Who blogs here?

Meet the ladies behind Game Fatale:

Kerry has been hooked on games ever since Granny’s Garden. Her specialist subjects are the Commodore Amiga and point and click adventures, and her secret guilty pleasure is po-faced JRPGs.

A Flash developer by day, Kerry currently divides her free time between her 360, her DS and her impressive collection of emulators. She’s also working on a Flash-based freeware point and click adventure, in the mistaken belief that people still play these things. When she’s not playing games, writing games or thinking about games, she plays bass in Cherry Filth and the Deathlegs and makes beautiful jewellery.

Carrie grew up with a BBC Micro and an Apple Mac which meant that she played (and loved) a lot of obscure text adventures and pixel-ridden platform games that no one else had even heard of. The L Room, Beyond Dark Castle and, later when she got an Amiga, Gauntlet and Wizball are not necessarily up there with Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music in terms of being obscure and cultish, but when everyone else you know has a NES or a Master System they might as well be.

After starting out as an inadvertent indie snob for video games she was saved by the LucasArts point and click adventures (the best one is empirically Grim Fandango), and (when the fifth gen consoles came out) all those games where you can race bizarre vehicles that probably shouldn’t be able to move while firing ridiculous weapons at other players (the Wipeout games, Mario Karts); games where you can kick someone in the knee til they die (Tekkens, Soul Caliburs); and those sweeping RPGs where you play an androgynous boy dragging a sword that’s as big as him for 100 hours (Final Fantasys top three: IX, VII and XII). Despite her obscurist background she will try to avoid calling anything ‘angular’ or ‘esoteric’, and will refrain from pointing out that anyone’s earlier work was good but that their later stuff was too commercial, unless absolutely necessary.

Cara has had a chequered history of flitting between platforms like a cheap roundheels. She ain’t gonna jaw too much about it here, but let’s just say her cherry went with Chuckie Egg and Street Fighter II in the arcade; then the NES brought her Lemmings, Gauntlet II and the fat plumber. She became a PC doll after that, getting her kicks from Doom, GTA and Sim City 2000 (all counterfeit mon cherie) and the first two didn’t stunt her moral growth like they’d have you believe – still hasn’t thrown lead in anyone’s face in RL. She thought Tomb Raider was slick because Croft was a woman who fought dinosaurs (if you lined the damn broad up right); and Dungeon Keeper and Lucasarts point-and-clicks kept her up all hours with their wacky quips. Then Tall Link in Ocarina of Time on the N64 stole the chick’s heart even worse than Ryu and the gameplay was hitting on all eight too. Ever since she’s been happy gum-shoeing anything from an old-school Gameboy to a 360, and the cocktail in her left hand is never happy unless there’s a DS in the right. Just don’t give her an FPS game.

Currently Cara’s ‘The Dame from Kagoshima’, GameFatale’s Japanese correspondent; she’s spent the last year as a Games Tester at Rockstar North, and before that grifted an English Literature degree out of the University of Edinburgh by penning a dissertation based partly on Max Payne. One day she wants to write bad-ass videogame plots and kick it with the literati.