• Let’s Play! – Precursors (Parts 1 & 2)

    Cadet pilot Treece Crichton crashes his ship on a hostile world, loses his colleagues (who can’t remember his name) to carnivorous plants, gets attacked by imperial robots then discovers he is in a computer simulation and that he is the One (or something). He then forgets all of it and is only able to look forward to getting into drunken brawls on a god-forsaken planet at the edge of the universe.

    [Read More...]
  • Review – Echo Bazaar – Fallen London

    I have been given a commission by the Department of Menace Eradication to get rid of an infestation of Sorrow-Spiders that has overrun a building in Watchmaker’s Hill. I step around the blind beggar who is chanting outside the building and enter. The smell of rotten fruit is overwhelming. I look around the dimly-lit interior and see nothing but moldering furniture. In an earlier part of my life I would have opened the curtains to let some light in, but of course that would be useless here. Sorrow-spiders are the size of a small cat, and both armored and poisonous. The best way to deal with them, although not the tidiest approach, is to hit them as hard as you can with a hammer. I take a tighter grip on mine and step forward cautiously. Lately I have been playing quite a bit of Echo Bazaar, aka Fallen London. Echo Bazaar is a web-based, story-based game set in the city of London, which has been stolen by bats and carried far below the surface of the Earth to the Neath. It now sits just across the Underzee, a vast underground sea, from Hell and is home to the Echo Bazzar. The Bazzar and its strange masters have stolen other cities through the ages and London is the fifth city where they have made their home. The Bazaar is located at the heart of Fallen London, in the Neath, a cavern of impossible size, by the Unterzee, a tremendous saltwater lake.

    [Read More...]
  • Review – S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

    I crouch in a filthy drainage pipe as an Emission blasts overhead, searing the surface with radiation and twisting time and space with unknown energies. Nearby crouches another refugee; another scavenger searching for artifacts to sell for profit, or maybe a bandit preying on his fellow man for the same goal. For now though, we are the same; two rats hiding from the fury of a ship that has already sunk. I check my equipment while I wait. I am down to only a few clips for the AKM-74 I carry, I used my last anti-radiation syringe after rushing through the contaminated swamp outside trying to get to this shelter ahead of the Emission and only a few stale chunks of bread are left to make my next meal. When the Emission passes my temporary companion may simply leave our makeshift shelter. He may invite me to join him at his campfire to share a bottle of vodka. Or, he may try to kill me. Despite the dangers though, I am strangely at peace. It is as if I am where I belong. As if I am home. I am in the Zone. I shouldn’t like the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. I’m not as good at FPS games as I used to be (and to be fair I was never really good at them in the first place) and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is an FPS game (and a very unforgiving one at that). I also tend to play games more for their stories than

    [Read More...]