Game reviews.  Some of the most divisive pieces of journalism in the gaming industry, reviews have been a common area of debate for many years, and this has been further exacerbated in the recent past, following the release of WB Montreal’s new title: Gotham Knights.  In today’s post, I want to take a quick look at the relevancy of game reviews in influencing the decision making of consumers when it comes to purchasing games. Let’s start with Gotham Knights, a game that suffered some delays due to difficulties associated with the Covid-19 pandemic (I feel like I’m mentioning this every week now).  Hype for this game was relatively high. After all, it had been seven years since a AAA Batman game had been released, and an opportunity to play in Gotham is one that very few would turn down.  With hype comes pressure (as discussed in my first post), and so expectations were high when reviews came out. To put a long story short, Gotham Knights did not review well.  Lo...

While it’s not new, streaming has become one of the biggest phenomenons in the last couple of years, with an increase in popularity coming about because of the worldwide lockdowns experienced during the height of the Covid-19 Pandemic.  The ease of access for anyone to stream means that the dream of reaching the big time is available to anyone with the means to stream.  You can start streaming simply by having a console and a headset, you don’t necessarily need to have a capture card and a top of the range PC.   But is this really a good thing?  Well, I plan to spend a good amount of time highlighting the pros and cons that come with streaming, looking at the platforms themselves, as well as what the impact can be on the individual streaming.  Regardless of how you feel about streaming and what your background is, my hope is that there is something in this post that resonates with you.  Whether you stream yourself, are an avid viewer of streams, or som...

If you’ve clicked onto this post, it’s probably more than likely that you’ve heard of Nintendo before.  One of the longest-running gaming companies in the world, Nintendo remain the strange outcast of the gaming family, left out of any conversation that involves PlayStation and XBox.  Nintendo’s innovation focuses on a very different area than that of the “Big Two”, where innovation often comes in the form of introducing something different to the industry, rather than on improved graphics to mirror realism as seen by the achievements of both the PS5 and the XBox Series X. And no, the title of this blog is not clickbait in any way.  I fully believe that Nintendo are a company that rely so heavily on the past that it can be off-putting for some consumers, and this is a conclusion I will be backing up heavily throughout.  In the next 2500 words or so, I’ll be looking at Nintendo as a company as a whole, trying to ignore the differences between them and other major play...

  The soulslike genre has been a topic of debate within the gaming industry since its incarnation in 2009, when FromSoftware released Demon’s Souls on the PS3.  The difficulty of these games has been raised as an issue by many, but by those that love these games, is a feature that simply cannot be compromised on.  At the end of the day, it’s the difficulty of these games that has placed them in a genre of their own right, and something that I personally have grown to love.  I think that the debate around these games shows a bigger problem within online gaming communities, and in today’s blog, I’ll be diving into all the factors and opinions at play when questions like this come up.  I’ll be honest, I don’t really intend on answering the leading question of today’s piece, but more looking at the general conversation around these games. Time for a history lesson (don’t blame me, everyday’s a school day, and I feel it’s only fair that I in some way contribute to yo...