About
This is where I basically write about my gaming life, what I’m playing, what I’m reading on other sites, what I’m thinking etc. So expect to see informal reviews, news, opinion and good deals I see for buying new games in the UK (yeah, I’m a Brit). Review wise it will be PC centric with a bit of 360 and occasionally something on the DS because those are the platforms I own but I’ll touch on the news from all the major non-phone platforms because I’ll although I’m a massive PC fanboy I’m also interested in other platforms, basically if I find it interesting and gaming related then I’ll throw it up here. I also intend to do something like a quarterly system building round-up, basically I’ll imagine I was building a new PC and go through my method of choosing hardware parts and give you my recommendations.
The site is named The New Flesh after the famous last line from the incredible David Cronenberg film ‘Videodrome’: “Long live the new flesh.” I’ve always thought the new flesh concept applies far better to videogames then video. The concept of new flesh in Videodrome was largely a fiction unless you count how Brian O’Blivion “lived” on after death where as with computers some people are already leading large parts of their life through video, for some avatars are in a very real sense the new flesh so I’m stealing the concept because it’s damn cool and it applies. Also thenewflesh.co.uk wasn’t taken.
I also think it will some day be possible to live indefinitely through transferring a functional copy of ones brain to a computer system so eventually people will actually kill the old flesh and become entirely digital beings. Of course that has little to do with computer games now but they are undoubtedly connected if only in the fact that computer games play an important role in providing economic support for hardware development so the more games we play the closer we come to immortality.
Now you might be wondering what the heck Persus-9 is, well I can’t tell you because if I did it would be a massive spoiler for a book you probably haven’t read and I’d recommend that you do it’s called ‘A Maze of Death’ by Philip K. Dick. Anyway I got it form that book but I’ve sort of adopted it as a handle and I also like to think of it as the name of my artistic movement but I’m the only member of my artistic movement and I don’t really move much so… Anyway, some day I’ll write the Persus-9 manifesto on persus-9.co.uk. I’ll also probably move this blog to a different domain from my vanity domain, until then just enjoy the posts and try not to think about it.
I suppose you might want to know a little about me. I’m not a journalist by trade, in fact I don’t have a trade. I’ve worked as a computer technician but my training is as a philosopher. My background in games writing runs roughly as follows. I fell in love with computer games at an early age, I still remember the first moment I saw one, the game was “Codename Droid: Strykers Run, Part 2″ on our brand new BBC and I must have been about five years old. I never got very far with it, I was a bit rubbish back then and “Strykers Run”, as I used to call it, is a pretty unforgiving game for someone of that age but it sowed the seed.
I first wrote anything about computer games about 10 years later in 1998, I wrote guides to Worms 2 on my first ever website. Worms 2 was the first game I played online, each Saturday I used to get my £2 pocket money and give almost all of it right back a few hours later having spent it at 1p per minute play dial-up Worms 2. It was also the first game I was ever actually good at. I was good at it because for some reason most of the obsessive types who developed insane levels of skill went off and played Roper and B&G games, utterly boring invented games involving messing about with either the ninja rope or bazookas and grenades and that left a niche for people such as myself who were of average skill but interested in the tactics of the game itself to become the true masters of the game and defeat the people who had become obsessed with skill when we faced them in a fair fight. However after I had to dissolve my clan to focus on my A-levels I didn’t write anything substantial about gaming until I arrived at university and tried to become a computer games reviewer for the university paper, that ended rather quickly after I realised the editor would never publish anything I’d written because we had completely different attitudes to games journalism. I figured that people could get the basic facts about any game by checking the official website so the couple of hundred words we had should be used to give an indication of the experience of playing the game and whether it was actually any good, the editor on the other hand seemed to think we should simply plagiarise whatever was written on the game’s official website.
Now I’ve decided to have another crack at it. Not with any expectation of success or readers but because deep down I love it and spending hours writing on my own site seems far more worthwhile then spending that time commenting on Eurogamer or wherever. It at least leaves something to point to and say “I did that.”
