Welcome to Digitally Downloaded! We all have stories on how we got into games. For some, it was right back in the days of Atari. For others, later to the party, Mario 64 might have been the game that got them going. For me, it was the original Game and Watch games. My father did a lot of travel for business when I was little. The tradition was, he would bring me back a little handheld game. That naturally led to the Game Boy, and handhelds have been a major part of my gaming life ever since. Even now I spend far more time playing games on the iPad than anything else. But for all those years and for all the games I’ve played, I’ve never seen the games industry resolve itself with my other major passion - table top games. There’s been attempts, sure, but no game has come close to the freedom of the ‘real’ Dungeons and Dragons or other pen-and-paper RPGs.
Digitally Downloaded team Editor-in-chief Matt Sainsbury (matts@digitallydownloaded.net) Contributing writers: Owen Sainsbury Domagoj Saric Aidan Broadbent Clark Anderson Jason Micciche Chris Ingram Nick Jewell Arnar Leví Zane Metcaff Please direct all correspondence and advertising queries to: advertising@digitallydownloaded.net
And the attempt to bring tabletop strategy gaming to the videogame world? The niche guys give it a go, sure, but it’s long gone from the board discussions of the major players. And it’s looking like it never will happen. The RPG, the strategy game, even the puzzler; those games of careful consideration thought and reflection have over time been replaced by a desire to appease the action-hungry Call of Duty fanatics. Careful plotting, turn based strategising and watching your back and supply lines has been replaced by button mashing, single character control (remember when you’d control a party of heroes in Final Fantasy, rather than one at a time?) and hyperspeed Tetris clones. I’m getting nostalgic here, but that’s the purpose of this issue. The whole Digitally Downloaded team has very fond memories of their early gaming years, and as awesome as some modern games are, those nostalgic rose-tinted glasses will never be bettered.
Matt Sainsbury Editor-in-chief
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