Posts By: Jim Ralph

Jim Ralph

About Jim Ralph

Jim Ralph currently resides in sunny Winchester, England. He'd love to hear from you, personally, with any thoughts on his writing or lucrative job offers.

5
After a prolonged and ammunition-expensive battle the Big Daddy fell. ‘How the hell are your weapons doing so little damage? And how were his doing so much?’ We quickly came to the answer: I was playing on Hard Mode. He’d played on the game’s default Normal Mode.

Go Hard or Go Home

 in Features by
2
Dark Souls is different, in a hell of a lot of ways, one of which is that its grammar places it firmly in the present tense. In it one can find an acceptance, if not outright encouragement, of the failure state most games seek to rewind and rewrite.

Present Tension

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2
At a pub, among friends, a wave of nausea has hit me. There is no pain as such, but rarely has the word discomfort been so appropriate. It's loud here, all of a sudden, and everyone is standing too close. I grow warm, begin to sweat, my stomach and its assorted, associated tubes feel leaden inside me.

Know Thyself

 in Features by
4
I’ve been read­ing Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, which is a novel about many things, but large­ly about detach­ment and loss. It’s con­cerned with those things which were a part of our world, once, but are not now and can­not be again. In O’Neill’s novel we find Dutch-born Hans van den Broek in the strange and tense set­ting of New York imme­di­ate­ly post‑9/11. Like the New York sky­line, Hans is expe­ri­enc­ing the empti­ness that fol­lows loss, the sen­sa­tion that some­thing is wrong, some­thing is miss­ing. Estranged from the struc­ture and sup­port of fam­i­ly, friends, a home or a pur­pose, Hans is detached from any­thing mean­ing­ful, any­thing […]

Game Changers

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