by ·Comments Off on Is Donkey Kong good or bad?

Donkey Kong arcade screenMy wife asked me over Whatsapp “Is Donkey Kong good or bad?” which is a perfectly expected question and entirely consistent with the sorts of questions I find myself fielding from friends and family all the time. I’m lucky I have spent so long playing games, reading about games and listening to podcasts about games for otherwise I would be ill equipped for life, which apparently requires the successful answering of these sorts of questions.

If this question is actually “Is Donkey Kong, the arcade game from 1981, good or bad?” then the answer is very simple. Yes. It’s very good. It’s the first game I ever played and it’s great.

If the question is however “Is Donkey Kong a good guy or a villain?” then it gets a bit more interesting.

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by ·Comments Off on Who killed the power fantasy? A World of Warcraft story

I struggled to condense my feelings on the latest World of Warcraft expansion into a short easily readable and pithy blog post so I gave up and decided to write all the words instead.

Prologue: The Sword in the Stone

For a very brief moment I thought I was going to be the King of England. It was very brief, and by that I mean about half a second.

Tauren Paladin in Lights Hope Chapel

Why yes my shoulders are on fire and I do have a small bird on my head.

I went to Disneyland Paris when I was about 18 with a youth orchestra group. We were playing at one of the little side stages which was a big deal for us, but not really such a big deal for the five people who mistakenly wandered over to the backwater of the park we were playing in.

Being 18 with a youth orchestra group abroad basically means you’re in quasi-parent-guardian mode. If one of the mini-clarinetists falls over and skins a knee, you’re the one that’s responsible for tracking down a plaster and making sure they haven’t broken anything. It’s not like you can just leave them for dead and head over to Space Mountain, you have to work to stop tears and tantrums. What I’m trying to say is by the time I was in Disneyland Paris, I was old enough and in the mindset of an adult enough not to be tricked by any nefarious Disney dark magic.

In one quiet part of the park, there was a sword lodged into a stone, a la the Legend of King Arthur, a la Disney’s The Sword in the Stone. Of course you have to go and try to pull it out. It’s there. That’s what it’s there for. Everyone needs to go and try to pull it out. So that’s what I did, knowing it was a stupid prop that you were probably supposed to pose for a picture with, pretending to struggle to pull it out. Mild laughs all round.

The sword moved…

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by ·Comments Off on Can you use video games to learn another language?

I convinced the day job to let me write about video games on company time and set about offering some suggestions on how to use video games to learn English.

It’s definitely possible -submersing yourself in any form of media will give you the edge when it comes to learning another language. The frustrating thing is that video games have a real potential to be more than that and I’m yet to see a developer successfully pulling it off.

Game of Thrones - Telltale Games

Admittedly, maybe attempting to learn English through Telltale’s Game of Thrones might be a little on the ambitious side.

What’s more, the success of apps like Duolingo show there’s a real market for interactive media that teaches these things and video games have so much potential to really react to the individual student.

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by ·Comments Off on Kaplan’s video game translations infographic

Below is something the awesome guys at work put together about video game translations.

In this infographic, you have the opportunity to learn a little bit of French! Also, the site, Kiss My Geek that it’s co-branded with is also a neat little site that I’ve taken to reading in an effort to improve my awful French language skills.

Particular favourites of mine in the image below are entries for Ezio from Assassin’s Creed and the original Grand Theft Auto.

Parlez-vous jeux vidéo ?
Parlez-vous jeux vidéo ? – Kaplan International

by ·Comments Off on An Introduction To Video Games – Genres Part 1

I present episode 2 of An Introduction to Video Games.  In this episode, we have a look at some different genres of video games.

This took forever to put together and I learnt many things, for example my video editing software does not like video files over 3GB in size and when you are 98% done with the editing process, it will crash constantly in a desperate and successful attempt to get your attention and make you want to cry/explode/both.

An Introduction to Video Games should always appear here, but you can also catch it on my Blip TV show page (UPDATE: No you can’t! Blip.tv got shut down!).  I think you can also find it on iTunes…but I wouldn’t put money on that.

Additional Notes:

Incidentally, Blip TV:  Actually pretty cool and well worth taking a look.  I think they’re doing something very interesting that could very well be the next big thing. (UPDATE: Hahahahahahaha wooooo hindsight)