Sometimes I buy the gaming magazine Edge. It’s supposedly the magazine for ‘serious’ gamers, which I like to think I am – perhaps that’s why I buy it – but almost every time I do, I come across something that makes me think it isn’t aimed at people like me at all.

Such as this for example. It’s a retrospective look at the merits of the PlayStation game Ridge Racer Revolution. Back when I owned one of those grey-box things, I came across this game myself, and I have to say it didn’t strike me as the kind of thing anyone would look upon with any great fondness.

Still, that’s not really the issue. Whoever wrote the article obviously disagrees with me, and that’s fine. What disturbs me is what he/she (Edge don’t like to put their writers’ names on anything, for whatever reason) has actually written about the game. How’s this for starters?

”The primary rule of a great pop song: always leave your audience wanting more…The primary rule of a great arcade game: follow the rules of the great pop song. Ridge Racer always had it nailed. If the straights are the verses, the corners are the chorus – the build-up and the anticipation, followed by the emphatic and joyful release.

And Ridge Racer Revolution is the exemplar of that concept, a three and-a-half minute explosion of colour, excitement and optimism that acts as an adrenaline shot to the heart.”

Pretentious? Oh yes. But at least you can kind of follow what’s going on. Ridge Racer – it’s like a pop song, apparently. But what about the graphics? What are they like?

“The sunset that greets the player on the first lap of the second track consists of the richest Del Monte orange imaginable. Water lapping up against the thin stretch of road halfway around the novice course is turned a beautiful shade of peppermint green thanks to its shallowness and the sand underneath, a section of track made all the more memorable and heavenly due to the flash of lens flare that appears for a split second just out of the corner of the player’s eye. Planes jetting off to new destinations, sailboats idling on all sides: the atmosphere is clubland holiday, a paradisiacal Ibiza.

Hmm, now you’ve lost me. It’s been a while since I played the game, but if pressed to come up with a description of my own I might have gone for “ugly” or “blocky” instead.

Anyway, the article continues in this vein, and there are times you could be forgiven for forgetting that he/she is, in fact, talking about a game – an old game in fact, where you drive a fake car around in circles on a fake island while ridiculous techno music pumps away in the background (go here if you’re not familiar with it yourself).

I’ve got nothing against taking games seriously, or using long words to talk about them occasionally, but it’s usually worth stopping right before the point you start to come out with this kind of bollocks.

So, just finished Fahrenheit. It was good stuff, actually – flawed, yes – but still very, very good. I didn’t even mind the sub-Nickelback “rawk” that played over the end credits.

I’m tempted to say that it’s unlike any game I’ve played, although a couple of things tell me stop short of making such a claim:

Firstly, for a game that’s mainly about storytelling and dialogue, it’s actually fairly restrictive in terms of the choices you can make and how you can take the story down different paths. You can say and do things you regret (or which are clearly ‘wrong’) but still come out of it okay in terms of driving the story forward. At several points it did strike me that, save for the fact that the technology has all moved on and there’s polygons where the grainy video used to be, the game isn’t really that much different from the dreaded ‘interactive movie’ that plagued gaming (particularly on PC) during the early-mid 1990s.

Secondly, your progress in the more action-oriented sequences is normally determined by your ability to either hammer a couple of buttons quite quickly or move the analogue sticks on your joypad according to a sequence displayed on the screen. Your character may be moving about, fighting monsters or doing a backflip, but you’re playing an altogether different game, focusing on moving your thumb in the right direction. While it’s certainly better executed, the general concept reminded me of the much derided non-interactive Don Bluth cartoon/games that appeared on Amiga and ST such as Space Ace and Dragon’s Lair. They looked good, but they were bum – and widely derided as such (although possibly not by using the word ‘bum’).

Both of the parallels I’ve drawn are with genres that are probably better best forgotten, yet I still really enjoyed the game. Still, since it’s a little too new for a full review, I won’t worry too much about breaking down the reasons why – I’ll just recommend that you check it out if you haven’t already.

Migman’s Flight Sim Museum

Given our own near-total lack of flight sim coverage, I thought it might be worth linking this site, which has entries for sims going all the way back to the beginning. Not a great detail of information on each game, but there are still some interesting bits and pieces looking back on over twenty years of the genre, see here and also here.

Hello.

Well, I guess that was January. I figured we’d have no problem getting a second update in before next month, but having done a bit of work on this one I got a bit lazy.

No matter, we made it (just about) – here’s a review of TOCA Race Driver.

Despite being relatively enthusiastic about Good Old Games, it has to be said that I haven’t been exactly splashing the cash on the games they’ve got on offer. The ones I really want I’ve got already, and some of the others, despite being good games, fall into the “you can buy it, but you’ll never play it” category.

Still, I was pleased to see that GOG had managed to secure the rights to Broken Sword 3. It’s one that the normally-reliable budget market over here in the UK hasn’t provided in cheapo format, except as part of a triple-pack that ignores all of us who bought the first two games.

So I’m gonna buy it and play it. And (gasp) review it.

So that was 2008. My journal prediction (made approximately 12 months ago) that the year would, ahem, “rock” may have been slightly tongue-in-cheek but, buoyed by 2007’s comparatively healthy schedule of updates, I had thought we could at least achieve something similar in 2008.

