John Walker's Electronic House

I’ve had a couple of pieces appear on Eurogamer in the last 24 hours.

First is a retrospective of Aliens Vs. Predator Classic 2000, which manages to even be a little bit Valentine’sy. It opens like this, for instance:

So I’ve got myself in something of a situation. I find that I’m spending an increasing amount of time in the company of another who is not a gamer. In a world where everyone’s something of a gamer, even if it’s just a game of Farmville at lunchtime, or some Bejeweled on the mobile phone, this new friend plays none at all. We do not have this in common. This means a front room that houses no tangle of game controllers protruding from the television. There’s no room in the whole house possessing a heaving black box of hard drives and whirring fans. This person does not own a USB mouse. This is unfamiliar territory. I am scared.

But I can nonchalantly carry in a netbook. I’m writing this on it right now. It’s an innocent-looking Trojan laptop, a small work machine. It’s no use for gaming. It’s sneered at by the likes of Steve Jobs for its inability to have its screen touched. It is, in fairness, a glorified typewriter. But just maybe…

It continues here.

Second is a review of the new Ace Attorney game, Investigations: Miles Edgeworth. I’ve been fortunate enough to review all five of this series for Eurogamer, and while they’ve astonishingly never managed to improve a single fault with each iteration, each is still a ludicrous joy to play. They’re happiness distilled down to its purest form, then moulded into gaming form. The infectious glee is overwhelming, and it works just as well once more without even mentioning the series’ former protagonist, Phoenix Wright. That starts like this:

I can’t decide which quote to open with. It’s one of these three:

“No one gets away with committing murder in my office! No one!”

“It’s gonna r0x0rz so many b0x0rz.”

“All you have to do is arrest suspicious person after suspicious person. That’s how you eliminate crime from the streets.”

Things might be different as Edgeworth takes the helm, but this is unmistakably an Ace Attorney game. It bubbles with joy, a simmering pot of gleeful happiness. The ridiculous world of outlandish characters, crazed enthusiasm and peculiar passion continues, despite this latest game being even more heavily focused on the topic of murder.

And you can read the rest here.