The Cartridge Thief Blog

  With the recent success of Bethesda's Starfield reaching 10 million players, I’ve found myself confronted once again by the concept of in-game text. Words appear in many forms across the landscape of gaming. More specifically though, I’m concerned with optional informative texts, the kind that are designed to tell you more about a game’s world or the characters within it.  (Image property of Bethesda Softworks) In the case of many Bethesda games like Starfield and Skyrim , they like to do this through straightforward in-game books that you can pick up and read. For me, these have always been like sandpaper for the eyes telling me oodles and oodles of information in an impenetrable medieval font-type about characters I’d never heard of before who have little to nothing to do with the main plot. This is partly an RPG thing because there will always be some players that like to role-play as homeless librarians who have to pick up every discarded cigarette packet in case it re...

 I’ve never done a review on this blog before and not for no reason. There are so many different reviewers out in the world that, I figure, if you need one for a game then there are plenty of places to get a good fix. For me, drilling down into one specific element of a game and what makes and breaks it is far more fertile ground for discussion, so I usually end up focusing on that. That being said, at time of writing, To Hell With The Ugly has a grand total of 56 Steam reviews and only a handful of YouTube playthroughs and trailers to its name. The game isn’t so much underexposed as it is buried alive under fifty feet of mud and radioactive toenail clippings. For me, this came as a surprise when I first started playing because To Hell With The Ugly might be one of the most interesting games to talk about that I’ve played this year. (Image property of La Poule Noire and ARTE France) Spoiler Warning: Vague spoilers for To Hell With The Ugly.  I will be talking about...

 Over the years, games have supplied us with a wide variety of intimidating and powerful enemies to challenge our button-mashing prowess. Under normal circumstances, you would expect to overcome these enemies through your overwhelming cunning, wit and strength before finishing them off with an honourable death as a mark of respect for the challenge they gave you. However, some games like to throw common courtesy out the window and encourage you to finish off your rivals in the most underhanded, hilarious and humiliating ways possible. Here are five of the most outlandish times that we dealt our enemies the least honourable deaths possible to assert our dominance, I guess... 1) Hitman -  Killed with expired spaghetti by a flamingo. The World of Assassination  trilogy of Hitman  games provides you with an incalculable variety of tools for assassinations. You can kill your targets with knives, guns, bricks, bombs and occasionally, each other. However, by far the most em...