Something snarky about it being Wednesday.
Well, Tappers, it’s Tuesday morning again, and–wait, I’ve just been handed some kind of note.
I see. I see. …Yes.
So they’re telling me it isn’t Tuesday morning anymore. Apparently we’ve managed to keep this feature “on time” for all of “two weeks”. Well you know what? This is INDIE GAMING! We don’t need your stinkin’ corporate stooge deadlines and schedules and stuff.
Anyway…the continuing adventures of Kermdinger Studios, LLC., below.
Happy Love Month everybody! Awww. Bleurgh. Enough of that. We all gave our wives, girlfriends, husbands, boyfriends and significant others enough attention on Tuesday. Now it’s back to the backlog. Are we all still keeping up? Don’t forget you can find those good old rules right here. Updated scores in the comments! Who will be losing/winning this month? Email the author of this post at matc@tap-repeatedly.com.
I’m trying to keep these funny, in part because there’s nothing funny about Dark Souls – almost nothing, at least. And making it funny makes it a little less… bleak for the rest of you. But there are moments when the morose nature of the game will intervene, and some of my experiences in this installment may qualify.
Steerpike the Handsome Sorcerer continues his journey today, with some business advice to a trio of unexpected entrepreneurs, a visit to the sunlit city of the gods, and another to a frozen realm of pure loneliness. What can I say? You can cover a lot of ground in 45 deaths.
It’s Tuesday, and you know what that means. Time to check in with Kermdinger Studios, LLC, and see how things are going.
Trust me, I really considered spelling “chronicles” with a ‘k’. I considered it hard.
We of Tap-Repeatedly like to, you know, support things sometimes. Like causes and movements and things like that. Sometimes, also, coffee tables. So in that tradition I’m pleased to introduce Kermdinger Studios, LLC, a shiny new indie game startup in Pittsburgh, PA. Kermdinger’s making a game (as indie game studios are wont to do if you don’t watch ’em closely) and wants to tell you all about it every step of the way.
Why are we featuring Kermdinger, you ask? Could it be that this author has, in fact, become drunk with the power afforded him by posting privileges here and wantonly flaunts his responsibility to the world – nay, the Internet! – to help give his friends and classmates a leg up? Could it be that Kermdinger offered to do all the work so that he could just hit “Publish” and spend the rest of the day on Star Trek Online? Could it be that I really just want everyone to know that that’s my blasted magic 8-ball they’re playing with, dammit, and I better get a fricking producer credit or something for it?
Yes. Yes, it could be all those things.
Whatever the reason, I present to you the first two installments of Kermdinger’s weekly video blog. Watch ’em.
I realized I’d better get cracking on these Diaries, because I’m really quite a bit farther in the game than this entry, and I’m beginning to forget things that have happened to me. Luckily I discovered a cool new technology called “A Pen” and “A Notepad” and have been writing things down so my brain doesn’t have to remember them unless it wants to.
When last we left our hero, he’d returned from the profound awfulness of Blighttown to discover a huge crowd waiting at Firelink Shrine, all in a frenzy about the campfires being out…
One of the reasons I was so excited about writing “My Idea of Fun” columns is because the way games are written about and viewed critically often seems to be in flux. As an example, when Wind Waker came out, gamers lambasted it. “Too cartoony, too kiddy.” What was cool and correct to like was Twilight Princess, when it came out. Now years later, Twilight Princess (which I rather liked) is “hopelessly derivative and forgettable,” and Wind Waker is the real winner. It’s also now okay to admit that Oblivion was really not worth all the hype, and people are finally coming out to sound a resounding “meh” about Grand Theft Auto IV.
Deeper and deeper I ventured, a brave warrior in search of… jeez, I don’t even remember at this point. At first I thought no place could be worse than the Depths, that it was the darkest point in the universe. I had defeated Gaping Dragon, its nightmare boss, and was rewarded with a key to Blighttown. That name does not sound promising, but as a brave warrior in search of <REDACTED>, it was on my list of places to visit. After all, if you’ve been keeping up with these Diaries then you know… it couldn’t be worse than the Depths, right?
The chances are that if you’ve found your way onto Tap Repeatedly, you have a videogame backlog. You can deny it all you like, but you know. You know, I know and The Log knows. The Log sees your ever amounting pile of games. He sees them and he laughs. Sat there, freshly chopped in the woodland, all sly looking, costing you money and time..
My name is Mat C and I have a backlog problem. I know I’m not alone. If you own a Steam account or have more than two PlayStation 3, Wii or Xbox 360 games to play, you have a backlog. If you’ve pre-ordered a PS Vita, intend on buying a PlayStation 4, NextBox or Wii U, you have a backlog before you’ve even purchased any hardware to tackle it on.
At Tap Repeatedly, we can help you. Or just laugh and mock. We’ll see how this goes.
I am enjoying doing these Diaries, as someone should know my suffering, but since I waited until I had a solid backlog before publishing them, I’m beginning to forget some of the stuff that’s happened to me in late December and early January (you’ll note these Diary entries date well before that). In any case, I’m going to try and catch up a bit so I don’t forget stuff if I have a Dark Souls adventure and no chance to write it down.
Now, some of you may be getting sick of the Dark Souls Diaries. I can understand that. If you are, let me know, and I’ll polish the (currently) 6,554-word scholarly paper I’ve been working on in parallel – the one that talks about Kierkegaard and Kant, about the concept of the Knight of Faith, about Campbellian Monomyth Variances, and so on – and I’ll just run with that. It will be epic.
Remember the time Armand K got really wasted and wrote that weird paranoid manifesto about how I’d tried to lock him out of the Bordello because he owed me $7.42? Well, I don’t know if Armand’s fully kicked the habit, but I’m pleased to have him back (and apparently lucid) with another guest entry. He’s been enjoying our Games of 2011 series and thought he’d just go ahead and do one himself. Game on, my …
For gaming, 2011 was a year like many that preceded it: from January to October not a lot happened, and in November a bunch of publishers thought it was a good idea to have their games compete with Modern Blopfare and Field of Battles. At least Epic and Microsoft had the sense to get Gears of Beefcake 3 shipped in September so people would care about it for two months.
Ah, but that’s not the whole story, is it…
Slow and steady wins the race, my friends, and I have slowly and steadily been failing to make much progress in From Software’s bleakly brilliant Dark Souls, as my report here will attest. But it’s about the journey, not the destination, and thus do I share with you more of the journey. I promise, you’ll get sick of reading these long before I’m through writing them. To adventure!
I’m the last person on the list so far to write one of these, so that means I’m going to tread some ground our other authors have already walked. That’s all right with me, though it does mean there may not be too many surprises on my list.
These are in no particular order, really. As with the other lists, I’m not saying “objectively, these are the best games made in 2011.” These are the games I primarily played in 2011, which define the year for me personally, and which I found most obsessworthy or worthy of conversation. I also decided, so as not to go on forever, to narrow this list down to games actually released in 2011, but I’ll mention other titles below.