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Our topic today is dungeons, and the keeping thereof, from creature management to the ongoing nuisance of “heroic” dungeoneers. Evil is good — we learned that in 1997, with Bullfrog’s seminal Dungeon Keeper; again in 1999 with Dungeon Keeper 2. Recreating that wicked goofballery has proven an elusive brass ring. Subterranean Games is grasping for it with War for the Overworld, which promised to be Dungeon Keeper 3 in all but name. Did they succeed? Or is evil thwarted again? Gregg and Steerpike cackle their way to the answers you need.

Perhaps this should be “Tap vs. Ben,” or “Tap vs. Not-Tap,” since 47Games’ Ben Hoyt is not technically on the Tap-Repeatedly staff, but we don’t have a category for that and I wouldn’t want Ben to think we’re excluding him. He has, after all, contributed a Celebrity Guest Editorial for us, and we did recently do a fun podcast on the Mass Effect trilogy and Halo, er, quadrogy. The dude is an honorary staff member, and opened up some time to contribute slightly more than half a discussion of Microsoft’s May 21 Xbox One announcement – a lucky thing, since coverage of all the new consoles has been somewhat scarce around here. Now we have an honest to god game designer weighing in (one who’s shipped an Xbox 360 title or two). Suck it, IGN!

Can games mean?  How?  And when they do, who’s responsible?  AJ and Dix take on authorship.  Read on!

As gamers, boss battles are practically in our blood.  They go back at least as far as 1975.  They’ve long been the go-to climax for a game adventure, the final goal for players of all ages.  Sometimes they are epic set pieces.  Sometimes…not.

Recent years have seen several titles get criticized for weak boss battles, even become notorious for them.  Has gaming outgrown bosses?  Has the march of progress left boss battles as vestigial as so many instruction booklets?  Dix and Steerpike clash in the bottommost dungeon to find out.

Girls. That mysterious species. Do they play video games? What kind of video games do girls play? How can we get girls to buy our video games?

These seem like simple questions, but in an industry dominated by men, appealing to fifty percent of the population sometimes becomes a tricky proposition. It’s been proven statistically that girls (and women) are playing games. But what kind of games are they playing? This time, on Tap Vs. Tap: Games for Girls.

AJ and Dix take a look at the state of women working in the game industry.

Regrettably, it won’t surprise anyone that the internet – and gamers with internet access – are not always the most forward-thinking bunch. One of the latest instances of this is the response to the Tropes vs. Women Kickstarter to do a series of videos based specifically on women in video games.

Unfortunately, this is just one in a long line of issues, whether with the portrayal of female characters in video games or the treatment of female gamers or the position of female game developers, to hit truly repugnant levels. There’s an outcry and blogs and strings of comments everywhere, some inflammatory, others seconding opinions.

But everyone’s preaching to their own choir, most of the time. The state of women in games is complex, to say the least, and some of the hard parts of the issue get lost in all the shouting. Dix and AJ try to have this conversation, maybe ask some difficult questions, and try to feel out the facets of what is, plainly, more than just a two-sided topic, with a minimum of sandwiches and death threats.

In the second of our Tap vs. Tap, Mat C and Lewis B put the world of journalism to rights and dissect what has become of a bustling industry worth billions of dollars. But has riding this piggy bank come at a cost to journalistic integrity?

In the first of our new permanent feature we’re calling Tap vs. Tap, Mat C and Lewis B have decided that their finest conversational moments are during the day when they’re idling away at their keyboards. Recording them sounded like a good idea. This could be very random, but sometimes the best things are. Our first topic? VILLAINS! Pow!