Portland, Oregon fiction writer, writing professor, and gamer, Tom Bissell, was interviewed in my local alternative weekly concurrent with the release of his book, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. It’s a long, rambling interview that touches on, among other things, why Portal is so important, why most game reviews aren’t very good and how …
How do you solve the problem of updating one of the most revered console franchises of all time and making it relevant for a whole new generation of consoles and gamers? Personally I’d suggest the best way would be to just not bother, avoiding desecrating the memory in the process, but Activision would clearly disagree. …
Since the dizzying heights of my birthday post about a month ago I’ve changed my mind on the name of this musical interlude featurette. The phrase “I can feel the epicness flowing through my balls” did originally make me laugh, but now… now it’s just a questionable YouTube comment. I feel so dirty. Anyway, since …
I take back what I said about Steam being evil because it made me buy Alpha Protocol. How can you hate Valve? Those guys crack me up. Big outlets (read: not us) got an announcement today, regretfully informing them that the Portal 2 event at E3 was canceled. But as is always the case with …
Based on yesterday’s flurry of bad press for Obsidian’s new Spy-PG, I’d decided to contradict myself (when I said I would buy regardless of reviews on account of Chris Avellone’s penmanship) and hold off on Alpha Protocol. After all, I still haven’t finished Final Fantasy XIII or Mass Effect 2 or Metro 2033 or Splinter …
GamesBrief ran a piece last week with the somewhat hysterical title “Five Reasons why Steam will Destroy the PC Games Industry.”
In a word: it’s a monopoly. Or it’s fast becoming one. And monopolies, historically, are dangerous, regardless of industry.
Lewis Denby has written an interesting piece for his column over at GameSetWatch about the way in which we engage with games and more specifically the nature of embodying player characters. The article came about after he attended and contributed to a discussion on video game narrative held by Kieron Gillen at GameCamp in London …
…And gave it a respectable 7/10, complaining about the game’s overall lack of polish and balance while complimenting its ability to keep you playing despite these issues. Obsidian Entertainment has never been great at polish; the company is much more about design and writing than technology, but they’re nowhere near as bad as Troika used …
There’s a rumor – thanks 1UP – that a PS3-based, high-def collection of famed games Ico and Shadow of the Colossus will appear sometime in 2011, like the recent God of War HD collection. No official announcement has been made, but as 1UP points out, it would make fiscal sense for Team Ico to release …
In what could quite easily be a direct follow up to our last Wow, I Was NOT Expecting That post, Sony have finally placed an official rubber stamp of confirmation on Killzone 3, to the surprise of just about nobody. Indeed, there are more than a handful of parallels to be drawn with this announcement …