About

What’s this all about then?

Invert Look is a website by Simon Halliday dedicated to everything about video games.  I write about stuff that I enjoy in gaming and want to share.  Sometimes these take the form of reviews or stories, but mostly it’s my general ramblings and musings.

It’s mostly based around PC gaming as that’s what I’ve grown up with and love.  This is also due to the fact that I don’t own any of the new consoles.  I’ve given my old X-Box 360 to my brother and my PS3 is essentially used for playing Blu-ray these days.

A lot of games are multi-format now though (and have been for a while) so it’s not a biggie really.

Invert Look’s own Twitter account can be found here.

What’s with the name?

Invert Look refers to the optional method of control used in a lot of first person and simulation games.  Pushing the mouse forward causes your character’s head/plane/spaceship/goat, to look/move down, while pulling the mouse back will cause it to look/move up.  It’s kind of counter to how you would expect to control something with a mouse, surely up is up and down is down, right… right..?

So… why the hell would you do that?

I played a lot of simulation games in the late 80s and the early to mid 90s.  Simulations, especially aircraft simulations, were much more popular until they fell off the radar in the late 90s early 2000s (we’re only really just seeing a resurgence in them, most likely due in part to upcoming VR hardware).

Simulations, well they simulate stuff, including controls.  In an aircraft, pushing forward on the stick dipped your craft down, pulling back, pulled up.  I played these for so long that the cognitive process is pretty much hardwired in to my brain, as it is for a lot of gamers who played simulations at that time.

I’m also left-handed which causes even more confusion over my choice of controls.

Hope that clears things up…