Sporadic Rambling

Are Games “Beneath Popular Culture”?

Andy — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:37:34 +0000

Almost since their inception, videogames have been met with rampant prejudice, legislation and stigma. Indeed, they are often “beneath popular culture”. This is usually related to violence, children and education, or diminished social skills. (Southern, 2001) Introduction In 2009, UK videogame software sales totaled £1.612 billion with console hardware sales amounting to £1.06 billion, while in 2008 US [...]

Film 2009

Andy — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:52:32 +0000

2008 was undoubtedly a brilliant year for films with the releases of Cloverfield, The Dark Knight, Wall•E, Iron Man, Burn After Reading, Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, Frost/Nixon, The Wrestler and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to name just ten. So how did 2009 do? First of all, I’ll admit that there were some major films released [...]

The New Xbox Experience

Andy — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:02:07 +0000

It’s that time of year again when the nights start to close in, the leaves begin to fall from the trees and Microsoft releases their annual Fall Dashboard Update (unless you live in the Southern Hemisphere in which case you can ignore the first two points). This year however, something is slightly different, and unless [...]

Peripheral Breakdown

Andy — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:48:26 +0000

Last week I was playing Rock Band, and whilst hammering out an awesomely over enthusiastic drum solo my bass pedal snapped in half. While this only caused me a few days of inconvenience (it was surprisingly easy to get EA to send me a new pedal) it got me thinking about the multitude of hardware [...]

Upcoming

Andy — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 10:43:01 +0000

The summer, or what little of it we had, is drawing to a close. The nights are getting longer, the weather is getting even worse, and soon Halloween and Christmas decorations will start appearing in the shops. However, the positives to this are that there are a fair few games and films coming out over [...]

Control Yourself

Andy — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:12:00 +0000

I was playing Rainbow Six Vegas 2 the other day, and in the middle of a gunfight I ran out of ammo. So naturally I switched to my night vision (which blinded me as I was fighting outside), crouched and back away slowly. Obviously this caused me a huge disadvantage and as such I died. [...]

It’s Alive!

Andy — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 12:08:57 +0000

A full year and a half after the last post on the old blog, I finally kicked my arse into gear and got round to creating my new blog. A few things have happened in the last year and a half that are worthy of some kind of mention. I dropped out of my Computer [...]