the background noise

A few weeks ago I got the urge to play a Soulsborne . You know the ones, the merciless rock-hard hit videogames popularised by From Software . Your Demon's Souls , your Dark Souls , your singular Bloodborne and Sekiro and Elden Ring and so on. I blame the last one myself, the Elden Ring DLC came out recently and footage of it has been all over my Instagram Reels (I'm not nearly with it enough to use Tiktok ) and gosh darn it, it returned me to 2015 when I last tried my luck at one of these games. It is also entirely coincidental that 2015 was the year that saw the release of the game I'll be talking about today. All of which is a very long winded way of saying that I've finally gotten around to playing Dark Souls II this month . Prepare for incoming thoughts on the matter...

Howdy folks, it's hitting peak summer in this part of the world and yes I'm already tired of it. Not tired of good weather you understand but you can have too much of a good thing as it happens. So naturally I'm staying at arms length from the outside world whenever possible and playing more of those them there video games. In matter of fact I played Nier: Automata and boy do I have some thoughts on it. As with most games I play this came out a while back but nonetheless you get the mandatory warning for minimum spoilers below. Now lets get to the robots...

Dear lord are we nearly at June already? Doesn't the time just zip past when you're blasting away at folks within the digital ether? Loo king back at the first half of the year I feel like it's been a robust period for my ever present gaming habit. Today I reflect upon a certain category of games that have taken up a sizeable chunk of my time lately. A category of games that have been around for a while now but which I feel is only now really coming into its own. I am of course referring to free to play games. Games that want the fast track to your wallet just without the cover charge at the door. I seem to have gone all in on these games lately and boy am I going to tell you about it...

Hello world, I am concerned. Perhaps even troubled. I am troubled by the implications of the video game experience that is Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit , or rather by the world in which it takes place. It is the story of the fictional world of Seacrest County, a familiar world to be sure and an unremarkable place one might assume by first glance. Very photogenic, good racing lines and a super keen police force. However not all is as it seems here dear reader, don't be fooled by the glossy exterior and the high incidence of high speed traffic violations, something is very wrong here in Seacrest County and I intend to get to the heart of it. For you see I believe the makers of this game may have pulled a masterstroke on us the gaming public. Oh yes I believe against all probability and likelihood that Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit is, not merely the racing game it purports to be. Oh no no, let's go down this rabbit hole...

There are those pivotal moments in one's gaming habit that come around every once in a while. Critical junctures or vital forks in the road where things could have been very different had the other choice been taken at the time. Usually you don't see them for what they are in the moment, they are very much things you only recognize retrospectively. Such is the case for the subject of today's post where I am going to ramble on at length on the subject of what might be my favourite game demo of all time. This would be the time-limited taster of everything the original Grand Theft Auto had to offer. Yes the first one that most GTA players at this point probably haven't played, an historical artifact developed by DMA Design out of Dundee and published by BMG Interactive back in 1997.

If any three words could sum up my gaming habits in the late nineties, those three words would probably be ' Command and Conquer ' or even ' Command & Conquer ' if we're going to be pedantic about it. Top down real time strategy games that I was well into back then. The gameplay was solid, the tone (at least in the early games) had the vague feel of the real world about it and most importantly for the subject of today's post, it had a stonking great soundtrack that still holds up all these years later. 

There is an art to playing old games, a   mindset even. A requisite state of mind thats required in order to play through its history. It's often said that you can't judge the past by the standards of the present and this is true to a point. Beyond that point the present can very much creep into your judgements and I think this is fine too as long as you are honest about it. The present moment can indeed cast a harsh light on the past, revered classics may not hold up even if you can still see what made them tick way back when. Such thoughts have come to mind recently as I found myself playing through the original 1987 release of Maniac Mansion .