyle’ sections are just awful. Maybe they’ve always been this dull and boring, or maybe my standards have been risen by culling the best of the [...]

Imagine playing an RTS game like Total War (in fact, just like Total War) with three of your friends, on a big screen and a couple of military history advisors. That’s what BBC2’s new show Time Commanders is, essentially.
There are a few twists, of course. None of the four players actually got to touch a [...]

Syberia II pushed back to 2004 - some disappointing news from Microids. Apparently they’re doing it so they can make a simultaneous release on PC, PS2 and XBox - but do console gamers really play adventure games? I suppose I shouldn’t be too bothered, since I have an unplayed copy of The Longest Journey still [...]