Rachel Helps

What should it mean to be a gamer?

All too often, the word “gamer” seems to describe a personality in its entirety. One’s gaming identity is somehow divorced from all the other aspects of one’s personality. Adam Ruch at Kotaku AU fights against this assumption. By being a gamer, I do not stop being a man, a university lecturer, a med

FTL is the space game that makes you forget all about exploring space

The new indie spaceship management game FTL involves a lot of, well, managing, and not a lot of space exploration. Rampant Coyote of Rampant Games found the game full of emergent narrative, with some surprising solutions to the problem of putting out fires. The focus of the game is not on space – it

The nostalgia buying cycle in videogames

Retro gamers will be familiar with the following cycle: you order a game online, you wistfully remember how awesome it was, the package arrives, and you have no desire to play it. This happened to me last time I stopped at GoG and bought Dungeon Keeper. Damien McFerran describes the problem at Eurog

Dating and fish collecting, finally together in the same game

Everyone knows that there aren’t enough games set in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by fish people. That all changes with Sealark, a kind of varation on Harvest Moon, with daily fishing taking the place of farming. Expect it in July 2013.