Category: Games

  • Point and Click Horror – The Last Door

    Point and Click Horror – The Last Door

    Recently I’ve started playing a handful of point and click horror games, mainly because I do a lot of travelling and at the end of the day I often want to unwind with something simple I can put down and pick up whenever. Mainstream PC games can demand a lot of time and thought, and,…

  • Space Games

    Space Games

    I guess, like many, I fell in love with the visual style of No Man’s Sky. The screenshots posted in the build up to its release looked like the covers of 1960s science fiction magazines – Galaxy, If and Worlds of Tomorrow. That, plus the promise of a vast galaxy of procedurally-generated unique planets, many…

  • Tormentum– Dark Sorrow and Darkest Dungeon

    Tormentum– Dark Sorrow and Darkest Dungeon

    Platforms like Steam have opened the game market to a horde of independent developers, some brilliant and some dire. One of the great advantages is that concepts that would never have been touched by the big studios are now being realised by one or two-man/woman bands. This is good news for gamers who either look…

  • Sinead O’Connor and Five Nights at Freddy’s

    Sinead O’Connor and Five Nights at Freddy’s

    Yesterday Sinead O’Connor posted this on her Facebook page: This is a message for parents of young children. There is an online game going round at the moment called Five Nights At Freddiies [sic]. The entire premise of the game is child sacrifice and child torture. An awful lot of kids are playing it without…

  • Sorcerer – The Game of Magical Conflict

    Sorcerer – The Game of Magical Conflict

    Having cut their teeth on the first ever grown-up science fiction game Starforce: Alpha Centauri in 1974, the US company Simulations Publications turned to fantasy a year later with Sorcerer: The Game of Magical Conflict and managed to produce a singularly odd game that, while fun to play up to a point, illustrated so many…

  • Some games I’ve played…

    Some games I’ve played…

      A Happy New Year! I thought I’d kick off 2015 with a blog post about some of the games I’ve played and enjoyed over the last twelve months. Games are often seen as one of the writer’s deadly enemies. They can be a massive time-soak – an easy distraction when writer’s block kicks in…

  • King Arthur Pendragon RPG

      Dungeons and Dragons came out in 1974 and a couple of years later I gave in and bought a set for the then extortionate sum of £6.99. It came in a little white box with illustrations done in biro. I hadn’t bothered to check whether it could be played solitaire (which it clearly couldn’t)…

  • StarForce – Alpha Centauri

    This post is a bit of unashamedly geeky nostalgia. As I’ve mentioned before, in the early 1970s I started collecting the science fiction magazines Galaxy and Worlds of If. Apart from the stories and articles what also fascinated me was the adverts. Flicking back through them now gives a fascinating insight into what people thought…