If I could remember how many hours I sunk into Master of Orion II, I might be able to guess at how many Endless Space is destined to take.  But I just can’t count that high.

Traverse City, Michigan is known as the cherry capital of the world. Michigan’s cherry production is about 250 million pounds, and represents about 75% of the tart cherries and 20% of the sweet cherries grown annually in the United States. That is a lot of goddamn cherries and I live right in the middle of it. Traverse City, as a rule, puts cherries in EVERYTHING, from butter to hamburger.

Cherry Capital (see above rule) Con or C3 is primarily a comic book expo with a multi-faceted offering of cultural media history. The offerings range from mainstream comics to work from smaller artists to a large contingent of Stars Wars memorabilia.

Tuesday afternoon, Zynga execs announced, among other things, The Ville, its new Free to Play Social Game.

Yesterday, The Ville became a thing you, too, could actually play.

Today, I played it.

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

There’s a certain category of game that I have thought, for years, would work well on the mobile phone, and that is the First Person Robot Battler. This was a type of game that had some entries in the early nineties, but ultimately never took off as a genre. This is not, in my feeling, due to failure of “first person robot battler” as a concept, but, rather, because Nintendo had a habit of tacking First Person Robot Battlers on to ultimately failed peripherals, such as the unwieldy SuperScope 6, or the awful, mockable, Virtual Boy.

So, for a while, I was enthusiastic (toward anyone who would listen for five seconds; this was an ongoing obsession of mine) about the prospect of moving this concept to the mobile phone.  I feel a First Person Robot Battler is an ideal type of shooter for mobile for several reasons …

Personally I wasn’t really sold on much of what Nintendo had to show about the Wii U at E3. Granted, I wasn’t sold on the Wii at this point in its life cycle either, and I ended up quite liking it, mostly.

But as news continues to seep out to us about Nintendo’s next console, I’m starting to see some serious red flags about how Nintendo thinks this is going to work.

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.

First, my humble thanks to everyone for the sympathetic Tap-Repeatedly response to my unexpected medical adventure(s). I continue to be warmed by your kind wishes and can happily report that I am healthy, active, and glad to be alive.

I can also report that I think I have finally solved the mystery of why I was bleeding in the first place. Sort of had to. None of the medical professionals I interacted with had any explanations to offer, so I became a detective on my own behalf. This is that story.

The last installment of the Diaries left Steerpike the Dashing Sorcerer a little glum, O readers. One of my oldest friends had vanished, very possibly by flinging himself into a boiling magma lake. Another died because of my own terrible sword discipline; I accidentally struck him down even as he tried to step between me and a Chaos-eating hose-beast. I also appear to have misplaced his daughter, which means she’s almost certainly dead as well. All that is the injury.

As for the insult? I’m now all but certain that my most powerful and knowledgeable snake-dog thing ally, Kingseeker Frampt, has been manipulating me this whole time. I only hope that the ends to which he has influenced my actions have some honor attached to them, because it’s far too late to turn from this path.

As it turns out, I’m only about an hour down the road from Cipher Prime Studios. They’re the studios responsible for such inventive music-based puzzle games as Auditorium. I was fortunate enough this week to get a demo of their brand new game, Splice, which was released today on Steam. My impressions after the jump!