Jasp's Blog

Over the past four years I have been a regular user of the British rail network. During this time I have regularly been frustrated with the pricing, which can vary from guilt inducing cheapness, to exorbitantly pricey, even for exactly the same journey. Finding the cheapest tickets isn’t easy, and it seems that every time [...]

You may have noticed reports in several newspapers and tech sites today of the Heinz Beanzawave, a USB powered microwave. Unfortunately for fans of beans and fancy USB gadgets the story appears to be, well, a load of old beans ((See, you don’t have to be part of the tabloid press to make terrible puns)).

Sixty-five years ago 160,000 troops landed on the beaches of Normandy to drive back the forces of fascism, and to protect the freedoms that they held to be important. Thousands of others worked behind the scenes to provide the ships necessary to co-ordinate such an astonishing feat, not to mention those involved in the concurrent [...]

With the third part of this series we move away from the more chronological approach, to considering styles, techniques and more overarching concepts.
Games on Tour
While computer and video games have a huge, global market, it is not a homogeneous one. Regions differ in terms of platform popularity and genre preference, as well as far more [...]

Feeling slightly worse for wear this weekend, so hopefully part 2 will not be affected too much.
Early Home Computers
As the home computing revolution began in the 80’s, systems were getting into peoples homes through two different routes. While Atari, and later Nintendo and Sega were making the first games consoles, the likes of Sinclair and [...]

This is not another tedious discussion on whether games are ‘art‘ or not. Such debates rarely tell us anything new, and instead usually end up hinging on arguments on semantics, and nebulous concepts of worth. Instead I hope to briefly consider the way in which games leverage art, that is in terms of graphics, to [...]

Arthur C. Clarke provided one of my first forays into science fiction, although I forget which book I read first. However, I do not forget the books themselves.
My favourite Clarke novel was, “The City and The Stars,” a story about Alvin, the first human ‘born’ in the last city on Earth — Diaspar — for [...]