Hello and welcome to Dominik’s Little Old Purple Column the 40th of its kind, the one where I forgot to write an intro and didn’t realise it til I went to record the audio so this is all you get I’m afraid. Well this… and the theme tune!
(If you be using your ears in an audio podcast fashion.)
It’s Guardian Column time again. Yay! If you want to visit the Games section of that fine august journal click on the link below and you will read me waxing lyrical about… guess what? Yes! Apple Arcade.
I guess I’m a casual gamer now – but who cares? | Games | The Guardian
If you haven’t followed my recommendations in the last few months then you really are a silly billy. Give it a go. It really is the best value games subscription available these days. In my HO. That is Humble Opinion, for those consuming the written version of this and think I was referring to my ho. No. Not in 2023. And certainly not in a bit where I am talking about The Guardian.
(PIC: It doesn’t look it. But I really do have fun as casual phone gamer!)
Seeing the latest Guardian Column reminded me of some interesting chat on my Twitter feed after my last column in there about playing Super Bomberman with my son Charlie at Christmas. A comment from the official Arcade Paradise account no less (which was probably the only game released in 2022 for me that came close to Marvel Snap in terms of “oh my God just five more minutes of this please!”) read as follows:
David - who goes by the twitter handle @beardyweird (and I checked his picture and he DOES have a beard, so that is half that question answered) - wrote: “I played too much Skyrim and when I saw the shadow of a bird flying overhead my first thought was "Dragon!"
Luke Morris goes by the twitter handle @hamsteroffury for some reason. I looked at his picture and it portrayed neither hamsters or fury, just as well because hamsters are a bit of a sore point in this column. For traumatic pet death reasons you will have to be a paid subscriber with access to the archive to seek out. Anyway @hamsteroffury wrote:
“After playing Mirror's Edge a lot I started looking out for red blocks, ladders etc around the city as if I was planning to parkour my way around like in the game (fortunately I didn't go quite that far). It was weird.”
Also bizarrely my spellcheck tried to correct @hamsteroffury to the word … er… counteroffer. What in the actual name of fuck is that about?
And Pablo5 who perhaps most interestingly goes by the twitter handle @pablo567 said, “This is actually a real condition known as the Tetris effect. It's part of a wider group of Game Transfer Phenomena where the brain gets so used to game related stimuli that they creep into your perception of the real world.”
I’m not sure I have ever gone through that except for time when I would play FIFA and then watch a real game of footy and I would feel myself trying to control the players on the real game as if I was playing FIFA. Especially with free kicks and corners. When they took a corner I would wonder why the guy I was aiming for wasn’t connecting with a header. And then I realised it’s because this was the real world and real footballers weren’t as good at the real game as I was on a… er… completely unreal video game. Or something like that.
I would LOVE to hear any examples YOU have of Game Transfer Phenomena and I’ll get into this more in next week’s column podcast colcast. Also what is the worst spellcheck/autocorrect shite YOU have had to put up with? Anything as crazy as trying to change HamsterofFury to Counteroffer? Or maybe it was the same thing. In which case why were YOU writing about hamsters and fury? I’d love to know THAT as well.
Unfortunately you can only use the Domments Section if you are a PAID PAL subscriber. Is this a cynical way to try and get some of you fee subscribers to hand over what is less than a quid a week for a version of this five times as long? No. Don’t be daft. I like working for nothing. Kidding.
This week the full version includes why I really really really did NOT like episode 3 of The Last of Us, how my latest favourite game has triggered memories of the funniest video game of all time but I wonder if it was only funny because of the state I used to be in when I played it, more hilariously naughty fun with creating character names in games and stuff about technology and pants. Yes. Technology. And pants. All of that after the jump for you PAID PALS otherwise that is it for the free teaser this week. Until next Thursday keep it little keep it old keep it purple.
(BONUS PIC: Just a taste of what’s to come in this week’s edition of FUN WITH CREATING NAMES IN VIDEOGAMES WITH DOMINIK DIAMOND!)
Dominik's Little Old Purple Column #40 FREE TEASER