Off My Mind

You know a game is old when you genuinely cannot remember the last time you played it. A safe bet would have been before Bioshock 2 came out which puts it close to 12 years ago but I’m not sure I actually replayed it before the sequel came out. I don’t know if it’s just the pace that life moves at in this day and age but I still consider Bioshock to be a somewhat recent release. Which makes very little sense because you could measure that time frame in console generations. That feeling is one I often find you experience when a game still feels like it holds its place even when playing it several years later. You think to yourself; “really, this game came out that long ago?” and in Bioshock’s case I certainly felt that both while playing it and once the credits rolled. It’s a game that certainly has a huge reputation and it did not disappoint upon revisiting. If anything I would say time has only benefited this game. The star of Bioshock for me has always been the setting, Rapture is on...

It has certainly been a while since I put anything up on here. There are many reasons for that, main ones being the focus on YouTube and Twitch I have had over the last two years but now feels like the right time to get back to writing more. If you have been following me recently you know that I used to work in the games coverage business, I don’t use the phrase games journalism as it carries quite a lot of baggage these days. I wrote for a website that used to be called PlayerAffinity.com which was then later rebranded as EntertainmentFuse.com after I left. I worked there for a little over 3 years and even though it wasn’t a paid position I genuinely loved doing it. I wrote mainly features and reviews for the first year or so and eventually became a lead for the console department. I won’t go super in depth on this as I did a whole podcast covering this which is below if you would like to know more.    As you can imagine I used to love to write about the video ga...

Red Dead never had the impact on me that it seemed to have on most people. Upon its release back in 2010 it was widely regarded as Rockstars best game and one of the stand out games from that generation, there was no shortage of "one of the greatest games ever" taglines being thrown its way. One of the main reasons I like to revisit old games is that when you play lots of games it can be hard to accurately remember what it is about a certain game you liked or didn't like. I remember being very disappointed with Red Dead from a mechanics stand point but really enjoying the story and setting. With the sequel on the horizon for later this year I thought it would be an ideal time to go back and see how time has treated Red Dead. At first I was optimistic,  I have moved past my very strict mechanics focus and am far more open to narrative being a focus on games as well as the developers focusing more on the immersive aspects of the world they create. The first few hours were g...

For various reasons 2017 has been quite the year in video games. I was thinking of doing a list of my top games but I think that format and awards in general have become pointless the more the medium has grown and it can be quite limiting when trying to talk about the year in general. Which brings me to this list; a list of things related to gaming that I felt really warranted some discussion. Favourite game of 2017. This one should be obvious if you're reading this, there is one game I have talked about more or less nonstop since playing it near the time of its release and I will continue to so do for many years. Guerilla came out of nowhere in the open world genre with Horizon Zero Dawn and showed everyone else how it's done. I've already spoken at length about my enjoyment of this game so this is really just its final layer of frosting on the best cake of the year. Game I played in 2017 that I really shouldn't have waited to do so. This one is actually pretty tou...