Sarah is a 25-year-old girl from New Jersey. We met on a sex fetish forum and digitally bonded over our love of being tied up. As we got to know each other better I discovered that Sarah suffers from a rare form of dwarfism, that she is quadriplegic and permanently on a ventilator.
Because of her condition, for most of her life Sarah had minimal contact with the outside world. Seven years ago she joined Second Life (if you’re my mum and don’t know what it is, welcome to 2003. BTW, have you heard about grime?). I didn’t think anyone still used Second Life, but it’s the most important thing in Sarah’s world, so I guess we shouldn’t be tech snobs.
I talked to Sarah about the reality of living completely outside reality.
I asked Sarah to send a photo of her in real life, but she wouldn’t. The avatars you see are Sarah in Second Life.
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I don’t know whose job it is to crack whip on the autistic gnomes in the engine room of the Japanese gamemaking industry, but lately, they’ve been slacking. Time was, all you needed was a chipped PlayStation to get access to some of the strangest and most wonderful bullshit imaginable, games that played like cheese dreams or waking up hungover in another dimension. The rate of batshit mentalism emanating from the Land of the Rising Sun has slowed of late, so thank god, then, for Deadly Premonition. Imagine Twin Peaks shot on a budget of $140 with a cast sourced entirely from a methadone rehabilitation clinic and you’re pretty much there. Read more »
I have this routine I like to do whenever parents or politicians or some other type of zealot decries a video game as perverted. I like to take off all my clothes, smear myself in lubricant and sit down to play something that’s actually perverted. Something like Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer, which is an independently developed PC game about seducing people, taking them home, torturing them and uploading a snuff film of their death to the internet. It’s also a love story. Read more »
Nothing draws nerds out of their pits like the midnight launch of a game that lets you feel like you’re wreaking your own bloody revenge upon society. So it was that myself and a friend found ourselves queuing on Oxford Street to get our hands on a copy of the new Call of Duty game: Black Ops. If you’re a child/well-adjusted adult who only picks up a pad to play FIFA or Happy Smiley Puppy Land on the Wii, you have to understand that this game is expected to sell more copies than any other game ever made, so to a lot of people it’s kind of a big deal.
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Whoa, how did I miss this? An erotic chess video game? Set in a post-apocalyptic world? With (and I quote the press release) “the possibility to actively guide each combination of pieces to a compelling digitised climax”? And a prequel set in Egyptian mythology? Fourteen years in the past, my 13-year-old self has just been delivered a boner from the future. Read more »
3D DOT GAME HEROES
Platform: Playstation 3
Publisher: Atlus
Do you like Zelda?
The original, I mean. Not Ocarina of Time or Twilight Princess or any of that 3D beeswax. The original top-down 2D Zelda games, The Legend of Zelda on the NES and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on the SNES. Read more »
I’ve always been moderately aware and mildly curious of the South Korean e-sports scene. I even ended up at BlizzCon one year, watched a few StarCraft matches firsthand and soaked up the hyperbolic, hyperventilating commentary that normally happens over crap American sports. It was pretty neat, but mostly because someone was paying for my beer. Read more »
Years before this shit, video games were 2D with fewer colours than a tube of M&Ms and weren’t gross or violent and therefore couldn’t scare anyone. Except me. I had completely forgotten about what a wuss I used to be until I read that Splatterhouse, for a brief period the goriest game in history, was getting remade. Then all the bad memories came flooding back and I decide to seek out some bootleg ROMs so I could finally defeat my gaming demons and feel like a real man at last. These are they. Read more »
I’m not one of those irritating video game nerds who wishes he lived in Japan, thinking it to be some kind of Nintendopolis where hot chicks strut around Shibuya dressed like Samus Aran from Metroid and you can get hired just by writing your World of Warcraft level on your CV.
Still, I love that the Japanese care about video game music. Like, care to the level where there are hundreds of video game soundtracks stacked in their HMVs, and the singles released from Final Fantasy games regularly hit number one. I still think VGM (as we enthusiasts call it) is incredibly underrated by the West. And that’s totally sad. Read more »
Simon Peter is an unemployed 30-something Kiwi gripped by a hatred of centaurs and a love of bad techno. So far he’s managed to leverage both obsessions into a short film about a gentle fellow being drugged and abused by a centaur. Now he’s made a Flash game about it which is out today, I interviewed him, which was exciting for both of us. Read more »
