Gareth Brierley

In space no one can hear you scream…I bet my neighbors were wishing I was in space because I was screaming like a banshee while playing Nova 111.

I hate being made to rush. I like to take my own sweet time in the doing of all things leisure. Whether it’s having that morning coffee slowly whilst being late for work or taking my time watching episodes of The Walking Dead while avoiding spoilers on twitter; I am the tortoise sticking two fingers up at the hare speeding by. So when a game tells me that there is a time limit in order to complete it, a reaction happens. I get nervous and I feel under pressure, because it feels like being at work with terrifying deadlines looming.

I want to admit something now, in front of you all, and that is, I have no rhythm whatsoever. I am a terrible dancer and wannabe musician. I just don’t understand the beat. In gaming terms I have avoided all the Guitar Hero/Rock band/DJ hero type clones knowing fully well that I would suck at them. So it is with great trepidation that I stumble into what I thought was one of the above type of games. I was very wrong; it’s something else completely and that something is very good. Music is still the main ingredient and inspiration for the game, but it’s used in such an interesting way that even a two left-footed, tone-deaf idiot like myself can play it.

It was with great excitement and nostalgia that I sat down to play the first chapter of a new adventure in King’s Quest with the promise of five downloadable chunks coming over the next year. Am I disappointed? Does it still excite me? Does it make me want to cry into a bottle of whiskey late at night in the dark remembering my lost youth? The answers are no, yes and yes, but I normally do that anyway on a Thursday.

It all starts with you looking out of a small window, hurtling away from earth at thousands of miles per hour. You’re an astronaut in a spacecraft watching the earth getting smaller and smaller until it’s a tiny dot. A picture of a loved one blu-tacked to the side of the spacecraft window. Who is she? Your mission? Unknown. Blackout. Instantly you find yourself hurtling down towards the atmosphere of a small planet, is it Earth? Blackout. You’re now standing on this planet, in your spacesuit; your craft is destroyed behind you. The world is beautiful, but barren and as the title says…lifeless. Your oxygen levels are dangerously low and you see something flashing in the distance.

In the late 1980’s you might have found me in your local arcade with a fistful of 10 pence's. Games like R-TYPE were my drugs, where I would start the game, play frantically for five minutes, get killed five times, then GAME OVER. Without blinking, the next ten pence would be put in and I would start the process over again, maybe getting a bit further and a bit older. It was fun, adrenaline pumping and addictive. So when after 25 years later I got a chance to play Project Root by OPQAM, a table top shooter that promised the old style game I knew so well, but with new free roaming, open world action, I was so excited, I even considered growing a mullet again.

It’s just past midnight and I am settling down to play Slender The Arrival. Ten minutes later and I find myself slightly sweaty with goose bumps appearing all over my legs and arms. Five minutes more and I am now frowning heavily, while feeling very scared, looking behind me, glancing out of the window nervously and jumping suddenly, even through I know it’s just a game. Repeat, it’s just a game

It's coming up to two months since the Xbox One launched. Our first 168 hours with the Xbox One turned out to be rather successful but now, over 1000 hours later we've started to notice the really great things