Jasp's Blog

As the gaming media turns all eyes towards L.A. for E3 2009, many blogs and news sites go into overdrive. While I’m not at E3 myself, and have absolutely no way of finding out information that isn’t already published elsewhere, I thought I’d still do my best to produce stories that I can guarantee you [...]

Its looking likely! Earlier today, newspaper columnist, television presenter and all-round misanthropist Charlie Brooker gave hints that we mad soon be seeing a series of ‘Gameswipe.’ In a tweet on his @charltonbrooker Twitter account, Brooker asked for the following:
Worst videogame bosses ever? Email yr suggestions to gameswipe at zeppotron dot com. Make what you will [...]

The four familiar words swam in his mind’s eye as the world remained frozen around him, that last ever present option both seductive and terrifying in its promises. Attempt number two wasn’t so bad; he had failed, but he did make the reserve list, and things were going remarkably well with Sarah. He couldn’t bring himself to accept it though, he needed a job, and in the current climate that could take a while, even for someone with his skills. Besides, he could always come back, now he just needed to be as far away as possible. He reached far back, not even looking at the dates as they flashed past.

February 12^th 1990, Little Wadeway

He turned inside out as the world past through him and then righted itself; a pause; then noise. The excited babble and shouts of children crashed over him as he was pushed and jostled by their movements as he found himself in a much smaller body than he had been occupying moments earlier. He was stood in the playground of Little Wadeway C. of E. Primary School and a glance downwards revealed that he was dressed in a bright red wax raincoat and a scruffy pair of Velcro trainers. How far back had he gone?

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 [...]

The third part of the ‘On art and Games’ series won’t be appearing this week, but instead will be up once its done. That’s not to say I’ve been ignoring it, but these things can take a while to put together, and I don’t want to fling the whole thing together in a rush. I’ve [...]

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 [...]

Anyone who has played a game on the Xbox 360, or has looked at a growing number of PC Games, will be familiar with the concept of achievements. Achievements are a way of meta-gaming, giving the player a reward outside of the game, for completing various in game tasks. These tasks can vary from simply [...]

Recently it was discovered that the word censor list for the computer game Pure was included in the game install in plain text format. Predictably this has resulted in many people trying to string together the most obscene sentences which will be able to bypass the filter. However for me the list raised another question. [...]

Good old games is a games download service that allows gamers to buy older titles, especially those which may be a bit difficult to find without trawling the depths of eBay. Like all the best download services, its titles are free of DRM, which means that they aren’t suddenly going to break on you should [...]