Tap-Repeatedly
Tap-Repeatedly is only electrons.
Tap-Repeatedly is only electrons.
From all of us here at Tap-Repeatedly to all of you out there in the ether, may a joyous yule season be upon you. If you’re not into yule seasons, may a joyous other kind of season be upon you. Perhaps a joyous winter solstice, or a joyous late December. Bear in mind that egg nogg is not – repeat, not – a faith-based beverage.
Once a year, something horrible happens. A cash-draining monstrosity we at Tap-Repeatedly refer to as the Steam Holiday Sale. $60 games for $0.99. Whole bundles – five and six games – for $4.99. And every year we queue up, faces hidden in shame, to buy games we already own, buy games we never intend to play, buy games we don’t even want. And why? Because! We. Just. Can’t. Stop. Ourselves.
Returning to the industrial grime of Killzone 3’s Helghan home world after over 70 hours in the bright clear Middle Eastern maps of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is initially a disorienting experience. Killzone 3, like its predecessor, is a game that at times has an almost suffocating atmosphere. Heavy orange and blue lights punctuate the superbly textured warehouses and military facilities while snow and ash particles continually waft through the landscape…
Though at this point Tap – a multi-national organization – has fewer active American writers than it does those from far-flung realms, we’d nonetheless like to take a moment and wish all our readers a very happy Thanksgiving Thursday. For the majority of the world, it is just a normal day. But it’s the day Americans congregate with relatives they largely despise, consume poorly-prepared turkey with a slurry of bread and spices shoved up its …
Well do I remember the first time I met Ben. I’d written an article semi-attacking Roger Ebert for, you know, being Roger Ebert. And Ben, who’d apparently been a fan of my column, forwarded it to the great man, who in turn wrote me directly, politely agreed to disagree, and CC’d Ben on the missive. Then Ben and I got into email and we had a chance to grab some breakfast together at that year’s Game Developer’s Conference. Since then we’ve made a point to get together at any conferences we’re collectively at; I at least have about 450 pounds of fun when we hang out. Ben started at High Voltage Software, (where he produced Duel Masters), and then to EA (where he served as design director for Def Jam: Icon) to Emergent (where he launched demos showcasing the company’s famous engine GameBryo) to Paramount (where he tried desperately to get Hollywood morons to understand the gaming business), finally to 47Games, where he belongs – which is to say, his own company, a consultancy that will soon hire me focused on maximizing the synergy between games and movies.
I mentioned Ben a couple posts ago, when I wrote about Deadly Premonition. And I meant what I said: never have I known anyone who can disassemble a game experience better. To put it another way, Ben knows what the fuck he is talking about. And while we don’t always agree, one of the many things I love about him is that we both share the slack-jawed glee of loving games, even when we hate them. Ben and I have never had the opportunity to do this, but we could sit at a table, drinking and eating, and talk about games for… hell, 20 hours at least before we lost interest. He’s a good friend and a kindred spirit. You should definitely check out his blog .
Today, he’d like to share with you his thoughts on Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty, a game some of you might have heard of. Take it away, Ben!
As you may have gathered by nothing looking or working as once advertised, Tap-Repeatedly is undergoing a metamorphosis. Largely visual, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, we expect a whole rainbow of problems in the next several weeks. Should you encounter any particularly egregious issues, THEN TOUGH LUCK please email via the link below. Our regular programming will continue during this time. Email the author of this post at admin@tap-repeatedly.com.
Over the next week or so, the gremlins who labor in the lowest depths of the Tap Repeatedly Missile Silo will be performing very routine breakings of the site, followed by standard frantic Skype calls and Staff Forum freakouts. Do not be alarmed by any of these events, which may include sudden visual changes and general peculiarity until all the new machinery has been installed and is working properly. We thank you for your patience!Email …
As some visitors may have noticed, over the past 4-6 days we have been experiencing intermittent timeouts and other bad-kitty behavior, which makes us sad. Please bear with as we work through the problem. If you encounter a timeout or gateway error, just try the site again in a few minutes. Apologies for the inconvenience! A Tap-less existence is a meaningless existence! UPDATE: thanks to one super-heroic MrLipid, we think the problem has been thwarted. …
Tap-Repeatedly will be undergoing some maintenance throughout the weekend. You may encounter odd site behavior – our apologies if you have any problems. Please be patient and pardon our dust.
The forums will be offline for maintenance and software upgrades today. This outage should be brief, but we are attempting to address a fairly major problem on the back end so unexpected surprises and excitement are possible. Stay tuned. UPDATE: forums are back online. Enjoy! UPDATE UPDATE: we are currently looking into a problem with the blog comment system. All will be well presently. UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: some horrible fanged monster has eaten the comment …
From all of us here at Tap-Repeatedly to all of you out there braving the cold to get stranded at an airport in a vain attempt to visit relatives, we wish you warmth and happy times. As usual, things will be quiet around Tap Central Command until after the egg nog hangovers have disappeared, but we look forward to serving up even more of our acerbic brand of wit in 2010. Best wishes!
Hello all, and please welcome back Steerpike’s older and more successful brother as a Celebrity Guest Editor! Marcus Sakey is a famous crime novelist – complete with awards and movie deals – and a wonderful guy to boot. His latest novel, The Amateurs, just came out in early August and is already garnering rave reviews.
Unfortunately the transition from FFC to Tap somehow ate up Marcus’s first Celebrity Guest Editorial, and he graciously offered to do another one. A lifelong gamer like his brother, Marcus is always looking for ways to integrate his beloved hobby with his increasingly complex life. Today he discusses the challenge of finding a good game to share with my kickass sister in law, who is hardly opposed to games but doesn’t find much appealing in the mainstream stuff. Marcus visits Tap often under the moniker “Marquez,” so be sure to leave some comments and suggestions for the lad. Thanks Marcus!
— Steerpike
I’m proud to present our latest Celebrity Guest, Thomas J. Allen, Executive Director of the National Academy of Video Game Testers and Reviewers (NAViGaTR). My first collaboration with Tom was back in 2005, an article on Quality of Life in the games industry, eventually (after after 18 months and 21 drafts) published in Develop Magazine across the pond in Europe. Tom and I have since appeared together on industry panels, collaborated on other articles like this one, and generally created our own brand of trouble. Tom is one of those people with 10-12 wild schemes cooking at once, and I’ve managed to participate in a few of them without losing my life or spotless criminal record.
One of Tom’s many passions is film, so today he presents us with a rumination on what the last few years might have been like had the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which so recently announced that it was switching to ten nominees for Best Picture instead of five, decided to do so earlier. As with our other Celebrity Guests, Tom will hang around for a while to respond to comments. Enjoy!
— Steerpike
FFC fans, please welcome Jason P. Sage as our latest contributor to the Fat Chicks Celebrity Guest Editorial Section. Jason is a hard-working independent developer on the technology and coding side of things. He and I have communicated fairly regularly over the past 12 months, discussing new technologies, the plight and promise of the indie developer, and various other topics. Jason is also the lead of Jegas, LLC, a hosting and consulting provider offering innovative …
Review by Toger Developer Gotham Publisher Disney Interactive Released January 11, 2010 Available for GameCube, Gameboy Advance, PS2, PC (sort of, see below) Verdict: 4/5 Thumb Up “Puzzles in PBG are pretty easy—after all, this is a children’s game. The narrator tends to give out huge hints on what you’ll want to do next or what you’ll need to look for in order to accomplish a specific task. Just the thing for a small …