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Dec 29, 2024 | 
superjumpmagazine.com | James O’Connor |James O’connor
In the 2010 chapter of Unpacking, Witchbeam's wonderful little game about the ritual of unpacking your possessions in a new home, the unnamed protagonist moves in with her boyfriend. If you've played the game, you almost certainly remember this level, even if some of the other moments in the game have started to blur in your memory. It's the only level in the game with a villain, after all.
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Dec 14, 2024 | 
superjumpmagazine.com | James O’Connor |James O’connor
I fondly remember the day the last episode of the original Life is Strange released. I remember the anticipation and excitement, the online speculation about how it would end; I remember trading stories about the choices I'd made and seeing people warm up to the experience over months.
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Nov 16, 2024 | 
superjumpmagazine.com | James O’Connor |James O’connor
Fairly early on in Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, protagonist George Stobbart is given a hand buzzer by the manager of a costume store. It's a classic prank object - you slip it into your palm, and when you shake someone's hand they'll receive a mild shock. The buzzer sits in your inventory for the rest of the game, and every time you talk to another character you have the option of presenting it to them, which usually results in George asking for a handshake.
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
superjumpmagazine.com | James O’Connor |James O’connor
Earlier this year, I watched the movie Millenium Actress. Satoshi Kon's second anime feature released in the early 2000s - it's hard to pinpoint exactly when it became available here in Australia, but I believe there was a DVD release around 2003. I remember reading a review in gaming magazine Hyper, seeing the disc on sale at shops and available for rent at Blockbuster. I definitely fully intended to check it out.
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Oct 18, 2024 | 
superjumpmagazine.com | James O’Connor |James O’connor
Within about two minutes of starting up any game on my Nintendo Switch, the internal fan usually starts screaming at me. When the shouting starts, there's an easy solution - I press the home button and give my console (a review unit that I've been playing games on regularly since just before the system launched in 2017) a little break.
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Oct 5, 2024 | 
superjumpmagazine.com | James O’Connor |James O’connor
For as long as there have been digital games, there has been discussion about embodiment - the notion that when we play a game, we become the character. It's a complicated concept that has, at numerous junctures of discourse, been smashed down into something more simplistic. If you've read a lot of games criticism, you've seen a sentence like this before: "the thing that makes games interesting is that we inhabit the characters, which makes it easier to empathize with them".
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Oct 2, 2024 | 
safilm.com.au | James O’Connor |James O’connor
WHAT‘S HAPPENING 03 October 2024 In 2019, Keirron Stach and his partner Caitlyn made a video game together. Secret Squirrel was created during a Game Jam – a time-limited event where teams create their games very quickly – and released onto independent game repository itch.io. “Go up against your friends to be the squirrel with the most acorns,” the game page’s description reads. “Tasty acorns score points, but not so tasty acorns lose you points.
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Sep 20, 2024 | 
superjumpmagazine.com | James O’Connor |James O’connor
Astro Bot, the new joyous 3D platformer for the PlayStation 5, is one of those games where it's difficult to talk about in a normal way. The game's positioning as an anniversary celebration of all things PlayStation, packed full of references and aesthetics tied to series from the company's past - many of them long-dormant - has stirred a lot of complicated feelings. Astro Bot is a game that is prompting many of us to think about the business of video games, and the history of Sony.
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Sep 5, 2024 | 
superjumpmagazine.com | James O’Connor |James O’connor
Deduction - giving players a mystery and then empowering them to solve it - is one of the hardest mechanics to get right in a narrative game.
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Sep 4, 2024 | 
energyvoice.com | James O’Connor |James O’connor |Erikka Askeland
To enable the realisation of the UK’s ambitions for offshore and floating wind energy projects it is crucial that the upgrade of UK port infrastructure is accelerated. For example, the 2023 report by the Floating Offshore Wind Taskforce identified that up to 11 ports around the UK that will need to be transformed as fast as possible into new industrial hubs to allow for the development of floating offshore wind.
