A look at good games and "meh" games

I haven't been to see any movies recently, as you might have noticed, and that's partly why I've been branching out into book reviews and game reviews. These past coupla weeks I've been reading about game design and what makes a game good or addictive, so today I'm going to talk about a couple of games, one an example of what I consider good game design, and one I consider not-so-good game design.

Book Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats

Okay, so it's been two days.

And I've already finished another book.

To be fair, Jon Ronson's writing is very readable. The topics are often absurd, seemingly larger-than-life, but that's the sort of thing he becomes involved in. My first experience of his writing was with The Psychopath Test which was an interesting look at psychopathy and the traits which give it away, looking less at the condition itself (these are, again, more of those "popular science" books I love) and more at how it affects people and how people treat it. Likewise, this look at the US military and its more... shall we say, "unusual" tactics in warfare, is approached in typical Jon-Ronson-style from the strange angle of its PsyOps division, the shady area of army intelligence concerned with psychic viewing, new age thinking and, as the title of the book suggests, staring at goats. Yep, this is The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Book Review: The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat

Today is a book post, in part because I haven't watched any new movies recently (or really in the past month at all) but also because books are something I love, but don't have the opportunity to talk about very often. Books are something I really ought to talk about here, being as my movie experience is very much based upon storytelling - a movie without a good story is not a good movie at all, people! - and being as I'm a creative writer (particularly poetry right now, but more on that in future). Reading is just something I do.

In particular, I love reading non-fiction; fiction is great and all, you get a wonderful sense of escapism and vast scale in a good fantasy or sci-fi, and the stories they tell can bring to light modern problems, even if they were written long ago. But as a kid I really grew up reading the Horrible Histories and Horrible Science books, I found them endlessly fascinating and amusing and I'm sure they're still a great influence on what I read, although now that quest for real-world information has turned to perusing the "Popular Science" and "Smart Thinking" sections in Waterstone's rather than the back-of-beyond dusty history sections in second-hand bookshops. But what I find there is still of great interest, particularly when I stumble upon something as engaging and informative as Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.

Hacked Off

I have to start this review by saying I'm not all that far through Watch Dogs. What I've heard of the storyline (and it's very little) is promising, but for my part I haven't really done much of it. I've had it for a few days now, and every time I play I get stuck on it, sucked in, unable to quit or leave. Many a night has been spent staying up 'til three in the morning trying to finish another side mission or just muck about and hack as many random NPC's as possible. Because here's the thing about Watch Dogs: there's so much of it, and it's all so much fun.

A Bundle of Reviews

So I've had an Xbox One for about a week now, and most of my time on it has been spent either grinding through ridiculously difficult side-scrolling platformers or expressing my disbelief that they actually bothered with a campaign mode in Titanfall. Anyway, I think I week is long enough to have bought all the good games (short of Watch Dogs with its extravagant £60 price tag or anything which involves a sport and is not affiliated with the Kinect) and to have time to review the console itself. So here are my thoughts on the Xbox One.

One Big Colossal-Monster Punch-Up

When Godzilla came out in 1998 I was amazed. I'm ashamed to say it was one of my favourite films (probably - I was six when I first saw it and it stuck in my mind, they obviously did something right) but I have never watched it since I was old enough to go and see 12-rated movies in the cinema. Now, with the rise of a new Western take on Japan's biggest export (from head to feet) it's time to see how Gareth Edwards' more traditional interpretation of a classic kaiju holds up.

Bigger, Better, Bloodier!

If Gareth Evans is a name with which you are unfamiliar, why do you read this blog? It's about movies. And Gareth Evans is a name which, in the movie, world, is quickly becoming huge. When The Raid hit screens three years ago, it was a low-budget, gritty martial arts action film and its visceral action sequences and close camera work made it a cult hit and raked in fifteen times its one million-dollar budget.

Now, The Raid 2: Berandal is out in cinemas and it's bigger, badder and bloodier than ever before. Featuring a more expansive world, more involving story and an impressive array of detailed characters, it's still the bone-crunching, face-breaking fist-thrower the prequel was; only this time, Evans has the budget to spread it about a bit.