I knew a little about Fred and Rose West before reading this. I remember seeing the house in Gloucester on the news when I was a child. This book is the first I’ve read about them, it’s written by someone who was a journalist at the time and was reporting on the case. It prominently features extracts of the interviews that Fred West gave to the police during their investigations.
I read this one on a flight to Hong Kong. This is a non-fiction book about a group of libertarians who decide to all move into a particular town and try to collectively get their ideas adopted in its running. They believe that the government, other than in its most core functions such as national defence is a tyranny. They refuse to pay any taxes viewing it as theft, and think nearly all regulations and laws should be repealed. They seem to believe that when they achieve this people will be truly free and come together collectively to build a kind of utopia.
This is an early SNES side-view Shmup. My brother had a copy when I was very young and I loved it. It’s very hard though, and so I never got very far back then. There is a large amount of slowdown as the screen fills with enemies and weapons due to the CPU of the machine being pretty underpowered.
I played this on my Switch 2, after having rented it from Boomerang Rentals. I love the Pikmin series. The first three I found to all be incredibly charming and relaxing. This one is exactly the same in that regard.
This book feels like two stories in one. The first is in what appears to be Russia, which is under strict authoritarian control. Their president effectively lives forever, as when their body dies the consciousness is passed on to another.
This is the original Metroid game for the NES. I loved Super Metroid, and felt like I should go back and finish the original. I’ve played it several times over the years, but have never gotten particularly far. The game is incredibly hard, and does not feature a map like the later sequels.
This is actually two games, which were released separately in Japan. They are a spin off of the Ace Attorney series, set in an alternative Victorian England. You play as a Japanese student who unexpectedly becomes a defence attorney after stowing away on a ship to England to join his friend who was travelling to study the English justice system to help develop the one in Japan.
This is a dystopian novel by Philip K. Dick, which he described as semi-autobiographical. It tells the story of Robert Arctor and his flatmates and friends, who are drug addicts. Most of them are addicted to a drug called Substance D, or death, which deteriorates the user’s brain over time until they lose track of reality.
This game was originally released on the Wii in 2010, and I played it back then. I got very far in, but didn’t finish it. This is the Definitive Edition released on the Switch, which I also played when it was released but never got to the end. This time I thought I’d give it a quick try on the Switch 2 to see what it looks like, and ended up completing the game finally. The game is extremely long. I think the game timer was around 80 hours when I saw the ending, with plenty for me to do in it if I wanted.
This is a 1950s post-apocalyptic novel about everyone in the world other than the protagonist turning into vampires. The main character still lives in his house, and has burnt the surrounding houses to the ground. Each night vampires bang on his walls and call out for him. His neighbour in particular calls for him by name over and over.
This game has a really unique premise. The story begins inside of a children’s book, with you playing a small boy on an adventure to save the kingdom. The thing that is unique is that you can leave the book at points, and enter the 3D world of the child’s desk that the book is placed on. As the game progresses you gain extra powers, including tilting the book to move objects on the pages, turning the pages to go back to earlier parts of the story or placing stamps on the pages to hold things in place.
This is a post-apocalyptic book from 1987 by Robert McCammon. It’s a very long book at nearly 1000 pages, and I think it’s heavily influenced by The Stand by Stephen King which was released a few years before. The apocalypse in this particular story is nuclear war between the US and Russia. Over the first few chapters missiles start flying overhead and destroying the world around the characters we have met.
This is the first PlayStation 5 game I’ve played in ages. It feels like I’ve barely used the console. I did love the small pack-in game though, Astro’s PlayRoom. This is the full game based in that series, and it is excellent. It is absolutely full of joy, graphically beautiful with controls that are just perfect. The game is full of new ideas. Each world and each level is throwing new things at you. For instance, one pick-up gives you frog gloves allowing you to punch enemies from a great distance, and swing off of red surfaces.
I played the reboot game of the same name almost exactly a year ago. I remember this game having significantly less fighting, and more tomb raiding than that one. Turns out my memory is correct, and thankfully so because the fighting is pretty awful here. Despite that this is a great game, it gave me a real sense of adventure trying to navigate my way around the levels.
This is the pixel remaster version of the game. I’ve completed the original version on the NES a long time ago, but this one improves it in several ways. In the original if you target an enemy that another character kills in the same round you miss your attack. In this one your character will hit another enemy instead like the rest of the series. The graphics are completely redrawn, but they are still in a pixel style that keeps the spirit of the original designs.