Gareth Brierley

I thought I had some skills. After thirty plus years of gaming, I thought I might have gained the reflexes of at least an out of shape middle-aged cat. I thought I might have had an complete understanding of the gaming world after all this time. I even thought I could predict code and be walking round like Neo in the Matrix. Sadly as indie game Hopiko has shown me, I can’t do any of things above as I'm pretty worthless when it comes to being a truely skillful gamer. Being this bad at a game is normally something I hate, but with this one there is a lot of fun being this terrible.

A long time ago, in a dark dark land, you didn’t have things like an Xbox. So to play the most interesting games in the world, you would have to venture out into the deep wild world, collect loads of 10p coins and enter the local arcade. These places were smoky, smelly, strange places. Full of pale looking teenagers and old men smoking, whilst playing fruit machines. But here in this strange land you would come across amazing games from Japan; dazzling, bewildering and testing your skills to the limit. Earth’s Dawn reminds me a lot of those times.

Toy Odyssey is a game that is hard to pin down. I'll tell you now though, it’s certainly not Toy Story. So get that idea out of your head because it’s much, much, darker than that.

Issue #1 was a good start to the series with some solid action sequences, an interesting premise and a likeable modern narrative. It did however have a ponderous beginning, so I was eager to see how this well this second episode starts. I can safely say it opens well and the saga has definitely got me hooked.

You’re driving through a city that looks a lot like New Orleans. It’s 1968 and you’re behind the wheel of a beautiful lime green Cadillac, playing “Paint it Black” by the Rolling Stones on the radio. You’re feeling great, you have fifty thousand dollars in your pocket, another $100,000 back home in your safe, you’re king of the road, and the controller of two neighbourhoods with a load of criminal minions at your beck and call. Then you see a speedboat inexplicably, and uncontrollably, spinning in midair like it’s being possessed. There you have the highs and lows of Mafia 3 in a nutshell. But the highs really do outweigh the buggy lows.

What on earth is Earth Dawn? When I first looked at it I was puzzled. It look’s like a game that is impossible to put into words, but at the same time reminds me a tad of titles gone by from my SNES and Megadrive. It’s been out in Japan for a while now and on the 1st of November, we’ll find out exactly what it’s all about, as developers OneorEight release their 2D side- scrolling action adventure to the general Xbox One, PS4 and PC public.

I’ve been in a real-life speedboat. It was for work and I was on Lake Windermere, in the middle of winter, while it was pouring down with rain. I was dwarfed by a life jacket and left bouncing up and down on the choppy waters pretending it was summer for a photo shoot. It was the worse day of my life and I was sick more times in an hour than I thought possible. So as I loaded up the “sim” like Speedboat Challenge, I was hoping the experience wasn’t as bad as that horrible day long ago. Unfortunately it was much worse, but at least I wasn’t sick again.

Lately, there has been a spat of mobile type puzzle games streaming onto the Xbox One. Cheap, easy to play and being very addictive are the key ingredients to their success on the home console market. Something you can spend five minutes on before the next four hours of FIFA or Gears of War. A small appetiser before the main meal, but like all pieces of finger food, some are very tasty, and some go straight back on the plate half chewed. Which is Castles I wonder?

The Assassin’s Creed franchise is taking over the universe. We have the games, a film coming soon, books, clothing and most recently comics. The Last Descendants - Locus is issue one of a new series of stories set around the time of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate - the Victorian era. These are connected with a young adult novel releasing around the same time, all set to give publisher Titan Comics another hit.

So here we are again with a change in the season, which means a new chapter of the King’s Quest saga has been released. Even though the gap between releases has gotten a bit shorter, it still takes a while to remember what’s happened before, what’s going on now and how the game works. It’s very nice to come back to the kingdom of Graham, but for the first time the world in the first hour started to grate a bit, feeling stale and tired. But things as always get better and the story pushes forward with some lovely touches. So let's put on a feathered adventure hat, grab our inventory cloak and carry on questing in this penultimate episode.

There were three things I was scared of growing up in the 1980s. The first were stonewashed jeans that for some reason made me feel sick whenever I set eyes on a pair. The second was Goths who would always be hanging around my local graveyard being moody and bumming cigarettes. And, of course, the third thing was thermal global nuclear war. Now The Bunker, which is set in 1986, has no stonewashed jeans or Goths. But it does unfortunately have a lot of thermal nuclear war. Or does it?

There are certain games that give you the keys to their very expensive car and then they say, "it’s all yours, go on, have a bit of fun". But where do I go? That's up to you. What do I do first? You choose. They wander off leaving you to fail, explore and discover your own personal stories and unique gaming experience. Then there are other games that have such a fantastic, unusual, story to tell, that your role is simply just to be the spectator in the passenger seat. Maybe you can give a little help with the directions, but it still won’t affect the outcome of the journey. Virginia is one of those games.

Every game should have a dog in it. The games that do use a canine friend as your companion always make me smile, while giving added emotional investment in the story. Fable 2 with its terrible doggy end choice, Fallout 4 and the best post apocalyptic best friend a person could wish for. I think the FIFA series should have dogs in the story mode or maybe running around in training sessions. EA haven’t got back to me about that yet though. Recore has a dog as well, but it’s a robot canine called Mack and it’s a highlight of this always surprising game.

I was always terrible at tests. Multiple choice? I hate you. What do these shapes have in common? I detest you. Fill in the blanks? You sicken me. If I have to do a test I always get instantly sweaty, start to panic and stare at the ceiling looking for divine inspiration. So it was with great trepidation that I loaded up The Turing Test. I was ready to run away and call in sick. But what I got was some lateral thinking, philosophic discussion about humans and machines, and then a twist that blew my socks off.

Can a game be a piece of art? This debate has raged hard for the last decade or so and I think the answer is a defining yes. I think a piece of art is something that speaks to you personally and makes you experience something, or feel something that is hard to put into words. I collect art. I own games like Inside, that I will never ever get rid of, or trade in, or swap, because I have it as part of my art collection. Dear Esther is now another one for my compendium of game art.