The Father of Video Games – Ralph Baer (Vice Docu)

NBA Jam – Girl Gamers

I played this game on the snes today. It’s an old classic I’d never played before, to be honest I was a Mega Drive kid so missed out on the Nintendo games, they didn’t look as cool at the time but actually most of them were a lot better. The picture looks kind of like a Superbeat poster!

My friend Nicki’s got a Snes, which is cool because you wouldn’t expect her to be into that kind of thing. I didn’t know any girls into games when I was younger and it’s only lately that loads of girl gamers seem to be coming out of the woodwork. I’ve got a few girl friends who’ve turned out to be gamers, the most surprising being my girlfriend! It’s become another thing we can do together like watching a film. It’d be cool to see big gaming companies catering to wider audiences than 20 to 35 year old geezers who want to shoot robots (Mass Effect), shoot civilians (GTA) or shoot arabs (Call of Duty).

Here’s some great games me and Ella have gotten into lately…

The Last Door – This is a wicked point and click mystery horror game. It’s online and comes in chapters, all the graphics are really pixelated but somehow it’s still a really creepy game. The sound design and music are both really well done.

A Dark Room – I think this game style’s got a name but I’ve no idea what it is. It’s basically just text, almost like a choose-your-own-adventure-book but instead of choosing your own story the object is to survive and evolve a community from scratch. Strange and abstract but also involved and immersive.

Super Mario World – If you don’t know it already then you have no business reading this post. Mario’s just brilliant, inventive and clever; it goes about as far as a traditional platformer can go. Somehow the mario designers manage to squeeze something new out of this simple format again and again.

Candy Crush – When I played this game for the first time I thought it was a sickly naff version of Tetris and I got really angry when they told me all my lives were gone and I had to come back in an hour! …Hooked, completely and utterlly hooked. Ella’s hooked, I’m hooked, my family are hooked and most of my friends are too. There’s something strangly sensual and obscene about the look of this game and I think that has something to do with peoples attraction to it.

Wii Tennis – What a great game. If the Wii only ever had this game on it it’d still be worth getting one. There’s nothing to instruct you how to play because you already know how to play tennis. You can perform all different types of shot, vollys, top spin, curve balls and super fast serves just by the way you swing the controller.

Minecraft – I got seriously hooked on this one. Oh my word, what a game. It’s like total creative freedom within a world that’s peaceful while at the same time being dangerous and scary. I spent about a week designing and building my own glass palace in the sky which could only be accessed by swimming upstream a never-ending waterfall. If that’s wasting time then take out the trash baby!

Nba Jam’s also wicked btw 🙂