Alex's Games of 2024

 

Hello, it's that time of year again.

Alex's Games of 2023

We're doing things slightly differently this time. For various reasons that I'll soon get into, I was in an odd place when it came to games in 2023. So instead of the standard list of ten games, I'm going to take you through my year in gaming roughly chronologically - but don't worry, along the way I'll share some recommendations, and you'll get that top ten by the end.

Alex's Top Ten Games of 2022

Thought you were going to get away without hearing about my favourite games in the past year? Think again.

Alex's Top Ten Games of 2021

...And here we are again. Whatever may have gone on in your past year, rest assured that as always, I have played some video games, and at least ten are worth rambling about! Let's get straight into it.

Alex's Top 10 Games of 2020

 

Well... that was fast. Perhaps I can tempt you into reading on by promising this opening to be the last reference to 2020's C-word. One way or another, I had ample opportunities for playing games this year - here are ten of my favourites.

Alex's Top 10 Games of 2018

Here we are again. Another year has passed and, unsurprisingly, I have at least ten games to talk about. Let the (discussion of said) games begin!

Alex's Top 10 Games of 2017

The year 2017 has come and gone, and as has become tradition, I will ramble here for a little while on my personal top 10 video games that I played in the calendar year.

Elite Dangerous: Long and Winding Road

It's been over two years since my last blog post about Elite: Dangerous. Hundreds of hours and thousands of faster-than-light jumps later, I have done some things, and had some thoughts. If you wish to know some of those things and thoughts, continue reading!

Alex's Top 10 Games of 2015

This website, as you may have noticed, is quite partial to rating individual games out of 10. This year, I have decided to flip this concept on its head, and rate ten games, against each other. I call this radical idea, this list-based article, a "Top 10".

Elite Dangerous - Never Not Scanning

Some months ago I wrote a blog post summarising the appeal Elite: Dangerous held for me, and relating my early experiences in the game. After roughly 30 hours, I had a Cobra Mark III, and an excited feeling that 'the real Elite: Dangerous begins here'. I was about to dive into the explorer class headfirst.

Approximately 150 hours later, I haven't come up for air yet.

The Final Frontier: Fake Space, Part 3: A Lunar Date

Cue orchestral music.

The alarms blared incessantly, terminal lights flashed over and over, and behind Bill Kerman's head he swore he heard a panel of the command pod's outer hull make a deep, sonorous creak. Either the ship was pulling apart at the seams or he was hearing things.  The latter would be excusable, seeing as the pod was spinning like a top - although tops normally just spin in place around one central point, whereas Bill's ship was twirling in three dimensions, like a ballerina break-dancing for dear life.  As the surface of the Mün approached faster and faster, Bill Kerman  remembered his astro-lessons, not so very long ago...

Oh My Godus: Beta Edition

As a big fan of Peter Molyneux's previous work (the Fable and Black and White series in particular), I was excited to see that Godus (the recent Kickstarter project by new studio 22cans) had made an appearance on Steam. So excited, in fact, that I fell over myself in my haste to download the beta version of the game and spend a few hours getting to grips with the fledgling god-sim in order to report back to those of you who (wisely?) choose to wait for the finished product.

eSports, Can they truly compete?

These past few months I have really got into watching various eSports events on Twitch. No matter what it is, no matter whether I play the game myself I just love watching competitive gaming and it turns out that I am not alone. At any one time there will be hundreds of thousands of people viewing thousands of different channels on Twitch and various other streaming sites.

Single events consistently hit the six figure mark and it was reported by Valve that the recent Dota 2 International hit over 1 million views. This figure may have been even higher when taking into account viewers watching via TV. Competitive eSports are clearly becoming more popular as a spectator event. However, can eSports continue to grow, and will their popularity ever begin to rival that of the more conventional sports?

'Don't Starve' Cheat Sheet

For those who don't know, Don't Starve is a basically a top-down Minecraft-esque survival game, set in a Tim Burton-inspired world.  Its charming appearance hides a surprisingly deep gameplay experience, with all sorts of items to craft, monsters to fight and a huge (randomly-generated) world to explore.  If you've heard about this game and are still on the fence, I strongly recommend you pick it up.  For those who are already on board, I decided to write a basic guide and provide some tips and suggestions for any new players.  Some of the stuff mentioned here could be considered spoilers, especially if you're the type of person who really values emergent gameplay.  However, I found myself increasingly indulging in this excellent wiki, and thought it would useful to have some of the more crucial information kept in one place.  I should emphasise that my strategies are not the only way of playing Don't Starve, and I don't doubt others have found equally useful alternatives.  I'd certainly recommend experimenting freely to find the best way of surviving, but these pointers should give you a hand.

Girl Gamers and Porno Mods

I am a lady geek.  It is also a fairly widely accepted fact that women in games are portrayed, by and large, pretty poorly - here, Wikipedia lists all of FIVE female video game protagonists, two of which I have never heard of (possibly my bad, I'm not a RABID gamer), out of a list of hundreds, if not thousands, of mainstream video games.  In addition it links to some pretty horrendous games that actually exist.  I'm not going to go into all the things I've found here because it would make this entire post very, very long.  Longer than it's already going to be.  Some time ago, I got Skyrim for the PC in order to activate some of the mods available.  If you don't know what modding is, then basically, it's usually user-created changes to game-play.  This can range from anything to simply changing the colour of an in-game outfit, to actually fiddling about with some of the games codes in order to insert new characters/animations/locations etc.  I really enjoy Skyrim, and one of the improvements on its predecessors (Morrowind, Oblivion etc.) that I particularly liked was the fact that female armours actually look like they are made for a female, as opposed to being so intrinsically similar, if not the same as, male armour, that when fully covered, you might as well have not been given to the option to choose a gender in the first place.