Showing posts with label iPhone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iPhone. Show all posts

Thursday, 27 September 2012

Welcome to the Magpie Society!



They tell me that I’m too young to be jaded and cynical about society, but let’s be honest if no-one else is going to be then we are at the beginning of the end. You would be forgiven for thinking that you had stumbled across the post of a pretentious counter-culture blogger, moping around inside with almost translucent skin from lack of sunshine.

However I am a lover of culture in its many forms including technology and our apparent ever growing symbiosis with it. Yes, technology is great and has revolutionised almost every part of our everyday lives, but we are now reaching a point where technology has become a new culture in an almost quasi-religious form. Apple and their devoted following of Apple-ites get a lot of stick in the press and on the internet by those not so symbiotically reliant on the next “i-Innovation”, however I do not feel they are alone in this problem and it is spreading throughout other areas of entertainment technology.

The best example of this at the moment is that of the iPhone 5 and the ‘New’ slimmer PS3 console being released. What is wrong with these you may ask, well it isn’t the products themselves that there is anything wrong with, but more the fact that people will so readily change from their perfectly functioning predecessors for a newer shinier version of what they already have with little noticeable advantageous technological gain. 

 

Friday, 10 August 2012

It's a fruit thing...


Do you know what I fucking hate? Mobile phone games! Games... on mobile phones! They're inconvenient, generic, power hungry bastards. If this is casual gaming then there's no wonder why I'm only having a casual relationship with my phone... yeah I got the innuendo too, yuck. My point is that, for someone who doesn't have a car and doesn't want a car, or just like to sit about the house, mobile gaming could be so useful as to be compulsive, yet it infuriates me how little there is for someone like me. I'm fed up of flinging birds, chopping fruit and pressing... fucking... JEWELS! I'm fed up of games that have 1 dimensional game-play mechanics, no storyline and no attempt to recreate the experience of home gaming, be it casual or hardcore.

It's the whole idea that this is what casual gaming is all about that really gets to me. Do you know which games I'd consider my favourite casual games? Pokemon Red/Blue, and The Legends of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons/Ages... and a Link to the Past once it was ported to the GBA. Why? Because you could dip in and out of the game as you pleased, and play for as little or as long as you wanted too, and you could hop out of the game at any time. It didn't matter if you were half way through a puzzle, because you'd be right back where you left off when you resumed the game. There was no waiting for a game over screen, and it didn't feel like the levels were deliberate bite-sized chunks, they felt very organic. On top of that, the stories were immersive and deep, they felt like what we've come to expect from a big name title, because that's what they were! And yet I could still just grab a quick 5 minutes in the back of my parents car on the way to some ill fated swimming lessons.