ONGOING SERIES
Editorial
Series.
Counterfactual history, industry profiles, retro PC culture, game preservation, and re-reviews of our own 1998–2002 verdicts. Long-form, researched, opinionated.
SERIES 01
Save State
Go back. Run it again.
0 entries
SERIES 02
Makers & Breakers
The people who built it.
0 entries
SERIES 03
The Beige Years
DOS to XP. No filter.
0 entries
SERIES 04
Last Save
The games that refused to die.
0 entries
ARCHIVE
One-Offs
No series. Just opinions.
18 entries
Save State
Go back. Run it again.
One changed variable. Realistic outcomes only. No power fantasy timelines. Each entry takes a defining moment in gaming history and asks what happens if one thing goes differently.
No entries published yet.
Makers & Breakers
The people who built it.
The people behind gaming's inflection points. One subject, one act, and the consequences that rippled forward. Industry history told through the decisions that actually changed things.
No entries published yet.
The Beige Years
DOS to XP. No filter.
PC gaming from the late 1980s through the early 2000s. Hardware, software, big boxes, and the culture around all of it. Personal history and object history in equal measure.
No entries published yet.
Last Save
The games that refused to die.
The games that died and the people who brought them back. Fan servers, reverse engineering, emulation, and preservation in all its legal grey-area forms.
No entries published yet.
One-Offs
No series. Just opinions.
Standalone editorials that stand on their own: opinion, analysis, and longer-form writing that is not part of an ongoing series.
01
The Broken Games Report: Issue #1
The season of the day-one patch: the games that shipped broken in late 2014.
Late 2014 became the season of the broken AAA launch. Issue one of The Broken Games Report rounds up the worst offenders, from Assassin's Creed Unity's bug-fest to Halo MCC's matchmaking and DriveClub's server meltdown.
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02
Indie Spotlight: Safety: Life is a Maze
Cute, creepy and tense: a grid-based escape where caution is everything.
Indie Spotlight: Safety: Life is a Maze is a cute-but-creepy grid-based escape where every step moves the enemies too, and picking a fight is a real gamble.
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03
Indie Spotlight: King of Bees in Fantasy Land
No graphics, no download, no problem: a browser game that's all story.
Indie Spotlight: Brendan Patrick Hennessy's free browser game King of Bees in Fantasy Land proves a great story beats great graphics every time.
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04
Benefits of Gaming: Problem Solving
The problem-solving skills games quietly teach, and how they carry over.
Games are quietly a problem-solving gym: root-cause and means-end analysis, collaboration and trial-and-error, skills that carry over into real life.
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05
Benefits of Gaming: Bringing Players Together
Far from isolating, gaming is one of the easiest ways to find your people.
The myth that gaming ruins your social life belongs to the past, online multiplayer, friends' couches, tournaments and conventions all bring players together.
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06
What Happened to SEGA?
From Sonic-era cool to a string of misfires, how did Sega fall this far?
Sega ruled the early nineties on the back of Sonic, so how did it end up here, with a hyped 'AAA' Aliens game selling barely a million copies?
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07
Outta Time Units (October 2012)
On deleting 1,000 Facebook friends, and the baggage that went with them.
Outta Time Units: Magic Dave deletes 1,000 Facebook friends and finds that letting go of the online clutter meant letting go of the baggage attached to it.
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08
SIEGE 2012: Day One Recap
New friends, a wrong turn to Popeyes, and hard-won advice on breaking into games.
Day one at SIEGE 2012: new friends, a misadventure on foot to the wrong fried-chicken joint, and a panel of industry veterans on how to actually break into making games.
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09
Wii U: Game Changer or Late to the Party?
A two-screen pitch for the living room, innovation, or catching up?
Nintendo's Wii U wants to be the centre of the living room with a two-screen GamePad and Miiverse, but is it a genuine game changer, or just catching up late?
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10
OUYA: Optimism or Skepticism?
An $8.5 million Kickstarter and a March deadline: can a startup console deliver?
The $99 Android console raised $8.5 million on Kickstarter on a promise to rescue console gaming from the mobile brain drain. Worth the hype, or too good to be true?
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11
Outta Time Units (June 2012)
Not a lazy generation, a Geek Generation, fixing things one Google search at a time.
Outta Time Units: Magic Dave argues this isn't a lazy generation but a Geek Generation, rediscovering the old roll-up-your-sleeves spirit through Google and a cracked iPhone screen.
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12
Indie Spotlight: Fray Now Available on Steam
Simultaneous-turn strategy in a corporate dystopia, now on Steam.
Indie Spotlight: Brain Candy's simultaneous turn-based strategy game Fray, set in a corporate-dystopian future, is out now on Steam for $19.99.
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13
A Trip Into The Secret World. Part 1
A play-diary trip into Funcom's "everything is true" MMO.
A play-diary trip into The Secret World's beta: choosing the Templars, surviving the Crucible, and stepping through the Hollow Earth toward Kingsmouth.
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14
Indie Corner: MiG Madness Out for Xbox Live
Time Pilot with the dial turned up, now on Xbox LIVE Indie Games.
Indie Corner: MiG Madness, a Time Pilot-inspired jet-fighter arcade game with power-ups, four-player co-op and a day-night cycle, is out on Xbox LIVE Indie Games.
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15
Indie Corner: Chompy Chomp Chomp Out on Xbox Live
A frantic multiplayer eat-'em-up arrives on Xbox LIVE Indie Games.
Indie Corner: Chompy Chomp Chomp, a frantic local-and-online multiplayer eat-'em-up from Utopian World of Sandwiches, is out now on Xbox LIVE Indie Games.
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16
Indie Corner: Compromised Now on Xbox Live Indie Marketplace
A 16-bit-flavoured top-down shooter hits the XBLIG marketplace.
Indie Corner: Compromised, a 16-bit-flavoured top-down shooter with 10 levels and four boss stages, is out on the Xbox Live Indie Marketplace for 240 MS Points.
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17
Are MMO Subscription Plans Changing Forever?
Everyone keeps predicting the death of the subscription MMO. The numbers say otherwise.
With Guild Wars 2 looming and free-to-play on the rise, is the subscription MMO finished? The numbers say the obituaries are premature.
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18
The Next Generation Console Wars
Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Dolphin, who wins the 128-bit war?
Dreamcast launches, PS2 looms and Nintendo's Dolphin waits in the wings: an in-period call on who wins the coming 128-bit console war (spoiler: I'm backing Nintendo).
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