An Unqualified Game Reviewer

A few weeks ago I let slip to a few friends of mine that I’ve been playing around with YoYo Games’ fantastic 2D game-making software creatively named Game Maker Studio. I also mentioned the pipe dream of turning my newborn hobby into an actual job. I’ve only been using this program for a few months at this point, so realistically it would take years for me to get the experience and knowledge to actually start making money from it; hence the term “pipe dream”. One of my friends was quite dismissive of this pipe dream, so I asked him “wouldn’t anyone love to turn their hobby into a job?” He replied words to the effect of “no, get a real a job.” This seems kind of soulless to me. The conversation swiftly turned to other matters, but I was really hoping that this friend would ask me something like “how many people do you know who’ve successfully turned a hobby into a job?” because I already had an answer prepared: “Every single actor, writer, musician, and sportsperson that you’ve ev...

In the late 1990s there was an old man named Alfred. His wife died and he fell into a deep depression. He couldn’t bear to live without his wife; he had no reason to live anymore. He became suicidal. It’s even rumoured that he went as far as to buy a gun to end his life. Alfred lived in the UK where guns are far harder to purchase for regular people, but according to the rumours Alfred was desperate enough to end his life, that he went to the trouble. Before he decided to end everything he decided to use the rest of his money and blow it on a PlayStation and a handful of games. “Might as well give this gaming fad a try before I end it all” I imagine he thought. “See what all the fuss is about.” The games were a distraction if anything else. As long as he was playing these games he was still living, but they would only last so long. Maybe they would give him the time he needed to reconsider ending his life, but it wouldn’t be much. But there was one game that was different to th...

The original Fable is one of the games I played about 20 times a year when I was little and have replayed at least yearly ever since, so regardless of what quality it possesses I could never give an unbiased account of it because the nostalgia factor is almost overwhelming to me as it remains one of my favourite games of all time to this day. The game starts with standard fantasy storytelling trope: idyllic lifestyle interrupted by absurd levels of tragedy in the space of a single day, in this case a bandit attack on your wholesome little village resulting in the massacre of everyone you ever knew including your entire family and you are left lost and alone in an uncaring world, if it wasn’t for the mysterious wizard who whisks you away to Hogwarts so you can learn how to be a fantasy adventurer and eventually avenge yourself upon the evil that bestruck your childhood (apparently “bestruck” isn’t a word, but I’m going to leave it in). After a long and fairly tedious tutorial sect...

Introduction About 6 months ago I played through the Resident Evil series for the first time. I did play Resident Evil 7 around the time of its release, and had made multiple attempts to play through the first one only to be met by either hardware failure or an age-induced impatience for older-styles of gameplay, but 6 months ago I finally got around to playing the main games in the series (most of them anyway). Shortly after, I wrote my own personal ranking for all the main entries of the series which has just been sitting in the laptops documents folder since then. When playing a new game or series of games for the first time one can often fall into the trap of hyping it up in your own mind and declaring it to be one of your favourite games or series of all time, but some months down the line once you've moved onto something else, you'll start to think that you overrated the series in your head and you actually don't like as much as your other favourites. Not th...