Jon Gracey's

Archive for the ‘PC’ Category

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Games That Rocked My World – #59: Depression Quest

In Mac, PC on March 12, 2014 at 1:29 am

Title: Depression Quest
Format: PC, Mac
Released: 14th February, 2013

I first came across Depression Quest for all the wrong reasons. Reasons that made me angry. Consider this article just a tiny bit of karma for all the nonsensical bile out there.

Depression Quest Logo

There’s a download service for games called Steam, which has a great array of titles for sale, new and old. It’s amazing. A new service, Steam Greenlight is intended to be a democratic system that allows users to submit and vote on which in-development games should be added to Steam, making them available for purchase by the everyday public.

The first article I read on Depression Quest was in Edge magazine, but went along these lines. Go on, read it. Or another like it. They’re all quite similar, because the behaviour being reported was as disgusting as it was drearily predictable. Read the rest of this entry »

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Games That Rocked…Pierce Wilcox’s World – #58: Pathologic

In PC on March 4, 2014 at 3:50 am

Title: Pathologic

Format: PC

Released: 18th August, 2006

Pathologic Box Art

Pathologic is not a game. Its creations, the esoteric Russian geniuses known as Ice-Pick Lodge, call it a ‘behavioural simulator.’

Pathologic does not rock your world. Pathologic shakes your world to its foundations and if you are smart and lucky and terribly brave you might be able to build something new from the wreckage.

Now you know. We may begin. Read the rest of this entry »

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Games That Rocked…Sertan Saral’s World – #57: Dark Souls

In PC, PS3, Xbox 360 on February 21, 2014 at 5:36 am

Title: Dark Souls

Format: PS3, Xbox 360, PC

Released: 30th October, 2011

Dark_Souls_Cover_Art

To talk about Dark Souls, I need to talk about Resident Evil 2, the first game I owned on the original PlayStation. To understand why, you need to understand what the two games represent to me. Before Dark Souls, Resident Evil 2  was the last game I played almost purely for the challenge.

The beauty of RE2, the thing that really drew me into its world and invest in its characters and the stakes of the story, was the deliberately clunky control system. Read the rest of this entry »

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Games That Rocked…Julian van der Zee’s World – #55: Heart Of Darkness

In PC, PlayStation on February 7, 2014 at 6:00 am

Title:  Heart of Darkness

Format:  PlayStation, PC

Released: July 31, 1998

HoD Box Art

Like most people, growing up I had a fear of the dark. Of course, I wasn’t actually afraid of the dark per se; that would be completely illogical – darkness is nothing, merely an absence of visible light. It couldn’t really hurt me – except of course for that one time in the middle of the night I awkwardly trod on my PlayStation controller as I got up to go to the toilet. No, I was afraid of what could manifest in darkness. I was afraid of the monsters that lived in the dark.

Darkness

If you squint you can see the monsters

Read the rest of this entry »

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Games That Rocked…Benita de Wit’s World – #53: Theme Park

In Amiga, DS, Mac, Mega Drive, PC, PlayStation, PS3, Saturn, SNES on January 24, 2014 at 1:12 pm

Title: Theme Park

Format: Amiga, Mega Drive, PlayStation, Saturn, SNES, Mac, PC, DS, PS3

Released: 1994

Theme Park Box Art

Hello Internet.

I’d like to tell you a story. A story about a child who spent a lot of time alone on the computer. A story about creativity.

As a kid I loved building games (that is to say, games where you build. I didn’t build games, great as that would’ve been). I loved to spend hours making something original, whether from paper or pixels.

I grew up in a bit of a gaming family and enjoyed a thorough videogame education. SimTower, Age of Empires and World of Warcraft were favourites of mine as they all had wonderful elements of customisation, where you could play the game in your own weird way. Being an odd child I took the most joy in making odd things happen. I loved allowing a 100-storey building to become roach-infested, building a civilisation of monks who converted entire enemy armies to a peaceful way of life or riding my frostsaber across the plains as a male night elf in a wedding dress. Read the rest of this entry »

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