the background noise

Deadly Premonition was a funny old game, an earnestly idiosyncratic tribute to the sensibilities of its creators wrapped up in a Twin Peaks style murder mystery. Of course it's that last part that caused it to pop up somewhere on my radar in the early to mid part of the last decade, anything that even partly channels the weird sensibilities of Twin Peaks and David Lynch invariably gets my attention but back to the game. This is a murder mystery, a dream like odyssey through the unknown and a reckoning with oneself that I wasn't quite prepared for. Short form social media wasn't all the rage just yet when this game was released, yet  Deadly Premonition found a popular little online niche for itself that captured the imagination of much of the gaming public. A curiously beguiling mix of gaming oddity that shouldn't have worked as well as it should have. Indeed some would say it barely worked at all.  As to why it worked for me, well I think there is something to be sa...

Too warm, just too warm. I'm sweating like a bawdy metaphor in church and I'm just not cut out for this thing we call summer. It's a hostile environment is what I'm saying. It makes me want to pack up and relocate to a walk-in freezer. So naturally, what better time to revisit my love of videogame music than when my brain is slowly baking from the inside.  Today we shall showcase the music of a game we've highlighted around these here parts before. Indeed I recall this was the best game I played back in the bygone days of three years ago. Today we highlight the music of Oxenfree for no other reason than I haven't already done so. That and I recently got around to playing it's sequel, so the first game has been on my mind a lot lately.

It's that time once again where I highlight notable examples of the art of the screenshot whilst going on a bit about the game they belong to. So re cently I played a pair of visual novels that caught my eye some time back. The Silver Case was the first game released by famed Japanese developer Grasshopper Manufacture and noted creative force Goichi Suda aka Suda51 . Originally releasing on the original PlayStation  in Japan back in the golden year that was 1999, it wouldn't see a Western release and localisation until it's HD re-release in 2016 on PC with other formats following soon after. This would be re-released alongside it's sequel The 25th Ward: The Silver Case and given my generally positive experience of Grasshopper games I tucked them away on my list for future attention. Well that moment has arrived and cometh the hour, cometh the baffling tale of intrigue, deception and inter-departmental warfare.

Just consider for a moment what a huge undertaking it is to actually make a game. Whether it's a AAA effort costing hundreds of thousands of dineros and many lifetimes of productive work hours or even your more humble independent efforts where the costs may not be so great but the penalties for failure are still pretty stark indeed. From concept to execution, it's a massive toil to see something through to completion on the hope and a prayer that it finds both the audience and the success that game makers hope for.  Now consider the games that are not like that at all. Consider if you will the concept of... shovelware!

As mentioned in the last update, I've been playing the console version of Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition . It is a game revered by a certain generation of late 90's gamer. A standout in a time of a standout RPG's. A rip roaring adventure through the world of Dungeons and Dragons . It's contents a veritable checklist for everything gamers look for in a legendary RPG. Yes it's 'finally getting around to playing another classic game' time again. Now that I've gotten around to playing the thing and having sunk a few dozen hours into it I'm going to ramble on at length about how it sucks...

Since restarting the blog three years ago I've made great strides into clearing the perpetual gaming backlog that irked me so much back then. It has been a busy few years and a great many games have been completed post-COVID.  It's a fine line of course I don't want this to feel like a task or a chore to clear but at the same time, games are not meant to be accumulated without actually... you know playing them.  So played them I have and h aving tracked my ongoing thoughts on the gaming habit right here on the blog I now ponder the always fraught question of what to play next?