Having just scraped a stunningly original ‘Best Games of 2015‘ piece from the bottom of the blogging barrel, I figured I’d go for the full house with an equally iconoclastic ‘What to look forward to in 2016’ post too. There are currently several million of these on the Internet – all better written, funnier, and more widely read than this one ever will be – but I’m going to tip the balance in my favour by swearing a fuck-load. So, you know, swings and roundabouts….. Continue reading “Games I’m Looking Forward To In 2016 (Part One)”
I know, right!? What kind of outside-the-box, original thinking is this? A Top Games of 2015 piece? Isn’t that pushing the envelope a bit too far? Isn’t this exactly the kind of crazy, experimental piece that risks undoing all of the goodwill I’ve managed to build up over the last few months? Honestly though, I hear what you’re saying, but that’s just how I roll, folks – a non-stop thrill ride of the cray-cray and the avant-garde.
Still, stunning lack of originality aside, I do quite like list-ey type pieces, and not least because they give me a rare opportunity to engage in a bit of thoughtful reflection and assessment. Continue reading “My Top Games of 2015”
I love Christmas, and I especially love it when I’m back home in the UK for it. As I said in my Christmas and Gaming piece, the festive season is made all the more festive when I’m surrounded by all the food, tradition, music, food, films, food, places, and food of my childhood, and the allure of all of that starts to get me excited sometime around the end of March. In fact, because my UK-based Christmas is a once-every-two-years thing now, it’s possible I get even more excited about it than when I was a kid. The weird thing this year, though, is that even though I am 90% ridiculously excited, there’s 10% of me that’s going to be a little bereft. Continue reading “Cold Turkey for Christmas”
[This is (what I hope will be) the first of many guest posts from Rich Keech – a veteran of gaming, a former colleague at TwinStick Gaming, and somebody I’ve known since video games came on cassette tapes. Teacher by day, Gamer by night, and Father 24/7, I’m thrilled to have him find some time to contribute to QTX, and as you’ll see in the following, he’s definitely got some mad skills when it comes to writing about games. I’m a huge fan of his work, and I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I do. You can find Rich on twitter as @spooklebeans, and @TLOUFactionsMP, and his YouTube videos are here.]
Now it has to be said, that this COULD be something of a controversial article. However, this isn’t click bait, it isn’t an attempt to insight a riot and it isn’t the insane ravings of a passing maniac.
It is…. an opinion. A considered opinion. Continue reading “Minority Report: Why Star Wars Battlefront is better than Fallout 4.”
Right, I’ve now been playing Fallout 4 for…well, for a lot of hours, so I’m in a position to follow up my First Impressions piece with some, I guess, secondary impressions. See, I say “I guess”, not because I’m unsure about how counting works, but because I’ve not actually progressed much further in missions and such – a point I’ll cover more in a bit – but, this being a Fallout game, I still feel I’ve made some strides into the game, both literally and metaphorically. So, whilst I’m not perhaps in a position to review just yet (not even nearly), I am slightly past that initial phase – hence ‘Secondary Impressions’ – and I’ve also been playing long enough to develop one particular gripe. Continue reading “Fallout 4 – Secondary Impressions (and “Issues”)”
****The other day I did a piece covering my First Impressions of Rise of the Tomb Raider, so please feel free to read that for a more general overview of the game. In the interests of trying not to repeat myself too much, this one will mostly be a follow-up to that – and focusing more on the narrative/complete experience stuff that was missing from the previous one.****
Having played something of a blinder with 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot, Square Enix, Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal had quite a lot to live up to with Rise of the Tomb Raider, and as the latest installment of the franchise hit the shelves, expectations were undoubtedly high. Continue reading “Rise of the Tomb Raider – Review”
As I’ve said before, one of the highlights of my first year of next-gen gaming was the Tomb Raider reboot, and that, coupled with the ever-so-brief go I had on this one prior to release, made Rise of the Tomb Raider one of my most eagerly anticipated releases of Silly Season. I had every reason to expect good things from this installment, and particularly because I’d very much gotten the impression that this one would feature more of the Tomb-ey/Puzzle-y stuff that I loved about the earlier Tomb Raider games, whilst still maintaining the strong narrative arc of the 2013 release. Continue reading “Rise of the Tomb Raider – First Impressions”
If my last two forays into the Fallout Universe are anything to go by, it’s likely that it’ll be another couple of hundred hours before I “finish” Fallout 4, so I figured it’d perhaps behoove me to do a series of ‘my journey so far’ type pieces in the meantime. This is the first, I guess, but it’s also a ‘First Impressions‘ piece, so I’ll limit this one to the immediately obvious stuff, but with a bit of the ‘sense of occasion’ thrown in for good measure. Think of me as a modern day Herodotus, if you will; not only being witness to history as it happens, but, like, writing that shit down too. Continue reading “Fallout 4 – First Impressions”
Soooooo, as I’ve said before, many, many times; tomorrow, Tuesday 10th November 2015, is quite possibly going to be the best day in the history of the world, ever. I mean, some other stuff has happened on some other days – some guy cured Polio at one point, for example, and there was all the Moon-ey type shananigans and such, but crucially, crucially – on no other day in History did Fallout 4 come out, and in no other cycle of 24 hours did Fallout 4 and Rise of the Tomb Raider come out at the same time. That’s a fact – and you can check it if you want. Continue reading “In Which Fate Punches Me in the Nads. Repeatedly.”
QTX 