Fuck Yeah, Video Games: The Life and Extra Lives of a Professional Nerd – Daniel Hardcastle
As Daniel Hardcastle careers towards thirty, he looks back on what has really made him happy in life: the friends, the romances… the video games. Told through encounters with the most remarkable and the most mind-boggling games of the last thirty-odd years, Fuck Yeah, Video Games is also a love letter to the greatest hobby in the world.
From God of War to Tomb Raider, Pokémon to The Sims, Daniel relives each game with countless in-jokes, obscure references and his signature wit, as well as intricate, original illustrations by Rebecca Maughan. Alongside this march of merriment are chapters dedicated to the hardware behind the games: a veritable history of Sony, Nintendo, Sega and Atari consoles.
Joyous, absurd, personal and at times sweary, Daniel’s memoir is a celebration of the sheer brilliance of video games.
My thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours who invited me to join the blog tour – also to the publishers, Unbound, for my review copy.
First things first…the title. Now I am no prude and, as a person of Scottish persuasion, I throw out expletives like punctuation. But I feel the F-Bomb in the title isn’t really needed and may put some folk off picking up what is actually a good wee book. I hope I am wrong as Hardcastle’s love letter to around 30 years of gaming is well worth your attention. Also when I think about my interactions with gamers on platforms such as Twitter and Mixer – they swear like fuck too so perhaps the swearyness will draw them in.
Fuck Yeah turned out to be a tricky book to review. Not because it is hard to follow or because it is poorly written. It is neither of those things. There are many short sections and bite-sized discussions which make it perfect to pick up and put down. It is well written with many laugh out loud moments. Clearly Hardcastle and I have experienced similar frustrations and enjoyed the same big moments in several games so the personal nostalgia his observations brought ticked all the right boxes for me.
No the problem I had with reviewing Fuck Yeah was that my son decided he wanted to read it too and my book vanished to places unknown whenever I set it down. Sometimes tracking it down was easy. Son would be heard guffawing with laughter and I could trace him that way. Other times he would wander through the house, book in hand, reading sections out loud to me (an audiobook experience that Audible are yet to fully master). The failsafe way of recovering my review copy was to wait for the child to fall asleep and then liberate the book from beside his bed. We got there in the end!
So two generations in the one family have enjoyed (or are still enjoying) Fuck Yeah. Definitely a good sign and reflects well that the selection of games Hardcastle discusses is appreciated by a teenager and a man in his mid 40’s.
Before the book arrived I did wonder how the selection of games the author selected to focus on may fare. Pretty well as it turns out. The games I have played which are discussed are very well covered. My kid has not played most of the games but is currently contemplating picking up one or two of the titles still available on current platforms. Even if I hadn’t played some of the games under discussion Hardcastle’s observations on the titles in question were still enjoyable so my biggest concern over how much I may get from the book were quickly quashed.
In between discussions on particular games are some additional chat points about life in games in general. These were fascinating too. I particularly enjoyed learning how badly Nintendo seemed to have botched the launch of the Wii. Trivia and gaming gems which I have missed over the years made the pages fly by.
When I first heard about Fuck Yeah I thought that’s a book I am definitely going to enjoy. Reader – I was right.
Fuck Yeah, Video Games: The Life and Extra Lives of a Professional Nerd is available in hardback and digital format. You can order a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fuck-Yeah-Video-Games-Professional/dp/1783527870/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1569011760&refinements=p_27%3ADaniel+Hardcastle&s=books&sr=1-1&text=Daniel+Hardcastle
