Author: Philippa W

  • How Irritating Button Mapping Led to a Humanitarian Disaster

    Like the rest of the UK gaming population, I’ve been playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It’s rather a good game (I’m especially fond of the slightly dated black and gold colour palette which really reminds me of another game which I am hugely frustrated that I can’t place. Any ideas?) but I keep finding myself…

  • Olympic Hero…

    Ah, Guitar Hero. Despite the fact that my living room is still festooned with plastic tat, I had started to feel slightly more kindly disposed towards the franchise. Mostly, I suspect, because Activision pulled the plug on Guitar Hero back in February and since then the number of times I’ve had to hear Rock and…

  • The Reason I’ve Changed My Mind About Ocarina of Time

    So, you know how I was banging on about how Nintendo need to stop re-releasing Ocarina of Time and find a new cash cow? Small confession: I may have changed my mind a little bit. The reason for my rather abrupt climbdown? [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-4u5L4um0c&feature=player_embedded[/youtube] It’s Zelda. Remixed. As a can-can. It was created to coincide with…

  • Is it time for Nintendo to let go of Ocarina of Time?

    Those folks at Nintendo are ridiculously proud of Ocarina of Time – and rightly so. When it was first released it garnered many a perfect review score along with all the squeals and the excitement. Thirteen years later and it regularly tops “Ultimate games of all time” lists and features in God knows how many nostalgic…

  • Losing my Farmville virginity

    I hate Farmville. I hate it for two reasons. One is that people I don’t even want to be friends with on Facebook but am for reasons best left unexplored send messages asking me to help then grow their irritating crops. The other is that I’ve never played it. I generally try not to say…

  • Welcome to Pipcastle

    There are few arenas more forgiving of unbridled acts of narcissism than gaming. You don’t believe me? Well, I have spent around fifteen years naming things after myself, building monuments to myself, blasting my way around space just to earn respect in dive bars and generally bigging myself up. The thing that brought all this to my attention…

  • And on the third day God created kitchen cabinet labyrinths

    Am I alone in infinitely preferring The Sims to The Sims 3? To be honest, as much as it’s fun playing God, it’s more fun when God has boundaries. God doesn’t have the time to micromanage some idiot senior citizen’s gardening aspirations. God also feels it’s a step too far into meta-gaming when you’re trolling…

  • The Unbearable Heaviness of Gaming Inventories

    Gaming inventories are both a blessing and a hideous curse. Let’s dispense with the ‘blessing’ part of this quickly. Inventories exist to allow the player freedom to collect all manner of gubbins to aid them in their quests. Developers usually put a limit on said inventory (be it weight, quantity or some other measure) to…

  • Spectator Sport

    One of the great things about games compared to movies is that you get to take part in the adventure instead of just watching it, but that doesn’t mean that watching a game isn’t fun either. Sometimes it’s incredibly annoying watching someone else play, they don’t go in the direction you would go, or they…

  • Gaming Resolutions

    It’s a new year and time for a whole load of new games to play while putting off the visit to the gym you promise you’ll go to every year but never do. I know what I want to be playing this year but whether I’ll have the time or the money to do so…