Jon Gracey's

Posts Tagged ‘PC’

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Games That Rocked…Paul Foxcroft’s World – #21: Day Of The Tentacle

In Mac, PC on January 14, 2013 at 8:00 pm

Title: Day Of The Tentacle

Format: PC, Mac

Released: June, 1993

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Hello Jon’s readers, I’m Paul Foxcroft. This guy:

PaulTrust me.

This will mean little to you, but I’m a human man, I live in London, I make my living by pretending; and like Jon, I like games. Here’s the quite simple request I’ve been putting off for a few days now…

“The brief is simple: 1,000 words or less, on a game that you love / has changed your perspective / made a big impact on you in some way.”

So has that eaten into the word count? Yes. But now, you and I swim in the sea of context. Brilliant.

A game that I love, has changed my perspective or has made a big impact on me. There’s so many, I mean really. THERE ARE SO VERY MANY. Read the rest of this entry »

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Games That Rocked My World – #11: Uplink

In PC on November 29, 2011 at 11:42 am

Title: Uplink

Format: PC

Release Date: 1st October, 2001

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I’m just going to go right and out say it. Uplink – by British developers, and self-professed “Last Of The Bedroom Programmers”, Introversion – is the greatest marriage of form and content in the world of videogames.

I’ll let that process for a second.

Picture the scene: a man sits at his desk, in a darkened room, hunched over his computer. The blinds are closed, and a blue glow diffuses from the monitor onto his face. Perhaps he’s wearing glasses, and the pale light reflects off them, twinkling across the desk. Perhaps an ash tray sits to the left, piled with used butts. Perhaps a freshly-lit cigarette dangles from his lip, jiggling encouragingly as he taps furiously at the keys and conjures transactions unknown and ungodly across the intangible ether of the internet. Suddenly, a knock at his door. He looks up, panicked, drawn away from the power of the screen to the more pressing concerns of the immediate now. Read the rest of this entry »

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Games That Rocked My World – #7: Far Cry

In PC on October 24, 2011 at 3:14 pm

Title: Far Cry

Format: PC

Release Date: March 23, 2004

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My friend Tom recently pointed out that many of the experiences on this blog are uniformly positive. Friendships. The new. Fair point. Sure, I play games to see strange new lands, meet interesting characters. To experience the positive. But to imply this is always the case would be unrealistic. Enter: Far Cry. Read the rest of this entry »

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Games That Rocked My World – #6: Grim Fandango

In PC on October 17, 2011 at 3:07 pm

Title: Grim Fandango

Format: PC

Released: 30th October, 1998

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I’m going to be straight up with you, dear reader; I have no strong memories attached to Grim Fandango. No conveniently parallel life-stories to compare and contrast. Not a pithily contrived lesson in sight. Sorry about that. I have, however, one reason for writing about it today, and it’s actually the best one there is: Grim Fandango is a gorgeous, shining, pinnacle of the medium. I’ll probably still wring a tenuous message out of it, though. Don’t you worry about that. Read the rest of this entry »

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Games That Rocked My World – #4: System Shock 2

In PC, Steam on October 3, 2011 at 4:06 pm

Title: System Shock 2

Format: PC, Steam

Released: August, 1999

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2114. Experimental starship, the Von Braun. Flickering lights. Echoing silence. Desolate corridors, empty but for the bloodstains. A former crewmate rounds the corner, neck swollen and contorted by an alien parasite, swiping metal piping into your face whilst gargling the words: “Kill me.”

System Shock 2 is the scariest game I have ever played. I was fourteen when it came out, which certainly put me in an impressionable position when it came to horror. This was slap-bang in the middle of the film/sleepover era, which despite flirting with many genres, was most at home with horror. We’d often rent a terrible action film to laugh at the dialogue, or a dreadful martial arts number to check out the bad-ass moves – and to laugh at the dialogue – but for me it was always horror that worked best. We’d all be camped out downstairs, often in a rural Essex farmhouse conversion – which was a brilliant setting for scares in itself – and after pizza and videogames, we’d bust out the sleeping bags, gather round the TV, and fire up a scary film. Read the rest of this entry »

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