For whatever reason, it didn’t happen. Still, we did manage an average of roughly two reviews per month (it would have been exactly two if I’d managed to get the PQII review done a day earlier) – which isn’t quite the barren update-free wasteland that I had sort-of convinced myself we were becoming.

The year started with a double-whammy of action, with Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza and Return to Castle Wolfenstein featuring in the first update. For some reason that theme continued, with new additions to the action section (in particular FPS games) outnumbering the others by quite some distance.

Standouts included the amnesiac cel-shaded shooter XIII and the continued adventures of one of our favourite gravelly-voiced heroes in Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne. Others, including the No One Lives Forever games, fell into the ‘not bad’ category, much like much of the rest of the year’s fare. There were a couple of slightly stinky games too, with the best thing to be said about TDR 2000 is that it completed our coverage of the Carmageddon series. Oh, and thanks to Jo we’ve now got all of the Monkey Island games covered too, which is perhaps more significant.

Speaking of adventures, I kept to my vow to cover at least one Sierra adventure this year when I reviewed the VGA remake of Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter but that was my lot for the year. Stoo and Jo kept the adventure section going by covering Fate of Atlantis and Simon the Sorcerer II respectively.

My other promise – to avoid covering any more Need for Speed games in 2008 – was also fulfilled, although I failed to compensate by adding anything else of significance to the Racing section. Sport, Strategy and RPG (and, er, Simulation) were similarly neglected.

We could promise to rectify this in 2009, but it’s probably best to aim for something more easily achievable. Sadly, nothing immediately springs to mind. At least one Sierra adventure? Already done. Daikatana? Maybe. The Knight Rider game by Davilex? Almost certainly.

Suggestions and requests are, as usual, most welcome.

Happy New Year!

Hope you all had a good one. This was supposed to be our final update for 2008, but unfortunately we didn’t quite make it in time.

Still, at least we’ve got things going for 2009. Here’s a review of Police Quest II for you.

Once all of the pre-Christmas-day fuss is out of the way, I always find the Christmas break a good opportunity to get some gaming done. Of course, the temptation is to get rather too ambitious and start thinking you’ll get through all of those games you haven’t had the chance to get into yet. This is a mistake because a) Christmas means a few days off, not retirement or the equivalent of the school holidays and b) you have to do things like buy and wrap presents, play Cluedo and generally be jolly and sociable rather than lock yourself in a room for several days.

And if you’ve been a good boy or girl this year, there’s always the chance that Santa will have brought more shrink-wrapped gaming goodies on the day itself, meaning that you actually return more game boxes to the cupboard than you took out in the first place.

Still, I’m not complaining, and in case this is sounding like a long-winded way of saying there won’t be an FFG update before the new year, worry not – there definitely will be (yes, you can take that gun out of your mouth now – it’s all going to be okay).

[Edit: Actually, no there isn’t. My fault entirely. Feel free to go ahead with those suicide plans. Or wait another day or two…]

Besides working on that, I have managed to get a little way into Fahrenheit, a curious adventure/’interactive-movie’ style game from the makers of The Nomad Soul. I can see why it might not be everyone’s cup of tea, and some of the dialogue is a bit clunky, but it’s still compelling stuff, much more involving and focused than the Bowie-based caper.

Anyway, hope you all had a good one. We should have some new content for you soon.

In the interest of, erm, not getting any retro gaming done for days I went ahead and got F.E.A.R. On the downside, it’s one of those games where so far the pallette consists solely of brown and grey; i hope it’s not all dingy warehouses and industrial settings. However, it is seriously atmospheric. Enemies aren’t thrown at you constantly; there are lots of quiet bits to build up tension between encounters. Also various creepy visions and ghosts pop up to taunt you, and i’ve definitely jumped and uselessly emptied a clip into one or two of them.

I have some other christmas gaming plans which may or may not result in site content… oh and I played a bit of Baldur’s Gate the other day. The review of which has become more or less our version of Duke Nukem Forever.

I don’t have a subscription any more, but to give myself something to read on the flight when I went on holiday last month I decided to pick up a copy of PC Zone. It just so happened it was the 200th issue, and as such featured a decent-sized nostalgia piece with memories from former writers, some of whom returned as guest reviewers. Former writer-turned-TV star Charlie Brooker even turned up to give his opinions on Euro Truck Simulator (a sort of newer version of King of the Road) – which you might have thought was beneath him these days, frankly. And Mr Cursor on the back page as well – what more could a 90s geek ask for?

Despite what I wrote here about the magazine’s best days being long gone, it’s since struck me that such an observation wasn’t all that objective. Nostalgia can never be discounted and there’s no way of telling whether the old Zone I claim to love so much would have been so impressive to me had I been a perpetually-frowning man just about on the right side of 30 rather than a greasy schoolboy back in the mid-90s. Now I think about it, I’m pretty sure I was sceptical of a redesign at some stage (late 90s I think) and even started muttering back then that “it’s not as good as it used to be”.

With staff leaving and arriving on a regular basis it seems unreasonable to expect a magazine to never suffer a dip in quality. I reckon you have to stick with your favourite, checking out the competition now and again to see if there’s anything better out there (I keep buying Edge as I think it’s what ‘grown-up’ gamers should read, but the tone of the whole thing just annoys me) and hope it comes good again.

200 issues isn’t bad going either. I think I might even renew my subscription – if the magazine ever folded, all we’d be left with is PC G*m*r. And no-one wants that.