Apologies for another post that isn't even slightly on-topic. I've a new pet project for this year and needed somewhere to document it, and I'm sure as hell not running a second Wordpress install, so here it is. Every day, for the whole of 2010, I will watch a film I've not seen before. Not very taxing, or original, or worthwhile. But amusing (at least to me), and a good way of burning off the pile of movies I've never watched. More importantly, an excuse to get around to the worryingly large number of culturally-significant films I've missed. I decided to do it simply...

Now that the first phase of beta testing for the long-awaited APB is almost at an end, I thought it was high time to share my experiences with it. I've had a whale of a time testing it, so much so I've been shunning other commitments – gaming or otherwise – to make way for the limited play windows. For those of you who haven't heard of APB, it's an MMO from Realtime Worlds, the relatively new software house founded by the chap who invented Grand Theft Auto – and the lazy but somewhat accurate description I've often heard of APB is that it's GTA: The...

I'd been meaning to pick up a copy of Ghostbusters: The Video Game for quite some time, but had never quite got round to it – until I noticed it as part of Steam's recent 5-day long 1-day only spectacular sale, where at £7.50 it would have been rude not to buy it. So I did, and three days later I'd completed it. Finishing a game at all is an incredibly rare occurrence for me, never mind within a few days of buying it, so I just thought I should mention that and perhaps attempt to explain why. Just to be clear, this won't be a review – partly because I don't...

After rather more false starts and cockups than I'd have liked, and seven years of having the idea to do this in my head… Ladies and gentlemen, may I finally present the Delorean time machine PC, complete with flux capacitor.

The recent Guardian article by Tom Watson on why MPs need to play videogames to understand them got me thinking. If you haven't already read the article, go read it then come back. Done? Good. This sparked a conversation on a messageboard I visit, specifically regarding the comment that kids aren't taught programming any more, they're taught Office. This is sadly very true, and something that led me to another realisation – at one point, kids *were* taught programming, but not by their school. I can only speak from a British perspective on this, so if you're an American...

Mods are something I've seldom played with, historically speaking, but more and more lately I'm stumbling on interesting-looking conversions for games I own that are too compelling to pass up. A case in point, and the mod that prompted me to raise the subject, is the superb tech demo for Ashura: Dark Reign, a Sonic the Hedgehog-themed total conversion for Unreal Tournament 2004. Having played this for only a few minutes, I was amazed by the technical achievement and attention to detail – had I not known it was a mod, I could almost have believed I was playing the latest Sonic Adventure...

I just wanted to write a quick thing about Left 4 Dead 2. I know this isn't news, nor is what I'm going to say particularly original, but I still think it merits saying anyway. So the first (stellar) Left 4 Dead game came out late last year. It's only really had one bit of DLC so far, the impressive Survival Pack, which added some very fun new content to an already immensely fun game. And naturally, given Valve's past tendency to release new content for its online games, especially TF2, people expect the same for Left 4 Dead. Which is a reasonable assumption, I guess. But then,...

Hello and welcome to my new blog, SmokesWithWolves. Some of you may know me already, or some of you might be backreading old posts at some point in the future, in which case I've prepared a little introduction below. I thought I'd start by explaining the idea behind this site. I've loosely maintained a blog in some form since early 2003, initially on LiveJournal, then through Windows Live Spaces and ultimately Wordpress on my former website – and if having a personal blog about my life for six years taught me one thing, it's that nobody gives a shit about reading tales...