Jessica Thompson

Twitch is the most popular live streaming platform for gamers, which gives everyday people an opportunity to stream their gameplay. As such, the content of the platform varies depending on the people who provide it. Most of it closely revolves around video games and video game tournaments. However, Twitch offers a lot more, especially with

Consider, if you will, the strange and wonderful world of racing simulation games. From Codemasters’ F1 series to Slightly Mad Studios’ Project CARS, the art of driving cars really fast around increasingly dangerous tracks has been represented in as many ways, shapes and forms as it’s possible to imagine. If you’re a gearhead and you

Escape rooms are becoming more and more popular in the United States now. They first got noticed in Asia and some parts of Europe, and it is not so difficult to see why people there got hooked on them. The level of excitement and thrill that they bring is very stimulating. An escape room usually

Due to the massive innovation and advancement in technology, coding and programming is more important than ever. It is one of the most important job skills out there and without people programming, much of our software, hardware and other technology simply wouldn’t work. Coding is at the core of every piece of software, app, and

When we were younger, the prospect of playing “augmented” video games was something that belonged exclusively to the distant future. Peripherals like the Sega Dreamcast’s VMU (Visual Memory Unit) and the original PS1’s PocketStation gave us a glimpse into what playing games with secondary displays might feel like, and in 2012 Nintendo’s Wii U showed

For a long time, PC gaming was exclusively the premise of keyboard-and-mouse users. Many PC games in the 1990s and 2000s were obtuse, difficult affairs, often requiring players to memorise hundreds of different button combinations and keyboard shortcuts in order to maximise their efficiency while playing (lookin’ at you, System Shock 2). Incomprehensible flight simulators,

There aren’t enough happy games in the world. Most video games these days revolve around gruff, grim people trying to do gruff, grim things in a gruff, grim world. That’s not a criticism; some of our favourite games take place in relentlessly dark universes where there are no moral absolutes, only shades of grey. It’s

Turn-based combat is a tricky beast. Get it right and you’ve got something like XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a thrilling, tense battle of strategy and wits between two evenly-matched enemies. Get it wrong, though, and you’ve got a player staring catatonically at the TV, mashing buttons until combat automatically resolves itself. It’s a delicate balancing act

“Take me home, country roads/To the place I belong/West Virginia, mountain mama/Take me home, country roads”. So go the lyrics to John Denver’s famous “Take Me Home, Country Roads”, a song that Bethesda has been working very hard indeed to attach to its online survival RPG Fallout 76. This song is already something of a

When a particular game does what it does so well that it becomes a runaway financial and critical success, pretenders are bound to appear. For every Dark Souls, there’s a Lords of the Fallen. For every Sonic the Hedgehog or Super Mario Bros, there’s a Bubsy. For every Spider-Man 2, there’s a Prototype. Sometimes, these

When revisiting old video gaming classics, there’s always a sense of dread that the reality won’t match up to your memories. Nostalgia is a funny old thing, and it blinds even the best of us, especially when we’ve grown up with something and can’t extricate it from memories of our childhood. The games we played

Video games have always enjoyed a strong relationship with other forms of media. Whether through the amazing translations seen with Rocksteady’s Batman Arkham games or the less-than-impressive old-school Atari 2600 translation of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, the franchise potential has always been a source of interest. However, somewhat oddly, we have recently seen an increasing trend of