X-Wing doesn’t have a tutorial, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t teach you how to play.

Half a dozen invaluable LucasArts classics hit GOG late in October, which, at least in the world as I perceive it, would be internet-shattering news had it not happened the same day that Marvel announced the whole of Phase 3.  So I’ve been playing a lot of X-Wing these last few weeks, because even though TIE Fighter is better I felt like starting at the beginning.

I had hoped that I would be able to get these The Longest Journey pieces out a bit before Dreamfall Chapters released, but as it turns out The Longest Journey is…well…long.  But I still managed to finish my replay of Dreamfall: The Longest Journey one night in advance of the release of its sequel.  For better or worse, it was much as I remembered.

It was with no small amount of relief that I decided not to write this piece as a review.  At first I thought maybe I would, but I realized, quickly, that I might not like what I had to say in it – not always.  Not everything.

From the beginning, The Wolf Among Us struck me as easier to recommend than The Walking Dead, functionally its nearest counterpart, because it isn’t so relentlessly bleak.  With the first season now concluded, I think it may just be Telltale’s best season to date.

While the gameplay itself offers much to enjoy,
the real treat is in the aesthetics.
Child of Light is a fairy tale rendered
in watercolor, and darkly poetic.

Ground Zeroes sold me on The Phantom Pain.

For a small segment of the internet population, April 20, 2014, was the end of the world.

I played Avengers Alliance on Facebook back when it was new in 2012, but only for a little while.  I returned to it in early March, curious to see if it was even still around, and found the game to be much expanded, with many new characters and features that improved upon it.  Clearly, it had continued to be healthy in my nearly two years of absence.  I played on Playdom.com this time, which was separate from Facebook, and allowed you to easily friend other players in the local chat rather than spam everyone you know on the internet to try to get them to commit to a game so they can give you free stuff.

I liked it.  But you know what they say about all good things.

I read comics. I also tend to draw certain comparisons between the comics industry and the video game industry, whether it’s their history of being accused of corrupting their consumers through violent content, or the general stigma of being “kids’ stuff” despite all evidence to the contrary.

And like video game players, comic readers – certainly those that consider themselves fans – tend to be very passionate about the medium and the characters and creators they follow. It’s easy still to discount comics as all capes and costumes, if you’re on the outside, because that’s still where the money (relatively speaking) is, and that’s what gets made into movies. But as a medium, comics host many nuanced and personal stories across all genres, things that speak to readers in ways that stuff with a higher budget – television or movies, say – often cannot afford in their quest to appeal to the broadest audience possible.

But hey, there’s nothing wrong with superheroes, either; Marvel, in their new Ms. Marvel ongoing, has recently premiered a title character who is an American Muslim teenager, the daughter of Pakistani immigrants.  How many places in American culture, even now, can you find that very real part of the American population represented, much less in a positive, leading role?

Regrettably, though, I’m not compelled to write this because of my favorite media moving forward.  I’m compelled to write this because of my favorite media being held back.

I thought Arkham Origins was good, even if it fell short of its predecessors.  Tough acts to follow.  In true internet form, of course, the narrative quickly became that Origins was hugely disappointing.  Things are either a huge success or a monstrous failure these days, I suppose.

Of course, many – myself included – point at the decision to take Rocksteady off the series and instead develop Origins in-house at Warner Bros. Games Montreal.  This seemed like the usual corporate tomfoolery that, at a certain point, we’ve all come to expect when a big publisher has a killer franchise on their hands, abandoning the studio that had forged a path and counting on name recognition to continue to move copies.  This – coupled with the fact that Origins was a prequel – felt particularly egregious, considering the conclusion of Arkham City.

Rocksteady was mum for a while on what they were doing instead of a third Arkham game.  It turns out that what they were doing was the fourth Arkham game.

Much has been said about Double Fine’s Broken Age.  Maybe because it’s Tim Schafer’s first point-and-click adventure game since 1998’s Grim Fandango.  Maybe because it’s a huge Kickstarter success story, earning well over $3 million by the end – one million of that in the first day – after only asking for $400,000.  Maybe because of the near-catastrophic announcement last year that development on Broken Age was behind schedule and over budget, enough that hitting their original release goal would require cutting 75% of the game.

…a distillation of everything Naughty Dog has come to do so very right.

There is a lonely house to the south of Hyrule Castle, perplexingly positioned atop a small hill for no apparent reason other than its fairly central location in the realm.  The house has been there for at least two hundred years. It is not obviously part of Kakariko Village, to the west, nor is it, in any special way, associated with Hyrule Castle itself – although its occupants tend to end up there in times of need.

It’s that time of year again.  A time for quiet reflection.  A time for looking ahead.  A time for staying up super late and celebrating solar mechanics.  Most importantly, though, it’s a time for reminding ourselves of some awesome games we played in the last 365 days – measured in the gaming world as “the time between the releases of Retro City Rampage and Dr. Luigi.”

Some years there are games that characterize my gaming experience.  That sum up everything that was most memorable about that year in gaming.  Other years, like this one, it’s hard to point at any one title or experience.  This last year was, for me, more of a tidal shift.  I’m a lot more of an indie player than I was twelve months ago (though that’s a highly relative thing).  For probably the first year ever, the pinnacle of my gaming experience didn’t come (at least not definitely so) from a console release from a major publisher.  That’s not to say I’m shelving my PS3 and swearing off the AAAs, but the reality of how much they’re losing their power really struck home for me personally, rather than just academically, in 2013.

Maybe this is a curse of third Batman things: Arkham Origins is to the Arkham series what The Dark Knight Rises is to Christopher Nolan’s trilogy: the biggest, but probably the weakest, of a series of very good things. Arkham Origins is objectively a pretty good game, but that mostly comes from what it preserves from its predecessors, because it makes very few attempts at expanding that formula.

After playing a bit of Heavy Rain, I would often get on my phone and call a friend who was playing it at the same time.  After verifying how far in we were (speaking in vague terms, so as not to spoil anything), we ravenously compared notes on the latest choices we’d made, why, and what happened as a result.  (“How did you cut off your finger?”) I was nearly as excited to find out what my friends had done differently as I was to progress further in the game.  It’s an urge I get most any time I’ve gotten through a game that confronts me with a meaningful decision.

Beyond: Two Souls never once provoked this feeling in me.