Author Archives: Mark Cullinane

About Mark Cullinane

Mark is founder of the gaming blog No Added Sugar (noaddedsugar.ie), a multiformat games site that focuses on intelligent, saccharine-free videogames writing.While he's new to the scene at Culch.ie, he's been writing about videogames for all of his adult life, and quite a bit before that too, contributing to various print and online publications.

Review: Heavy Rain (PS3)

  By Mark Cullinane | March 11, 2010 - 12:12 am | Featured Post, Games, The Culch
3 Comments

Videogames have aspired to be ‘like films’ for as long as I’ve played them. Back in the early 90s, Hollywood movies were exciting, sexy, glamorous, culturally accepted-everything that videogames weren’t. A lot has changed since then, of course, with videogaming staking a strong claim as the mode of entertainment of choice of the noughties, for part of the populace at least. Yet, for all the progress videogames have made at winning the hearts and minds of modern media-saturated audiences, many in the industry still have one eye cocked at the multiplexes, wistfully watching on in jealousy. And whilst I’ve always found this penchant a little tiresome, Heavy Rain is, by my estimation at least, the climax of the quest that began in 1983 with the seminal Dragon’s Lair- at least until the next one. Its legacy to gaming, however, is not entirely straightforward.

Review: Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (Wii)

  By Mark Cullinane | February 16, 2010 - 1:05 pm | Games, The Culch
1 Comment

This Wii re-imagining of that ‘other’ classic Japanese survival horror series wastes little time in demonstrating that it’s a little bit special. What’s this- detailed, smooth graphics? Precise motion controls? Sky-high production values? It’s not hard to see why our interest was piqued. Whilst we’re usually more than a little sceptical of any game or movie that attempts a ‘re-imagining’ of previous series entries, it’s a term that fits particularly well here. After all, not only is this a game that has been radically shaped around its lead platform, it comes from a new development team- UK-based codeshop Climax rather than Konami- and its adoption of a fresh new approach to horror that is more psychological than survival, conspire to make Shattered Memories an intriguing prospect.

No Added Sugar: Push The Button

  By Mark Cullinane | February 5, 2010 - 5:14 pm | Games, The Culch
3 Comments

Doesn’t anyone else find Apple supremely irritating? Sure, their products typically exhibit the cutting edge in industrial design, and their user interface design prowess is famously unrivalled. Yet, call me a curmudgeon, a Free Software communist, or just a sore loser, but given the restrictive choices that Apple products typically offer-our way or the highway- I choose the highway every time. It’s not just the way that the company exerts paranoid control over its products through its insistence on closed software ecosystems; or the way that they thumb their nose at established computing standards in favour of proprietary alternatives. Hell, it’s not even the infamous ‘Apple Tax’ which sees Apple product users pay exorbitant prices for basic accessories like adapters and cables, as well as the computers themselves. What really gets my goat is the religious fervour that greets Apple product launches, where Apple’s well-oiled hype machine has the world’s … There’s more →