Quick reviews of games I barely played

I've been playing small amounts of a few different games recently to try to clear out some of my backlog of games I've bought and never tried. Here's what I think of some of them (and how long I played them for).

How to play Gat Out of Hell

I've just been replaying Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell today, and this time I noticed something odd about the early missions (in which you recruit your allies and gain your powers): They're in the wrong order. Now you can actually do them in any order you like, but the game prompts you to do them a certain way, specifically Blackbeard/summon, Shakespeare/stomp, Vlad the Impaler/aura and then the DeWynters/blast.

Chocolate with Vegemite

There's a thread on the Something Awful forums called the Anti-Food Porn Thread. It's pretty great most of the time, but there are a bunch of babies posting there who get disgusted by quite ordinary things. Recently a few "trip reports" have been posted of people eating food from KFC, which I found incredibly dumb, because that hardly fits the "anti food porn" description, does it? So I asked the thread to nominate something for me to eat that was actually weird. Someone suggested that chocolate with the Vegemite in it, but it had already been done, and anyway I don't think they're selling it any more. I certainly couldn't find any in the shops today.

So I decided to go one better and do a home-made version.

Authors Behaving Badly

This is an account, written for my Writing Creative Non-Fiction class back in May, of my encounter with Gilbert Ohanian (previously covered on this blog) and a discussion of similar reactions from other authors to bad reviews.

Letters to Yourself

Robert Dessaix's 'Letters to an Unknown Friend' was the keynote address at Essaying: The Calibre Prizes, a symposium held at the National Library of Australia. This is my review of a transcript of it, written for my Writing Creative Non-Fiction class back in May.

Uncreative Fiction

This is a thing about creative non-fiction (and why I hate it) that I wrote for my Writing Creative Non-Fiction class back in April.

Ads

Today, while looking for the many perfectly legitimate torrents of public domain things that I like to download, I noticed a couple of ads.

Shifts in Genre Conventions

An essay on genre and how it changes over time. I think genre is generally a pretty useless and uninteresting concept, so I can't really claim to have anything interesting to say about it, but since I had to write this I may as well post it.

Remnants

Another thing I wrote for the genre class, this one was supposed to be gothic fiction but is really more just a sort of generic sci-fi, really. I don't mind this one, but it's pretty uninventive.

Pumpkin Jam with Ginger

This was a thing I wrote for a class on genre, in which the task was to combine detective and fan fiction with the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill. I think it turned out OK, given those constraints.