A few more post-PAX reports! Indie was a huge precence at PAX East this year, and it would’ve been just as difficult to see everything there as it would have been all the triple-As. Here are impressions from just a few indie games I played at the convention. I’ll take a look at Girls Like Robots, Primal Carnage, and A Valley Without Wind: three games that are all pretty different from one another and reveal the huge variety of indie games that were available there.
Oh for God’s sake.
Mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway last July, apparently played Modern Warfare to learn (according to his testimony) “how to use rifle sights.”
I’m reminded of a roundtable I once attended on violence in games. California Cassandra Leland Yee had just argued that military games teach kids how to kill. Professor James Paul Gee replied, in a perfect sarcastic deadpan, “the only thing any war game has ever taught me is that I don’t want to be a soldier.”
If you watch one video this year, make sure it’s of Electron Dance’s Harbour Master drinking with the fine folks from Arcadian Rhythms. It would seem that Mrs. Harbor Master and the miniature Harbor Masters are off on holiday. You know what that means: BEER, and lots of it.
Hit this link to check it out. It’ll make your day.
The Log might be a little later than scheduled this month, but The Log is here nonetheless. And he’s here to count your gaming misery. March was a pretty brutal month for The Log, and some of those minus figures are really starting to toll up.
According to our header, you come to Tap-Repeatedly for the media, the opinion, and the attitude. But maybe, occasionally, some news? It’s been a week since PAX and I’m still writing up things that, while an entire week old, could be technically considered “news.” Now if you read the Tap-Repeatedly forums, you’d have gotten this information the day I got it, since I dropped up my rambling thoughts the day of the event. But if you didn’t, you still win, because now you get this information: with all-new screenshots! So, without further introduction, here’s the games I played at the SquareSoft press event at PAX East! Plus the bonus of opinions and attitude.
In the early hours of this morning (about 5:20 am GMT), we were precisely one hundred years out from the moment when the RMS Titanic slipped once and for all beneath the waves of the North Atlantic. She took with her some 1,514 passengers and crew, a little more than two-thirds the total number of souls aboard. None of the survivors lived to see this anniversary. (The last passed away in 2009.)
Though she wouldn’t be rediscovered until 1985, the Titanic lived on fairly vividly, here and there, since the first word of the tragedy reached the world. The resurgence of interest in her story comes in waves, of course: following the release of the book and film A Night to Remember in the 1950s; the amazing images from the wreck in the 1980s; the release of James Cameron’s period epic Titanic (re-released in 3D to coincide with the anniversary), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, in 1997.
I think the night the Titanic sank must have been the end of the world as anyone knew it. She was the last gasp of human audacity and ostentation, of unbridled luxury for its own sake. The end of a world in which the only way anyone could imagine the two sides of the Atlantic would be linked was by such an engineering marvel. A scant two years later the Great War would begin, and for the rest of the century human ingenuity on any sort of large scale would be defined by conflict.
Scheduling for my monthly column at the International Game Developers Association has been more than a little spotty of late. I was once pretty Johnny-on-the-Spot with deadlines, but various things influenced that negatively; meanwhile the organization itself is going through various transitions as well. In the interest of getting myself back on a schedule I present my not-yet-published April 2012 edition. Not being a big multiplayer myself some of the conclusions I draw may be shortsighted, but in the end I hope to spark some thought on what that form means in the larger cultural context of gaming. Enjoy!
My love for competitive fighting games started in the early 1990’s, with the arcade debut of Street Fighter II. Back then, I was in middle school. I liked the character of Chun Li, a character who was a woman fighting in an otherwise-male cast, claiming to be the Strongest Woman in the World as she flashed across the stage with her high speed kicks and jumps. She was a popular character choice for guys I knew, too, but not because she was an inspiration. Because if you did the Spinning Bird Kick, you could, like, totally see her panties, for a whole two frames.
At PAX East I got a chance to try out a game called Girl Fight. Girl Fight is a fighting game that makes the fleeting experience of seeing Chun Li’s panties in to the entire purpose of the game.
You’ve waited this long to hear what they’ve been working on…
Dungeons & Dragons has lots of licensed video games. But the pen-and-paper tabletop game that many gamers consider the soul of D&D is a game in flux.
The presence of Dungeons & Dragons was felt throughout the long, broad halls of Boston’s PAX East convention this past weekend. Wizards of the Coast brought with them this year the traditional tabletop offerings, running tables of D&D Essentials and the new Lords of Waterdeep board game in the convention’s table gaming room. But Dungeons & Dragons also means video games these days. In addition to checking out some new content premiering for the existing Dungeons & Dragons Online, I also got a first look at the newest D&D MMO, which is simply called Neverwinter. My thoughts on the latter lead off a series about the things I saw this past weekend at PAX. Join me past the jump.
I know this is likely to render meaningless the lives of many a reader, but you gaze upon the fifth-to-last Dark Souls Diary.
“Steerpike!” You cry. “No! Please for the love of all that is good and/or holy, say it’s not true! You have already written twenty thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight words, words we neither solicited nor enjoyed! Your own mother has asked you to stop! Say that we don’t have to read five more of these before the torment can end! We beg you Steerpike, just type this: ‘and then I did a bunch of other stuff and won the end forever.’ Wouldn’t that be a pithy closing?”
That actually would be pretty clever.
Unfortunately Kermdinger Studios was hit by a meteorite yesterday and completely obliterated. Bummer.
Okay, I’m just kidding. Only Ethan was obliterated.
I normally don’t post breathless and shocking announcements, but it’s just been brought to my attention that there’s been a huge upset in the world of gaming. Specifically, SWERY65, director of Deadly Premonition, has had his blog taken over by an alternate-dimension doppelganger with a terrifying mustache. And I gotta say, the game that development genius ZVVORY666 is working on now looks incredible.
What better way to spend a sunny weekend than playing games indoors. If I had a portable generator I would have likely taken my desk outside, but then I’d have only had sun glare on my monitor. Instead, I packed off my family for three days and decided to stay indoors away from the sun’s rays, playing Guild Wars 2 for more than 42 hours (curse the need to sleep!)…