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.

The 3DS is doomed. Nobody wants dedicated portable games consoles anymore. iOS is taking over. Nintendo going third party confirmed. Pack it up guys, it’s over. Well no, actually. Turns out the 3DS is pretty popular. So popular infact that the system has just pushed past the five million mark in Japan alone, a feat managed in just 51 weeks and faster than the Gameboy Advance, Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii. For comparison’s sake, the …

Humans and other sentient beings who visit Tap-Repeatedly: the site will be down for a few hours on Monday, February 20. We anticipate this outage will take place late afternoon/early evening GMT, which is like next Thursday or something in Australia and around 10:00am Eastern US. During the period of the outage, your lives may seem empty and/or meaningless. DO NOT DESPAIR. Not only will Tap be back in what will seem like an eternity to you but in actuality will only be a couple of hours, the benefit of this downtime will be things that none of you will ever notice but will stop people yelling at Steerpike. Thanks for your patience!

UPDATE: All is well and the site is back! We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

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.

I don’t think there could be a better email in the world on a rather grey Tuesday, than an invitation to take part in the Guild Wars 2 Beta.  Though I can tell you very little (other than it begins this weekend and I’ve already packed off my entire family) rest assured I will be providing some in-depth coverage come Monday the 20th, so be sure to check back here. If you have any suggestions on what …

It’s Tuesday, and you know what that means.  Time to check in with Kermdinger Studios, LLC, and see how things are going.

Super Mario Bros. Crossover is a pretty basic idea: a fan-made Flash game where you play Mario’s levels with other characters. Each character retains the abilities from his or her original game, and power-ups do different things than they would normally!

That’s the short title. It fits on a byline. The actual title of this article is “Things that I Saw This Week that Demonstrated What is Wrong With the AAA Game Development Model and Why It Is Unsustainable.” Another real title might be “What I Think About Double Fine’s Million-Dollar Kickstarter and Its Larger Meaning By Way of a Terrible Reality Show.”

For a two or so hour long experience I couldn’t recommend And Yet It Moves enough; it’s a beautifully presented game, full of great ideas and really quite unlike anything else.

So a lot of people like Tim Schafer. 19,689 people to be precise, at the time I’m writing this. Perhaps yesterday you heard about this? In case you didn’t I’ll summarize: the folks at Double Fine productions don’t believe it’s possible to receive publisher funding for a “classic adventure game”-type game in 2012. Not going to happen. So instead, they reached out to so called “people” to fund their adventure dreams. $400,000 worth of funding, to be specific. Kotaku figured it wouldn’t take a week. Turns out it didn’t take a day.

Check out Double Fine’s “Kickstarter” page for all the details. Tim’s amusing plea video follows the break.

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.

Outside the circle of people who develop games, a game “Jam” event isn’t really a well-understood phenomenon. When I told friends I was going to be participating in a weekend-long game event, their assumption, perhaps a natural one, was that I was going to be spending an entire weekend playing games. These sort of marathons have become more common. Often they’re done for entertainment; other times, to raise money for charity. I think overall, a weekend of playing games is more easily comprehended than the strange animal that is a game jam: a one-weekend development event.