You died. Alone. Because there was no one to touch your bloodstain. Because the servers are going offline. So there won’t be online features. Get it?
“Hello, please leave your message after the beep.”
“Hi, this message is for 1998 and 2007. I just wanted to tell them to go fuck themselves.”
Yesterday, in an Extra Life encore, I finished The Last Guardian. I just want to type those words again.
I finished The Last Guardian.
A trillion years ago, when my brother Marcus published his third novel Good People, a mutual friend reached out, not to congratulate him, but to warn me.
“Have you noticed that a younger brother dies in every book so far?” Vezner asked. “I think whatever he has planned for you, it’s coming closer. I’ve prepared this helpful infographic to illustrate my point.”
I found this infographic again the other day, while cleaning out my office to paint, and it still sends a chill down my spine.
For those of you who don’t pop by our friend Harbour Master’s site Electron Dance every day, well, you’re missing a lot of brilliant work. Brilliance like The Drake Incident, a video that basically has everything you could ever want, ever.
Sometimes I wonder if we talk about Dark Souls too much around here, then I realize how crazy that is. You can never talk about Dark Souls too much.
Rooting around in a coffee table basket, looking for a notepad, I unearthed this list. I’d forgotten having written it down a little over a month ago. Upon seeing it I remembered, ‘oh, this is that list I wrote down of my 17 favourite PS4 games.’
So…That’s what this is, then.
(Sorry, early adopters. There are no PS VR games here.)
This is just one last PAX East post to discuss stuff I didn’t discuss before. The event in general, a couple panels I attended, and how the experience has evolved over the years. If that doesn’t strike you as too interesting of a hook, I can also promise at least a couple cool cosplay photos. But probably none of me. Unless that would really be a draw for you, then we’ll see what we can do.
As of one minute ago (assuming I set the publish time right) my brother’s bestselling Brilliance trilogy of novels comes to a shocking conclusion with Written in Fire. I am aware of three ways you can access this book.
Community, Dan Harmon’s ensemble comedy set at a wacko community college, is one of the most truly geek-friendly TV shows of the past decade. The first time I ever watched Community was the Dungeons & Dragons episode: among the most accurate representations of tabletop roleplay ever put to network television. There was also an entire episode of Community that took place inside a pixel art video game.
It occurred to me just last week as I was watching this episode: the internet is full of wonderful things. Could that video game be a real thing now?
Should I have even doubted?
Dear Murderous Cockweasel,
Congratulations! You are an asshole.
You must be enjoying Dark Souls 2, with its exciting new fiction and hearty, vivacious PvP multiplayer. You must be! The exuberance with which you killed me as I stood idle at the Heide’s Tower bonfire proves this. As it proves your worth as a person – yes, you, carrying your ridiculous, giant-ass oh-so-obviously-compensating-for-your-pencil-junk Final Fantasy sword. Because it takes a true player (dare I say, playa) to kill someone WHO ISN’T THERE.
Gamers are all enthusiastically discussing the announcements and outcome of this week’s E3 conference in Los Angeles. But I spent time last week at a very different conference, the Gotland Game Conference at Gotland University in Visby, Sweden. Most of my photographs of the event are of Visby itself, a city built inside old castle walls and full of historical ruins and charm. But you don’t have to take my word that there was a game conference there! At GGC, I was honored to be a juror and play some very promising student projects that were created right at the school. A few of those below the jump!
So maybe you’ve heard the news. Nintendo doesn’t seem to want people to make Let’s Play videos of their games anymore. If you do, Nintendo would like the ad revenue from its copyrighted content.
You may think this is fair. The core content, after all, is Nintendo’s. I, personally, do not think this is fair. I love me some Let’s Plays. And for numerous reasons: they’re a great way to do long-form critique of a game; they’re a great teaching tool; they’re often entertaining in their own right; and, gosh darnit, a lot of times they inspire me to buy the game.
I almost left a much longer comment on this fantastic Gamasutra piece talking about the history and pedigree of the Let’s Play. But then I realized that there was no better way to say screw-the-man than making this a full post, and sharing some of my favorite LPs with you right here. So join me below the jump for the happy links. Or check out, just for starters, the LP Archive and browse to see if your favorite game is there too.
I’ve been on the road near-constantly since my trip to IndieCade in New York City, so a comprehensive trip report is a bit late in coming. However, I did want to share briefly with everyone the games I saw at the show. This is far from every game, just the games I personally engaged with on Saturday when I stopped in. Maybe there’s something on the list that will interest you, too!
Its name is the Logitech Extreme 3D Pro. Not an imaginative or inspiring name, not like some of its predecessors in my gaming history – Sidewinder or Magnum 6, for instance – but beggars, as they say, can’t be choosers. Starting now, I call it “Extry.” Because truncating things and then putting a ‘y’ at the end totally works for names. Like for my Loftwing in Skyward Sword, which I named “Beaky,” short for Commodore Beakington the Third. But I digress.
Extry has one very important feature that his predecessors, however beloved, sorely lack: Windows 7 compatibility.
Has this ever happened to you?
You’re a player of video games – what one might call a “gamer.” You’ve probably built up a backlog because of Steam sales and fall release schedules and not having time to play video games because of the rest of your life interfering. So you have some free time, you take the game off the top of the stack (or proverbial stack, as the case may be) and start playing. For the sake of argument, let’s call this hypothetical game Alan Wake.
So it turns out you don’t really dig this game that much, which is too bad, but it happens. Still, you’re desperate to fill the endless holidays hours (hypothetically) somehow or other, and this is the perfect time to check some things off the list, so you choose another. And another. Nothing clicks. This one is deeply flawed; that one just isn’t your thing. You give up on new titles and boot up a mainstay, a known quantity, maybe more than one. (Let’s call this game Endless Space. Or maybe Soul Calibur. Even Dark Souls.) And despite the glories of past sessions, the record of unbridled enthusiasm that can set you on logging embarrassing numbers of hours on a game, you can barely stand to play it. (Or them.)
You’ve got gamer’s block.