The Tepid Take

2005. Summer. Dad is drinking one of the beers he calls "stubbies" because they come in squat little bottles. He is sitting on a blue sofa in a burgundy red room with yellow carpet and I am ignoring the in retrospect unforgivable clash of colours by directing my eyes squarely at the television which, given that this is 2005, is roughly a billion feet deep. It is a good size, though, to display that summer's diversion of choice. In the coddled doldrums of the school summer holidays, I have - off the back of a frankly incredible experience with my friend's Sega Genesis - jumped onto the Sonic bandwagon. As a precocious brat at the time, I don't remember thanking my parents enough for buying a chunky Xbox and a copy of Sonic Heroes to play on it - but I took to video games like a duck takes to skydiving, which is to say it was laborious and perhaps ill-considered. The remainder of my memories from that summer are patchy: I might've gone to a wedding (painfully ...

Obsidian Games had struck gold. They would tie up, with the utmost subtlety, the link between their new IP – The Outer Worlds, released in the November games rush of 2019 – and the postmodern classic Fallout: New Vegas. It would be mentioned in the publicity but it wouldn’t be pushed . “The team that brought you…” and little more. A piecemeal callout to Bethesda and then, mouths shut tight. In the wake of Fallout 76 and increasingly low expectations for their space-faring Skyrim-alike Starfield, Bethesda were in hot water, and it was exactly the right time for Obsidian to crawl out of the woodwork and bum-rush the big boys. The Outer Worlds was destined to be the western RPG that western RPG fans had been waiting for ever since western RPG Fallout: New Vegas set a new standard for branching gameplay, thoughtful motif, worldbuilding expertise and western RPG-ing generally. The Outer Worlds would pay homage to that tradition while issuing the long-distance telegram of a middle fing...

This isn’t the first time I’m cosying up to The Elder Scrolls V. I’ve played a touch of it since the last piece – a cripplingly sentimental attempt at explaining why I love that game so much. Since then I wouldn’t say my opinion of it has soured – more that I now understand it, and its endless list of flaws, so well that it stops being a majestic open world sandbox and becomes an attempt to optimise every stat and bypass every invisible wall. When I boot it up, I feel like I’m one of those League of Legends champions, playing the game as a full time job and thereby, inexorably, being unable to either “play” it or really consider it a “game”; like asking Gareth Southgate for a kick-about right after getting metaphorically kicked out of the World Cup, these things stop being fun when we really pour ourselves into them. I’m not writing this in an attempt to enjoy Skyrim more – I’d be much better off dropping my as-yet-unconfirmed future pay cheque on a new game. Instead, I’m writing it...

It’s hard to deal in absolutes. My friend often reminds me how her favourite novel is The Unbearable Lightness of Being, while I respond with incredulity at how hard I find it to even create a shortlist. Faced with the challenge of pinning down the indubitable be all and end all of literally anything - from books to music to contemptibly obscure French philosophers - is a struggle for me, as someone prone to near constant indecision. And yet, despite this quirk, there’s one superlative that I’ve always had an answer for. My favourite video game is still, without a shadow of a doubt, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. This opinion was hardly avant-garde when I formulated it in the spring of 2012 thanks to an Xbox 360 copy of the aforementioned game, but it had become slightly unfashionable by 2016 when I doubled down with the PC port of Skyrim: Legendary Edition. Since then, Skyrim has fallen down a particularly problematic rabbit hole , but that’s not the reason I’m writing this articl...

The world of video games is full of contradictions: expecting high quality sequels of favoured franchises to be delivered year on year, despite these games being incredibly resource intensive in production; a series of complaints about payment systems in modern games leading to the divisive loot box system; even Half Life 2 is an anachronism, another double-edged sword. Valve’s golden goose – a game that spent 5 years in development hell and cost $40 million to produce – heralded the arrival of Steam, the latter-day go-to platform for cheap PC games, and a catalyst for indie game development in the mainstream. Valve, purveyors of crafted, high quality experiences, are effectively responsible for a new renaissance. And yet, in spite of this vast sea change in the market for video games, the pricing structure of those at the top has remained stagnant. Why? I’m writing this article because of the recent slew of videos on the YouTube channel Extra Credits, focused primarily on AAA ...