GUEST REVIEW BY SUPER BAD ADVICE

One snag with videogaming is that regardless of the topic, the word ‘game’ itself often conjures up ideas of playful excitement and enjoyment – like the happy, smiling funsters you get on boardgame boxes, all sat around having a jolly time poking each other with Ker-Plunk sticks or trying to work out why so many faces in Guess Who? look like a poorly disguised Julian Assange.
 
Films and books don’t have this problem, of course, as both are just the name of the delivery device, not a description of what you’re getting in itself. If you say “I’m going to the cinema to watch a film”, no one is any the wiser as to whether it’ll be a happy film, sad film, thrilling film, or complete waste of £10 and 2 hours you’ll never get back – you know, like the dreary-arsed DC comic book movies (and THAT WAS A JOKE before anyone writes in).
 
Games, though, come saddled with some expectation of what you’re going to get and how they’re going to make you feel built in because they’re ‘games’. Which might be why some people still dismiss storytelling in gaming as immature by default – they inherently think they’ll only ever get something light, shallow and frothy.
 
But this isn’t 1982 anymore, and the narratives possible in gaming have moved on a bit from ‘help Bumbo collect dragon eggs from the haunted cave for his monster custard factory’.
 
Stories in games aren’t always happy ones. Or easy ones. And as a consequence, sometimes calling a game a ‘game’ is almost unfairly trivialising it. Because of course you can still appreciate something and very much enjoy the experience of it, and feel better for having had that experience, without it being a laugh a minute or an action-packed thrillfest.
 
Which brings us to Gris.

I can't keep up with games anymore. I think that if I was still writing Digitiser - as per its original plan to cover the entire breadth of gaming - I'd be lost. Indeed, if we were faced with covering it, just with the two-man - and later three-man - team we originally began with, we'd have no chance.

It's one of the biggest changes I've witnessed over the course of my years writing about games, and the primary reason that Digitiser The Show chose to focus mostly on old games, mainly from the era that I was writing Digitiser for Teletext.

It's not so much about nostalgia as being practical. I can do old games, and talk about them with a degree of confidence that I know what I'm saying. I often worry when I touch on newer stuff - especially the sort of games which come laden with a passionate fanbase - that I'm going to put my foot in it. And by "it" I mean a deep trough of nerd effluence. 

Part of the challenge of writing about games these days, and keeping a handle on developments across the industry, is the size of games. I'm not just talking about the literal size of them - the big open worlds of Far Cry and the like - but the way in which the fanbase will build upon them, these communities springing up around the outskirts like shanty towns. 

Back in the day, I could be confident of my opinion on something like, say, Sonic & Knuckles after three or four hours of play. I'd get that done, move onto Cannon Fodder, for example, then clock that in a few more hours. Games - and being a games journalist - was manageable. 

Now, I don't have a clue about half the things I read, and need to take two weeks off work to review something. 

What's more important than critical acclaim? Moneyyyyyyyyy! 

You may have heard the news that Respawn Entertainment - now a subsidiary of Electronic Arts Global Megacorp Inc. - has released a free-to-play battle royale game entitled Apex Legends. It is, apparently, set in the Titanfall universe, but without the Titans which gave that franchise its name. That would be why they've given it that meaningless, self-consciously cool-sounding, focus group-tested, title.

Here are some alternatives they might like to consider for their next game:

Apogee Cusp
Zenith Saga
Lethal Salvation
Hostility Crusade
Fallen Void
Warfighting Skirmish
Hostility Conflict
Atomic Sheath
Cacophony Bong
Ephemeral Clash
Intrinsic Champions
Magnum Honk
Flocculent Sods

Frankly, put any screenshot of Apex Legends next to one from EA's next big release, Anthem, and you'd be hard-pressed to tell them apart. Whatever happened to games having their own identity?! But that's okay, because people don't like to be startled by new and interesting things. They just want to be spoon-fed the same old lukewarm roadkill ad infinitum, apparently.