Author: Christian Donlan

I don’t know if you’ve been for a hike recently, but I often feel like I live each hike twice. There’s the thinking about the hike – planning it, walking through it in my head – and then there’s the actual hike, where shoelaces break, my foot gets stuck in a cattle grate, I…

As Chris Tapsell pointed out a while back, every GTA game is love wrapped in satire. The series seems edgy because the satire is very broad, and often fairly misdirected. But the series sells – and the individual games stick around for so long – because after thirty hours of playing, you’re responding purely…

This week I’ve been re-reading Graeme’s wonderful piece on Iain Banks that we published on Tuesday. I’ve also been thinking about Banks in general, listening to old radio programmes he was on, and wishing that we’d gotten to enjoy his entry on Simon Parkin’s podcast, My Perfect Console. That would have been dream broadcasting. …

Years ago, one of my university lecturers told me that he didn’t really read much that he enjoyed anymore – I suspect he’d been marking one of my essays – but there was a line of poetry he had read the other day that he thought was phenomenal. He then said it out loud,…

As we enter the grey early days of winter, and as I seem to more frequently start each day with a Lemsip wafting restorative lemony goodness next to me, a game that offers the simple pleasures of bright colours and pleasing shapes is worth more and more. Inevitably, then, our game of the week…

I swear that London used to have a palace situated on a bridge. I’ve been googling around this morning and I think I might have been thinking of Nonsuch House, which was on the old London Bridge. Four storeys and built in 1579, I’ve also just learned that Nonsuch House was the first recorded…

Not to brag, but last night I spent a fiver buying the film of A Month in the Country online. It’s the film of J.L. Carr’s miniature masterpiece of a novel about a veteran of the Great War who spends a month restoring a mural in an old church, and it stars cinema’s most…

The game that kicked off Mario’s RPG adventures retains its charm in this cheerful remake. Mario is asleep in bed. It’s a lovely wooden bed with a warm blanket and fat pillows. The bedroom’s a bit odd, though. The room is carved out of rock, and if you were to walk out the…

Something surprising happened when we sat down last week to write about what we wanted to see more of in Grand Theft Auto 6. Two of us, independently, wanted to write about radio stations. If you’ve read the piece you’ll know that Ed wrote a lovely section on his need for an 80s radio…