Tag: Games

Review: Oxenfree

Your Oxenfree blue-haired alter-ego, Alex

It’s not often I get chance to play computer games anymore. The precious few hours I get to myself most days are usually filled with trying to catch up on my OU study1. So when I do choose a game, it has to be something immersive, where I make a difference. I loved Fable when it first came out and having finished Fable 3 recently (well behind the rest of the community I know!) I was looking for something new. A game I could play for ten minutes or an hour, something that I could be absorbed into and something where it didn’t matter if I didn’t play it for a couple of weeks. My wonderful husband bought Oxenfree for me on the XBox (also available on Steam) and I was hooked from the beginning. Continue reading Review: Oxenfree

Anything you can do AI can do better (?): Playing games at a new level

Robot hands dealing cards
Image from BigThink.com

Learning to play games has been a great test for AI.  Being able to generalise from relatively simple rules to find optimal solutions shows a form of intelligence that we humans always hoped would be impossible.  Back in 1997, when IBMs Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in chess1 we saw that machines were capable of more than brute force solutions to problems.  20 years later2 and not only has AI mastered Go with Google’s DeepMind winning 4-1 against the world’s best player and IBM’s Watson has mastered Jeopardy,  there have also been some great examples of game play with many of the games I grew up playing: Tetris,  PacMan3, Space Invaders and other Atari games.  I am yet to see any AI complete Repton 2. Continue reading Anything you can do AI can do better (?): Playing games at a new level

The Gamechangers – BBC Make it Digital Season

Daniel Radcliffe in the Gamechangers (BBC)
Daniel Radcliffe in the Gamechangers (BBC)

After yesterday’s Girls can code the BBC kicked it up a notch with the Gamechangers – a TV movie about Rockstar Games and the controversy around GTA San Andreas.  At the start, it was made clear that Rockstar weren’t involved and that it had been pieced together from court reports and third party interviews.  If you missed it then it’s available on iPlayer for the next month. Continue reading The Gamechangers – BBC Make it Digital Season

Microsoft HoloLens and backwards compatibility

It’s been a while since I’ve had the time to really dedicate to gaming in the way I’d like.  My XBox360 is languishing unloved, my World of Warcraft account dormant since I got the Insane achievement in Cataclysm and the most I can manage now is the odd game of Hearthstone on my Nexus 71.  I still keep an eye on what’s going on as the gaming industry is pushing the development of a lot of technologies that make their way into our lives in one way or another and I always have that hope that maybe something will give me the free time to immerse myself into some of the latest games again.

I was watching the announcements for XBox at E3 as they popped up on twitter this evening and two things really stood out for me.

Continue reading Microsoft HoloLens and backwards compatibility