An Unqualified Game Reviewer

  A recent episode of Slightly Civil War on the Escapist Magazine discussed who had the best first console between debaters Yahtzee Croshaw and Jack Packard. Yahtzee was arguing that his Magnavox Odyssey 2 was better than Jack’s SNES, but during their post-debate podcast where they have more of a relaxed discussion about the topic Yahtzee mentioned the idea of peoples personal gaming DNA, which is to say the gaming experiences they grew up with based on which consoles they owned. I thought I’d spend this blog post describing and discussing my own gaming history and my own “gaming DNA”. Gaming in my family would have started off with my dad during his own childhood/teenage years; I’m not too sure about what machines he owned but it was definitely a PC, a BBC Micro I think, rather than a television console. Whichever one it was, once he had children and we had a Windows PC in the house he would still continue playing the occasional game, now with me and my brother watching. It was ...

  Assassin’s Creed, what an absolute travesty of a franchise. It all started off so well with the first instalment putting the player in the shoes a medieval Assassin, and I think the capitalization on that word is correct because this is the actually historical Order of Assassins of the crusader times. The plot wasn’t much in Assassin’s Creed 1 but the game was more focused on the gameplay, where you explore a medieval crusader city, gather information about your target, and carefully assassinate your target. There was some underlying plot-line regarding a powerful weapon of some ancient and advanced civilisation, but does anyone really care? No, it’s just a through line to connect your 9 assassination missions throughout the game. As perfectly fine and serviceable the AC game was, I’ve never found myself able to complete it for a second time, because the game is fairly repetitive with your pre-assassination information-gathering activities limited to eavesdropping, pick-pocketi...

Recently I replayed TimeSplitters: Future Perfect on my old Xbox original, or I tried to at least, my disc is so scratched and damaged that the game crashed half-way through 3 or 4 of the levels until I finally gave up after about 9 levels. But anyway, despite the set-backs I can safely say that the game is still one of my favourite games of all time; in fact I played so much back in the day, that it’s entered that small cohort of games that if I sat myself in a dark, quite room with my eyes closed I could probably just think the entire game in my head. I don’t replay games as much as I used to, but seeing as I’ve have replayed this one again, I thought I’d a do short review of all three of games in the TimeSplitters series. The series was created by Free Radical, which was founded by former employees of Rare, specifically employees who had worked on the N64 classic GoldenEye. While the rest of Rare went on to release Perfect Dark, Free Radical went on to create TimeSplitters, and it...