Games – A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Itsy bitsy spider women and giant policemen

Aug 24, 2025Aug 24, 2025MattLeave a comment

Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

Vengeance is a dish best served over many episodes: in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Melanie writes about the rather dark familial goings-on in the Chinese historical drama The Glory.

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Is this the real life? Knit’s Island (2023)

Aug 23, 2025Aug 23, 2025MattLeave a comment

So many video games are about escapism – but this doesn’t mean that the worlds we escape into when we play are necessarily better worlds than the one we inhabit. No, when we pick up that controller, we often find ourselves in situations that are brutal, life-or-death: warfare, disaster, the apocalypse. It’s therefore not surprising that perhaps the most common player interaction in games is killing – or its flip side, dying. Obviously, though, that’s partly beside the point: in a virtual world, death means very little, whether you’re the one doing the dying or the one who’s killing. One Nazi, zombie, mutant less – or, if it’s the Nazi, zombie or mutant who won that particular fight, you reload and get another chance at killing rather than being killed. The worlds we escape to may not be better than ours, but they’re exciting, and the reversibility of death is obviously a plus.

But is this all these worlds can be: places where we either kill or die, over and over?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Ae you trying to seduce me?

Jul 13, 2025Jul 13, 2025MattLeave a comment

How do the films we watch as children affect our taste as adults? And what if we don’t really watch children’s films when we’re growing up, but instead our parents take us to see Amadeus or The Last Emperor? Matt has a thought or two on these questions.

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They create worlds: This game belongs in a museum!

Jul 12, 2025Jul 12, 2025MattLeave a comment

One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

There are a number of films that have been immensely influential on video games. Their thumbprints can be found all over gaming. An obvious example of this is Aliens; even beyond actual adaptations of the IP, you find the trope of space marines fighting insectoid xeno creepy-crawlies on hostile planets again and again – and sometimes, ironically, it’s the literal, licensed Aliens spin-offs that are among the games worst at replicating the Aliens playbook, more so than the games that are basically Aliens with the registration number filed off.

Another one of the clear inspirations for many games are the Indiana Jones films. It’s a perfect match, really: Indy makes for an appealing character type that gamers would want to play, there’s the appeal of mysterious legends and foreboding ruins, and the films are even structured in ways that lend themselves to being translated into the gaming medium: find artefact A, which opens door B, behind which there’s puzzle C, and so on, leading to legendary MacGuffin Z. Cue end credits.

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They create worlds: Game over, man! Game over!

Apr 12, 2025Apr 12, 2025MattLeave a comment

One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

In the 1980s and 1990s, video game adaptations of films and TV series were a staple of gaming – or, more precisely, they were a staple of bad gaming. Especially in the ’80s, a video game adaptation usually didn’t look, sound or play much like the movie it was adapting, other than a tinny, chiptune rendition of the main theme. (Sometimes we got lucky, as with Ghostbusters, which would shout a scratchy sampled “Ghostbusters!” and laugh maniacally at the player in the same scratchy voice.) And the gameplay? It’d just be a basic take on a genre that was easily imitated: the side-scrolling shoot’em up or the platformer. Those pixels looking faintly like a human being? They’re Arnold Schwarzenegger killing bad guys. That blocky car-looking thing? That’s your Ferrari Testarossa, you’re Sonny Crockett, and the other cars you’re pursuing in a crude top-down depiction of a city supposed to be Miami, they’re the drug dealers you’re trying to catch. ‘Drive’ your ‘car’ into their ‘cars’ and your score goes up. You’re living the life of a screen hero.

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They create worlds: Walkabout Mini Golf

Jan 25, 2025Jan 25, 2025Matt2 Comments

One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

When I started getting into Virtual Reality with the release of the first consumer-grade Oculus Rift in 2016, the kind of games I was expecting I’d eventually play in VR were ones where I’d sit in the cockpit of a spaceship, plane or racing car, or where I’d run around exploring mysteries and fighting or evading enemies. I expected games that were pretty much like what I’d been playing on PC for decades, just more immersive, more focused on the experience of being there, in the virtual world.

What I didn’t expect: that some of my favourite VR experiences by far would be hanging out with friends and trying to get a small ball to go in a smaller hole.

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That was the year that was: 2024

Dec 30, 2024Dec 29, 2024Matt2 Comments

Ever since the pandemic, time feels like it’s been broken. Looking back at the films and TV series I’ve watched this year, the games I’ve played, and whatever else I did over the last 12 months, my most frequent reaction is “That happened this year?!” The temporal shape of things has been out of whack for a while, and it sometimes feels like this is getting worse – like we’re all stuck in one of the trippier episodes of Star Trek. Though I think it’s time to be honest about this: in part that’s also because I am approaching the big Five-Oh (and no, I’m not talking about Hawaii). This is my last New Year’s post before finishing my half-century, and that is a pretty freaky thought.

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They create worlds: Still Wakes the Deep and the limits of realism

Jul 13, 2024Jul 13, 2024Matt1 Comment

One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

Still Wakes the Deep is a recent horror game made by the developer The Chinese Room, who had previously released two games I’ve written about, Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (the latter of which I wrote an entry in this series about). While the staff turnover at The Chinese Room has resulted in a company that looks very different from the one that made these earlier games, Still Wakes the Deep nonetheless carries the DNA of earlier titles by the developer; perhaps many of the people working at The Chinese Room these days were inspired by the likes of Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture to apply at the company.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: My, xenomorph, what big teeth you have!

Jun 9, 2024Aug 11, 2024The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Sometimes it’s the diamonds in the rough of any medium that prove to be the most memorable – or so Matt argues in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees.

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They create worlds: Like a Thief in the night

Jun 8, 2024Jun 8, 2024Matt3 Comments

One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

Like most people who’ve been playing video games for a long, long time, I like a good first-person shooter. I still remember the excitement of playing Wolfenstein 3D, and then later Doom and Quake. There were 3D environments before these, but they popularised them, while also driving the hardware evolution that, some 30-odd years later, would see graphics cards that do real-time raytracing. (If you have no idea what any of this means, don’t worry: it’s not what the post will be about.)

But while it’s fun to run around a 3D environment wielding a gun and shooting baddies, those aren’t my favourite first-person games. Give me a choice between running around, guns blazing, enemies falling left, right and centre, and sneaking around in shadows and biding my time, and it’s usually the latter that appeals most.