Posts Tagged ‘video games’

TOEM is a photo adventure game on the Nintendo Switch. Set in a beautiful black-and-white world, you go around taking photos of different things. It’s very chill. I didn’t get very far into it because it’s a puzzle game and not obvious what you need to take photos of, which still wasn’t chill enough for me. But I might come back to it at some point.

Another fun video game. You play a small yellow man who is sent to the fictional Yorkshire town of Barnsworth. You run around the town helping the locals who keep exclaiming “thank goodness you’re ‘ere” and asking for assistance with a variety of different problems. These typically involve jumping and kicking because these are the only controls.

The game is written in a northern dialect. When you start the game it asks you “A’ tha from Tarn?” You can then select “Dead Reyt” in which case the game continues in Yorkshire, or “Sorry What?” in which case I assume it switches back to English. If you want to play about with the settings you need to pause the game and go to “faffin'”.

I completed it over two evenings. There were some bits where I found myself having to loop back and kick everything to work out what was going on next. But mostly the game seamlessly guides you through where to go and there was very little frustration that I often experience with other games.

The storylines are a good comedic take on northern culture, although the town was perhaps a little more run down and dirty than I would like. The voice acting is excellent.

Dredge is a fishing simulator horror game I played on the Nintendo Switch. You take on a fishing captain whose boat is destroyed. You are loaned a new boat by the local mayor and must fish to earn money and dredge supplies so you can expand your boat and explore the world.

Also it’s somehow a horror game at the same time and at night you begin to panic and hallucinate.

This is probably a great game. But the whole panic thing made it way to stressful. It was always a desperate rush to get back to port before nightfall which made it difficult to explore the world and left me feeling the paranoia the character was experencing. I stuck with it for 4-5 days and then gave up.

In the video game Spiritfarer you take on the character of Stella, who is charged with helping spirits cross into the afterlife. You captain a ship that you sail around an open world exploring local islands, while expanding your ship, taking on passengers and seeing to their needs.

The graphics are stunning. It’s a beautiful hand-drawn style. There is also plenty to do in the game: you can talk to the spirits aboard your boat, cook, fish, craft things, and build new buildings on the boat. It’s quite a chill game: you set sail for somewhere and that sailing takes time, which gives you time to do things although can sometimes go on a little long.

The game has a storyline but it involves a certain level of interpretation that I didn’t always follow. I think if I played through it again I would enjoy the story more.

My biggest criticism of the game is that nobody seems to have played it on a Switch. The text is tiny. Unreadably tiny. Even when I went into the settings and turned the text size up, and even when wearing my glasses, some of it is impossible to read and you have to guess what the numbers are.

There were also points in the game where I did get stuck because it felt like very path was blocked. Despite my frustrations, though, I was addicted to this game and excited to play it every night. It’s my favourite Switch game so far after Animal Crossing.

After over 100 days of playing Animal Crossing, I decided it might be worth giving a second game a go. And that game was A Short Hike.

You play as a bird who has decided to hike to the top of Hawk Peak. You can wander freely around the open world and as you do so, you collect golden feathers. These are important because they allow you to fly, climb and jump for longer, allowing you to get further up the mountain.

It’s a really fun game you can complete in a few hours. The physics are lovely and the graphics are warm. But you don’t quite get the amazing views jumping off the top of the mountain because the Switch doesn’t have the power to render the entire world as a background.

Well worth spending a cozy evening with.

Elina bought my a Nintendo Switch for Christmas and I’ve decided to write a few blog posts about the games I’ve tried. Number one being Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

In the game, you relocate to a small deserted island where you build a community. The game involves gathering resources, crafting furniture, and earning bells (the local currency) to pay off your home loans to the project leader, Tom Nook. It’s a very chill cozy game.

The game happens in real time, following the day and night cycle in your location. It is daylight during the day time and dark during the night. It also follows the seasons so you get snow in January and and different bugs and fish are only available to catch at certain times of the year. In that sense, it takes at least a year to complete because you need time to cycle through everything.

This does get in the way at times. As a parent, I typically get time to play before 8am and after 10pm. But the Nook Shop is only open 8am to 10pm and Able Sisters is only open 9am to 9pm. There is a night owl option that allows the shops to stay open an hour later. Venla has had the opposite issue: some of the fish only come out after her bedtime.

Overall though, it’s a 10/10 game. It’s the only game I got with my Switch and I played it every day for four months without ever wanting to try out another game.

Earlier this month I took the unusual step of going to buy a video game. I don’t play games most of the time, but given the old versions of Madden can usually be picked up for a couple of pounds, I decided it was worth it. I haven’t actually played it yet, but I will…

It was part of a 3 for £12 offer so I had a look at what else they had. I found this:

A video game based on the best film ever? I’m sold! This resulted in me being able to get one more game for the same price. This was really tricky because I did not really want another game and therefore spent ages trying to decide between all the games I didn’t really want. In the end I picked Tomb Raider.

Happily I took my Ratatouille game home and the next day had a bit of time to give it a go. It turns out the controls are impossible! It’s hard enough to stop Remy falling off stuff most of the time and sometimes he falls down inside a solid object and the only way to get out is to restart the game.

Then you have to learn how to balance on a wire. But how? The game does not explain it. Do you tilt the controller? Use the joystick? Use the arrows? Use the top buttons? None of them seem to have any effect. What am I supposed to be doing here?

I chatted about it at work and I am not the only person who has had such problems. In general, I realise what the controls reminded me of though. Tomb Raider! The way it was impossible to stop Lara falling down holes, usually by accidentally jumping backwards to her doom.

The frustration was brilliantly captured in this 2006 video:

So maybe me and Ratatouille the game are just not destined to get on. Luckily, I can just play one of the other games I bought and get away from those horrible Tomb Raider style controls that I had forgotten how much I hated.

Oh, wait…

I was recently in a discussion about whether violent video games led to violent crime or not.

The main argument from the other side was “well, it’s just obvious isn’t it” and, on a slightly more substance based strand, “kids just think violence such as they experience on a video game is normal and acceptable.”

My argument was that there simply isn’t any evidence for this. I wasn’t going to chase it up or anything but I have work to do that I’m procrastinating from and as I saw a related article in the news just now, I thought I would double check my facts.

A quick consultation of the encyclopedia helpfully points out the bottom line – that Harvard Medical School and the British Medical Journal have both done studies into this topic “have shown no conclusive link between video game usage and violent activity.”

The fact is the evidence shows there isn’t a link between violent video games and kids going out and committing violent crimes.

But I would also goes as far as to say that, if you put some thought into it, it’s actually obvious that there isn’t a link. I think there are two main reasons for this.

The first is that Wikipedia also points out that over the past 20 years violent crime has been consistently in decline whereas sales of video games have been consistently growing. If there was a link we would expect that as more violent video games were sold, violent crime would increase. But it doesn’t. In fact it goes the opposite way. I’m not suggesting that violent video games actually decrease violent crimes but it certainly is evidence against the idea that encourage it.

Secondly, society hasn’t really got any more violent than it used to be.

Video games may be a relative new comer (although of course the ZX81 is actually older than I am) but the idea of violent games certainly isn’t. For years kids have been running around playing cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, playing with toy soliders and toy guns. Indeed my dad has often told me that one of the must have toys of his era was the Johnny 5 Gun, so called because it had five different modes of shooting. The only difference today is that kids run around a virtual world connected by their X Box Live rather than doing it in real life – which is arguably far more real than in a computer game.

Given these two reasons alone, it does not seem intuative that the popularisation of video games including some which are violent, would automatically lead to violent crime – and you would be right, because the evidence backs up that it doesn’t.