Braid
Monday 18th of August, 2008
Have you played Braid yet? This was not a game I was really looking forward to — I'd heard a few things about it before it launched, and seen a few screenshots, all of which had left me entirely unmoved. Thankfully, it was released through XBLA, and as such was contractually obliged to include a free demo version — because this is one of those games that needs to be played.
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Just Doing It
Tuesday 12th of August, 2008
I spent a whole bunch of my train journey yesterday chatting via IM to a good friend of mine about motivation. I'll admit straight out that I'm not somebody who has an easy time with self-motivation on side projects. I agree to do too many things for too many people, then find it difficult to get started on any of them — or find myself switching wildly between them, like I'm spinning plates. In fact, that's part of the reason I was so anxious to launch this site — I wanted to get it finished, out there, complete.
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Yoshitomo Nara + graf
Monday 11th of August, 2008
We visited the Baltic this weekend to check out the new Summer exhibitions. I spent the whole train journey from Newcastle to London (3.5 hours) attempting to put down in words my experience of Yoshitomo Nara and Graf's A-Z exhibition (short version, I liked it). Now I'm going to try and re-explain it without sounding like a wordy tosser, on the fast train from London to Milton Keynes (about 40 minutes).
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Orangina and Samsung lose at advertising
Thursday 7th of August, 2008
Okay, talking about bad TV advertising isn't exactly original — but seriously, the current batch is just too terrible for words.
Firstly, there's the insanely badly judged Orangina advert. Is this what we're doing now — freaky octopus women and anthromorphic mice juicing citrus fruits on their breasts?
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PixelJunk Eden
Sunday 3rd of August, 2008
As I mentioned last night, my PS3 hasn't seen a huge amount of use as a serious gaming machine. The reasons for this are straightforward enough — there haven't really been any exclusives of interest, unless you're the sort of person who enjoys the hideous controls and mind-numbing storylines of Metal Gear Solid (I'm not). Uncharted was a fun-but-only-once kind of experience, Motorstorm needed splitscreen to keep it going, and Haze was just plain shit. And multiplatform games are basically 360 games as far as I'm concerned, due to the generally lower prices and my controller preference. There's really nothing on the horizon either — until Little Big Planet rolls round, of course.
I do however have a big soft spot for some of the cheap, simple PSN games. PixelJunk Monsters (and its fiendish expansion pack, Encore) has made a particularly large dent in both mine and Kathryn's time. At heart, this game needed to be played by two players, sitting next to each other, preferably with a freshly-brewed cup of tea waiting to be drunk during the post-game postmortem. As such, we were both quite anxious to see whether Q Games' new PixelJunk release, Eden, would provide the same kind of experience — albeit in a totally different setting.