I’ve been a gamer since I was a little girl. It all started in the early ’90s with my uncle’s Amiga 500+ and Lemmings, Rainbow Islands, Eric Chahi’s Another World* and a Viz game that I was forbidden to play because it was too rude for my little ears. But I played it anyway while my parents where asleep. Because I was a rebel.

I don’t have a favourite game or genre and I don’t believe anybody truly can. My passion is for the overall experience. The world must make me want to explore it and the engine must allow it. Games are in a unique position to immerse you in ways books and films can only dream of and nothing ruins the experience quite like having that immersion broken, be it by bugs, instability, restrictive or counterintuitive controls and combat, limited movement or a boring aesthetic. The games I tend to heap the most praise on in that respect are FEAR 2, Beyond Good & Evil, Metro 2033 and Half-Life² (and Episode 2 in particular) while the franchise that has consistently delivered is Tomb Raider.

You won’t find opinions on the latest titles here (DRM related rants excluded) because I never buy games when they’re first released. For one thing, I can’t afford release prices but even if I could, I wouldn’t pay them. Games companies never wait for a game to be stable before releasing and I refuse to pay full price for something that doesn’t work properly. So I wait until every patch that’s going to be released, has been released.

You can get a better sense of my overall tastes from my Steam and Playfire profiles or the Game Girls page in the Dollhouse.

Crafting Worlds

I’m still fairly new to this RPG lark but my Character Creation addiction is now well established. I can easily spend as much time on a CC Screen as the game itself. I mean sure, my female characters invariably end up as pale skinned redheads (what’s the point of playing an RPG if you aren’t going to live out a few fantasies?) but there’s more to Character Creation than colouring; just because Commander Shepard looks hot as hell in the CC Screen doesn’t mean her** face won’t go all wonky in conversations. It really is a lot of work.

Aside from that I love the idea of being able to apply my own moral compass to a character I’m controlling. That’s the real point after all. Not the CC Screen.

When the pages listed below become active they’ll include character bios, headcanon, face codes/head morphs (Mass Effect only) and details of any mods used.

• Fallout 3/New Vegas – my Lone Wanderer and Courier are the same person
• Mass Effect

*Which if you’ve never played (shame on you), is available on GOG and Steam so you’ve no excuse

**I’ve established Shepard firmly as a “her” because none of my attempts at BroShep have ever made it past his first trip to the Citadel – dude’s fuck ugly and creepy with it no matter what I do. Besides, it’s Jennifer Hale!