Far be it for me to be that old man grumbling about how everything was better in the olden days... but one thing that was undeniably better in the olden days was this thing: game logos.
And here's the proof.
Think of a game logo. Any logo. Chances are if you can picture one, it probably wasn't created in the last ten years.
Far be it for me to be that old man grumbling about how everything was better in the olden days... but one thing that was undeniably better in the olden days was this thing: game logos. And here's the proof.
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How long do you need to play a game for before you can formulate a valid opinion on it? This amount of time: no time at all. In fact, people can have opinions on anything, sight unseen. Take it from the writer of Pudsey The Dog: The Movie...
So... you might've read my review of No Man's Sky. You might also have read the comment from Digitiser2000 reader Chris O'Regan, who had this to say: "From your review I can only assume you haven't played it for long enough. Everything you describe occurs at the foundation of the player's experience. It exists to act as a stark relief against which you compare the experiences you have yet to have." Which is interesting. Because from my perspective, I've very much played it for long enough. However, Chris's comment got me thinking. The debate about whether journalists need to finish a game before they should be allowed to review it is one that has raged for aeons. I thought it might be worth taking a slightly closer look at it. Some years ago, I paid my first and only ever visit to Dublin.
I don't know what I was expecting - some sort of quaint Irish theme park of a city, in the same way that Americans expect London to be full of smog and people in bowler hats, and Jack the Rippers. Unfortunately, I was rendered disappointed by how familiar it felt. Arriving in the city centre it was all the same shops I got back home, the same chains, the same high street brands. I could've been back in London, frankly, were it not for the accents and the Guinness factory. Which has an absurd restaurant where everything is made with Guinness, which is in no way a good idea. I had much the same feeling of deja vu the first time I went back to America after a decade, and saw you could buy Cadbury's Creme Eggs. It made the country feel less special, made the world a smaller place than it is. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Dublin - there isn't. It's perfectly nice. It just felt incredibly familiar, and something of an unnecessary slog to get on a plane just to wander about and get drunk in the exact same sort of city I was all too familiar with back home. No Man's Sky is the Dublin of video games. It's Friday, which means it is the day of the Friday Letters. Please... If you would like to be immortalised on this page, all you must do is send your questions, comments and "that" to here: digitiser2000@gmail.com
I've been playing No Man's Sky since I woke up this morning. I want to talk about it... but I'm aware that reviewing such a huge game, on what amounts to just over ten hours of play, may not be doing it justice.
Not least because those ten hours are still throwing up surprises. Everything I feared about the game - that it would become repetitive, and boring, isn't happening. It's a sandbox, but one with a structure of sorts. It lays down breadcrumbs, leading in multiple directions at once, and following the trails is proving irresistible. Every new location, every alien encounter, every new piece of technology, brings unexpected rewards - another piece of lore, or another mystery, or an unexpected encounter, or a weather system which takes me by surprise. Right now, I'm gradually making my way towards a black hole, which promises a shortcut to the centre of the galaxy... It feels huge, and strange, and empty... and exciting. But instead of reviewing No Man's Sky right now... I can talk about how it is delivering something I've always looked for in games: a sense of unbound exploration, which has faith in the player's curiosity and imagination. No Man's Sky... it's out. I've played it. No time to mess around; here are my initial thoughts. Be warned: they're mostly pretty positive, so I've tried to temper any latent excitement by off-setting my comments using mocking images of babies with their faces pressed against windows.
Though it eventually became the sort of whimsical 80s games magazine that many of us recall with fondness, Sinclair User began life as a more serious computing publication, dedicated to all things ZX81 and Spectrum.
Here we present a gallery of some of the magazine's finest early covers, in honour of the ZX Spectrum Vega project getting into some difficulty... Are you an Xbox One owner? Have you rolled your eyes at the hype surrounding the imminent release of No Man's Sky? Have you struggled to contain your envy of PS4 owners? Or perhaps you are a PS4 owner, and have been smart enough to hold off on buying No Man's Sky until the reviews drop?
Either way: this is your article, and we urge you to share it with all of those who greedily gobbled up the hype, and convinced themselves that No Man's Sky - sight unseen - would be the greatest game they ever did play. We have gathered some of the most damning quotes from around the Internob, from those who have played the game, and coupled them to some suitable imagery of the celebrity chef Guy Fieri - custom made to provoke maximum irritation among the No Man's Sky early adopters.... Many aeons ago, I was having a beer or three with Andy Watts, the creator and lead writer of the CITV sitcom My Parents Are Aliens.
It was a show I'd worked on for a couple of years at that point, and very much loved writing for - I ended up being responsible for 14 episodes overall, second only to Andy himself... devouring every commission they'd toss my way. At the time, I was also developing my own kids show, one which, as usually happens, never got made. I think I'd already had a few close calls by that point - projects which nearly got green-lit - and was already feeling pessimistic about the chances of this new one. Coupled to that, I'd had some other strange experiences - namely, having some un-produced work shamelessly pilfered by certain individuals - which made me feel cynical about the TV industry as a whole. It was while telling Andy all this that he gave me one of the best pieces of advice I have ever received: enjoy the "What if". When this current generation of consoles launched, both Sony and Microsoft expressed an intention to produce original TV content - clearly seeing the way the industry was moving towards platform-exclusivity - as pioneered successfully by Netflix and Amazon.
Unfortunately, that dream has now crashed and burned like a content Zeppelin; you may have read over the weekend that Powers, the first and last PlayStation TV show, has been cancelled. And yet... I'd argue that this doesn't have to mean the end for console-exclusive telly... It's surreal to think that one day modern video games will look archaic and weird. That photos of people playing on the Xbox One, or using an Oculus Rift, or playing Pokemon Go, will be as of their time as the photos we display here: in this gallery of 70s and 80s gamers.
We don't want to put any pressure on you, but we'd like to suggest you might wish to show one or more of these photos to your dad while he's in the bath. Hey - we've still a few tickets left to the Teletext and Digifest on October 1st.
You can get them here, while they last. I've spent most of this week trying to resist sharing something with you that has been made for the evening festivities. Providing my loins can remain strong... if you want to know what it is - you'll have to come along. H'hah. I tease you. Anyway. Look now: it's the Friday Letters Page. And! Do you remember when games cost just £1.99? You'd be forgiven for not remembering that, because for the most part games were never that cheap. Unless you're talking about Steam or iOS games, but for the purposes of this piece I'm prepared to pretend they don't exist.
When you look back at the days of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, games have always been expensive. Arguably, you get much more bang for your pennies nowadays. Heck, in real terms, games are actually cheaper than they used to be - and providing you don't mind contracting dysentery from other people's filthy bum-fingers, there's a thriving second hand market, thanks to retailers like CEX. But what could you do back in the day, before second-hand games were a thing, if you wanted a new game, but didn't want to resort to the dirty act of piracy? In my case, I went to Freemans, the corner shop at the top of my road. You know how Super Mario was named after Mario Segale, the landlord of Nintendo of America's office, yes? It's a good story. It's an interesting story. And we're ending it here. There's just no time to recount right now. There really isn't. We have to move on.
You see, it is time already for nine more stories about how the games characters got their names, and one story about a protein. That's not even a joke. "Fashion! Turn to the left! Fashion! Turn to the right! Oooh, fashion! We are the goon squad and we're coming to town! Beep-beep!"
And people called David Bowie a terrible lyricist. In honour of it being 46 years this year since the dawn of the 1970s, here's some godawful fashion from that era, which mercifully chose to remain there. |
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