This is a barely legible meditation of how chasing Hollywood audience and Hollywood dollars (but without having the advantage of Hollywood accounting) is absolutely killing AAA games. At this rate, there won’t be any left mid-next generation. Remember, you read it here first.

In the story of the week last week, the biggest story is that the story became its own story. Confusing? Possibly, but this is exactly why it serves as an awesome way to describe gaming culture in a nutshell: nerds debating tiny, insignificant details that make no sense whatsoever to people from the outside looking in and then succeeding in blowing the debate up so thoroughly that real people were definitely injured in making of this video… or news story… or opinion column, whatever.

So, everybody and their dog got themselves a Playstation Vita. Which of course makes no sense. Dogs, unlike cats are absolutely terrible at videogames and my neighbour’s German shepherd while pretty talented in some other fields (like barking and shitting in the street) never won a single Street Fighter match against me. And I let the stupid animal play as Ken, for crying out loud!!!

I have owned the newest Nintendo’s handheld console for a little more than a week.  Here’s what it inspired in me…

I thought Steerpike’s post about Madness as presented in cinema and in games was asking all the right questions but offering precious little in the way of answers. Since my wife instructed me to do the weekly house cleaning before running off to a beauty parlour, I thought there was nothing more logical than to ignore her wishes and try to analyze what exactly we mean when we say “madness” and how come it almost …

. . Having played through the opening five hours of Mass Effect 2 and No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, two hot off the presses sequels to relatively popular franchise starters I was alternately in tears and in fits of laughter. Something is wrong here. Something is wrong with the media of games and I am not sure it will be fixed unless we take a critical view followed by a stand. Do we still …

But in the meantime, while most of you are trying to alternately kill yourselves with drinking and resurrect yourselves from a killer hangover, I will turn back and look on 2009, trying to figure out what it is that people will remember it by once it is gone. When I say “people” I mean “me”, of course.

Yesterday Steerpike wrote a thoroughly enjoyable take on Electronic Arts going back to its evil ways, but in all the fuss and rightful condemnation we shouldn’t be forgetting that there are other players in this game too and that they’d like a minute under the spotlight as well.

So, the biggest title this season finally drops. The successor to 13-million-strong-in-sales Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is finally out, sans the Call of Duty prefix, marking a true beginning to a new IP and, possibly the birth of yet another gaming related but general-population-targeting controversy. Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or failing to read Tap-Repeatedly) in the last couple of weeks, you are aware just what we’re talking about here. In one …

  As I am not too sure how I would do a review of a free, Internet-based game that strokes both my basest gaming urges and my basest sexual urges, I decided to forego a classic form of a review and just do a freeform take on Taboo Snaps, a game that tickles and giggles amusingly but never strays towards uncomfortable.

So, I’m a bit of an arachnophobe. I spotted a spider making its way from my living room’s ceiling to my living room’s floor the other day and while I managed to throw it out the window eventually, it involved a lot of screaming and panicked jumps all over the room. To be clear here: I don’t hate spiders. I don’t kill spiders, ever. I merely don’t want them near me. Surely, that is not …

Call them addictive or don’t, but games have the power to enthrall like nothing else on earth.

Review by Meho Krljic Fighting games are back. Technically they never went away and yet this is exactly the year in which we can talk about their return. They came, they saw, they smashed. Living to see such high profile releases as the PC port of Street Fighter IV reminds me that despite what Slipknot say, all hope is not gone. Join us today in reviewing three recent fighters: Street Fighter IV (PC), King of …

I can’t decide whether I was mad or overjoyed while making points in this barely readable piece of stream-of-consciousness thinking that tries to connect the dots between amateur anthropology,  Japanese fighting games, career advancement tips and beating people up in real life. Since there are repeated mentions of a certain character trait that is for some reason associated with a certain part of a human body, click on the ‘continue’ button only if you’re not …

Review by Meho Krljic NyxQuest: Kindred Spirits Developer Over the Top Publisher Over the Top Released 16 June, 2009 Available for Wii (WiiWare) Time Played Six hours (but I am really slow) Verdict: 4/5 Thumbs Up “Being the goddess of night sucks when you’re up against an angry Sun. But it makes for lovely platform gaming.”