She mixed it up right there in the sink; it smelled like terps and looked like Indian ink...

Potions’, gaming is full of em.

Need to heal a near fatal arrow wound to the chest? There’s a potion for that.

Need run faster than a speeding train? There’s a potion for that.

Need to fly up through the clouds and punch a god to death? Yup, there’s a potion for that.

From MUD to Skyrim, potions are the practical alternative to the graft of first aid training or hitting the gym, and let’s face it, none of us are going to play a game that requires us to take a break from the action to learn CPR in Tamriel or spend 4 days a week at the gym to stave off Nathan Drake’s beer belly.

 

Good god that's a messed up bottle!

Potion of Transmogrification ; Fable 2

Get to the end of fable 2 and earn yourself 1 million gold (or choose to kill your dog and get given it for free- you monster!!!), you can then purchase the HQ of your now dead nemesis, Bowerstone castle.
Hidden under this imposing pile is the alchemy lab of one of the previous residents.
Revealed in several diary entries scattered around the place are the details of his greatest achievement, a potion that lets you permanently change from he to she with one swig from the disturbingly shaped bottle.

Morrowwind, The elder scrolls.

This speed run aiding creation can be knocked together within the first 10 mins of the game.
Once you have used your alchemy skills to create this potion you can take a swig and instantly fly though the clouds, develop super strength and instantly kill the games main big bad and complete the a game that should take dozens of hours in just under 30 mins- check out some of the speed run videos on you tube.

White Radford's decoction ; The witcher.

The witcher games take potions to the next level, the shear verity of mutagens, potions and elixirs you can create is astounding.

This decoction allows bones to mend, flesh to heal and wounds as deadly as a crossbow bolt through the chest to be shrugged off easily.

The creation screen for these potions is quite daunting when you first start, but with miraculous liquids like this one available its well worth the effort!

Pop idle.

I am not a musician, and I have come to the depressing conclusion that I will probably never be a musician. Much like my F1 racing driver and fighter jet pilot fantasies, this is another the musician dreams will probably stay just that, dreams.

However over the years’ technology, games, PC software ad plug in peripherals have given me an all too brief glimpse of a world where I was a club DJ, a rock guitarist or just maybe a writer and composer of complex and beautiful symphonies.

There are the obvious ones, the guitar and band heroes with their plastic guitars and drum kits, the borderline karaoke of sing start and lips and the one step too far of DJ hero- however these are not the ones that stick with me.

 

Rave EJay

 

 

Back when rave was still under a decade old, I made an impulse purchase from a Brighton book shop that was having a closing down sale- it was a game/tool that allowed you to take beats, samples and melodies, stack them horizontally along a scrolling time bar so you could create cut and paste tracks and create and save them in MP3 format.

The fact that you could knock together a simple track in 5 to 10 mins and then spend hours tweaking and adjusting it with new samples, increased or decreased tempo and even record and convert your own samples to use in the program as well.  It was this last feature that kept me coming back to this simple to use sequencer- I spent hours sampling movies, music and even SNES and megadrive sound effects to make increasingly complex and diverse musical tracks.

In the end I moved on to more complex and professional applications, but none matched the fun and accessibility of Ejay.

 

 

Electroplankton    2006 UK

 

Now this is an odd one. It’s not a music design app, it’s not a rhythm action game and it’s not a tech demo- the only way i can describe this weird fish related undersea music mash-up is that it is a collection of noise making, sound distorting beat repeating mini games that have no other function other than to delight you with their short, useless, musical muses.

This was only on the original DS ad took advantage of the mic, duel screens and touch pad to allow you to manipulate sounds you recorded, add beats and create loops and phrases with the help of the afore mentioned plankton .

The really odd thing about this cartridge was there was no way to save the results and no way to use the tools together to create anything but disposable snippets of what could have been. Why the designer ndieszero did not allow the mixing and matching and even eventual saving and storing of the results is unknown, but what we are left with is a spark o genius that could have been so much more.