I’ll admit it, I was wrong!  All this time I have thought, hell, fervently believed there were only three ways to get rich: (1) Inherit it, (2) Steal it, or (3) Earn it. Except for the first choice, none of those sound particularly fun; but, it turns out there is another way, a far better way and one that can be a bucket of fun, gaming enthusiasts. Did you know that computer gaming is now considered a professional sport?  For example, just last month U.S. immigration officials classified the world’s top video-game players as professional athletes. Wow, does it take forever for the U.S. government to wake up, or what?  We all knew how special gaming was, but all we got from the government was a lot of crap.

I’m not very good at real-time strategy games. I attribute this to my inability to multitask well, but that’s not to say I don’t enjoy playing them. The biggest problem I have with them is that most revolve around micromanagement, and since AI War, with its robust automation and smart unit management, I’ve become more of a macromanagement kind of guy. Why? Because it means I can focus on the strategy part. You know, the important part. Not the frantic juggling and tedious busy work part. Homeworld and Company of Heroes, allegedly two of the finest real-time strategy games evar, turned me off because I had to nanny certain units. I’m sorry but, engineers, you need to fix those tanks right in front of you. And repair frigates, those nearby damaged ships need looking at. Do your fucking jobs. The more granular my level of involvement the more distracted I am from the strategy, and for me, that’s a problem.

Exhausted from a trip, you drop your bags at the threshold of a dark, strange, lonely house. The night is late and stormy. No one comes to greet you; no one is home. You did tell them not to make a big deal, not even to pick you up at the airport. “Like, really, seriously, you don’t have to pick me up.” Exact words, in a tone that said “Nothing would make me happier than to reach the gate and see you smiling there.”

A tone that said “please pick me up, I’m so tired. Pick me up, I haven’t seen you in a year and I can’t wait. Pick me up, I’ve missed you and I love you and I want to hear everything that’s happened. I wish you’d stayed suspended, waiting for me, but I know you haven’t, and I’m not sure where the new house is, I’ve never been there. So please pick me up. It’s been so long. Please pick me up.”

But no one did. So, all on her own on a dark and stormy night, 22-year old Kaitlin Greenbriar, has gone home.

Dragon’s Crown is one part loot-dropping dungeon crawler, one part 2D brawler. It has a satisfying, tight core loop with high appeal: kill things, take their stuff, get that stuff identified and sold, equip better stuff, use better stuff to kill bigger things, take their stuff, repeat and repeat. … Dragon’s Crown is exactly the game we needed right now.

According to the ESA’s most recent fact sheet, women currently make up 45% of game players.

This isn’t really news. The stats about the increasing amount of female gamers have been available for years. But the common wisdom is that women are mostly interested in games on Facebook: casual games for which they are unwilling to pay actual money without being deceived by free-to-play monetization tactics. However, one company, Silicon Sisters, has been working on games targeted at young girls and sold with a money up-front model… and succeeding at it. Now, they’re planning on doing the same with a game targeted squarely at the adult female demographic. Their new game is called Everlove, and it is an interactive romance novel for an American audience.

Unequivocally, I say Rockstar is greedy, selfish and without remorse. They make it difficult, even impossible for a customer to receive satisfaction when there is a problem. The truly ironic thing is, they pretend they are trying really hard.  One gets the impression, early on, that he/she is being helped.  But, before long, you realize that your emails don’t seem to have been read, by real eyes in any case. I cannot help but believe there are thousands of others who feel as I do.

Last year I shared a few vlogs from a little indie start-up called Kermdinger Studios as they set out on the journey of creating their first indie game.  Eighteen months and one cross-country move later, the guys at Kermdinger have unveiled their first project, launching pages on Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight.  They call it Stunt Runner, a physics puzzler for PC and Mac with a humorous twist.  The game’s already at the top of the video game staff picks on Kickstarter, which isn’t a bad sign at all.

If you’ve been curious what the Kermdinger guys (Kermdingers?  Kermdingites?  What is a Kermdinger, anywise?), check out the details on Stunt Runner.  You can also visit them on their own site.

As a fan of the setting in general, Shadowrun Returns gave me very much what I wanted, and I can mostly only fault it for leaving me wanting more.

Lo! This quite-excellent news may have passed you by a week ago as it did me, so here as a public service, I offer you last week’s news: Stardock Corporation have acquired, from Atari, the rights to classic but never incredibly popular space fun franchise Star Control! They then immediately announced “now that we at long last own the rights to Star Control we’re figuratively burying it right beside that E.T. game which nobody also played but someone you know claims they did and you punched them for it. That was the right thing to do. Punch all liars!” Okay, I kid, they didn’t say that! Who ever would? No video game corporation is that evil.

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I like new things. I like operating systems. And, apparently, self-torture. It’s for these reasons that I spent part of last weekend rebuilding my PC – something I’d been meaning to do for many months. The machine’s always been a trooper, but in the last few weeks it’s gotten grumpy. It needed a good hard formatting. I use this PC for gaming and work, but I keep everything mission-critical in a DropBox, so I thought it might be fun to switch the rig over to Windows 8.1 Consumer Preview at the same time.

This is the story of how I installed Windows 8.1 Consumer Preview and slashed my wrist, not in that order. It actually gets kind of gory so if you’re squeamish, clear off.

“It’s not that I wouldn’t recommend Face Noir to a hardcore fan of the genre. There’s just a lot better that’s floating around out there right now in adventure game land, and despite a layer of modern polish and some pretty good art and sound design it doesn’t add a lot for the English-speaking audience.”

I’m glad we had the chance to do this, and frankly I wish it’d been reasonable (or realistic) to record a much longer, more organized conversation with such smart people about such a smart game as The Last of Us. As this longest console generation winds down, it seems reasonable to say that this game will be remembered as its crowning achievement, a Shadow of the Colossus for the PS3 era – and that’s two generations in a row wrapped up not with some great bro-shooter epic but with something melancholy, thoughtful, often heartbreaking, and deeply meaningful to those who played it. The Last of Us, from serial hitmaker Naughty Dog, is a game based on a lie. There are zomboids and bandits, there’s beating people to death with bricks, there’re set piece battles aplenty. But it started with the lie, it’s about the lie, and maybe in the end the lie is all that really matters.

Hark! There is a book you must buy. Marcus Sakey, my media mogul brother, Jaime Lannister to my Tyrion, Alan Wake to my Barry,  has gone and written another novel. Brilliance, it is called, and it is available on this day for buying with your monies and reading with your eyes. Click upon this link to buy it.

Why that link in particular? Tell you what: first, click and buy, then come back and read this, then go read the book.

Man I’ve been behind these past couple weeks. I’ve barely had a chance to stop by and say hello. I suppose I could say I need more leisure time and fewer responsibilities, really I just need to manage my time better. Anyway, the IGDA is running my Culture Clash columns according to a different schedule, to accommodate the other writers (and the fact that I haven’t exactly been great with deadlines recently). So last month’s, which ridiculed Microsoft for the Xbox One launch, didn’t come out on that site until after they’d reversed their worst blunders. Now I can’t claim that it was my writing, and mine alone, that drove this decision. This one, meanwhile, I wrote and rewrote about a thousand times. Today. The first draft was probably fine, but then I thought I’d do something new with it, then I changed that idea, then I realized my thesis didn’t make sense, then I wound up with this version, which nobody will be happy with. But there’s always next month.  Enjoy!

This is Telltale throwing us a bone – a nice meaty bone with some good stuff on it – and hey, I can think of worse things to do with five bucks.