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I default to assuming the worst about Rockstar Games. That is a reasonable position because Rockstar is the worst. My years in the industry have shown me little to contradict the impression that Sam and Dan Houser are egomaniacal assholes who treat their employees like garbage and perpetuate a studio culture fueled with fear, run by a leadership that never hesitates to lie on record.

The Housers insist they’re making some of the best games in the world, conflating “best” with “most successful.” I appreciate Rockstar’s consistently excellent stories, writing, and cinematics, but I’ve never truly warmed to any of their work. Imagine my surprise, then, when I fired up Red Dead Redemption 2, a game that’s breathtaking in experience, masterful in design, and almost incomprehensible in scope.

DOOM is good, to general incredulity.

The whole world is loudly, vocally, relentlessly amazed. DOOM is good! Unbelievement! Dumbfoundery! Getouttaheah!

It occurs to me how cruel and backhanded this startled praise must feel to the developers. I mean think about it: You did your job well. Everyone is astonished. What a shitty compliment.

Hi, Tap-Repeatedly: I just returned from another round of PAX East in Boston, and I’m here to talk about the games I played at this event!

This is going to be a long series of entries, because it’s hard to fit everything I saw into just one post, and some things aren’t easily categorized. I also got some video interviews with developers this time around, and for those that turned out, I’m going to embed them within future posts so you can hear what the devs have to say in their own words.

Now, onto the games! In this entry: Metrico+, Party Hard, Ladykiller in a Bind, and Kathy Rain.

Bridging the gap between the PC and console – and by extension, between the mouse and the controller – is no easy task. There’s a reason it’s never been done; a reason that despite all these years and all these innovations nobody has come up with a suitable control scheme that allows the best of both worlds. As Valve’s own marketing video muses, “For too long, players have had to choose between the precision of a mouse and the familiarity of a controller.”

Note: I’ve updated this article a bit based on some more hours with the Steam Controller. Major changes are noted, others are just in there.

Geralt of Rivia is a sullen man, unlikable even, but I like him because he’s cooler than me and because he always remembers my birthday. Which is today. I am forty.

So far it doesn’t seem much different than when I was thirty-nine, but the real test is whether I survive the next few days. I’m currently participating in a weekend-long birthday extravaganza thrown by my friends to celebrate the many late-May birthdays in our group. When I was younger, this sort of multi-day celebration was par for the course. Now that I’m forty it’ll probably kill me. In fact, I might already be dead. This post could be from beyond the grave!

I’m not someone you’d want around in a survival scenario: zombies, tribulation, camping, the park. Frankly, I possess very few skills and many undesirable qualities. If I were placed in an environment containing more than 65% Nature, I would die. I bring middlin’ genetic value to the table, but honestly, you could do better. I have no aptitude in engineering, construction, basic math, unarmed combat, logistics, celestial navigation, tool use, or athletics. I can’t operate a chainsaw, drive a motorcycle, construct an igloo, butcher an animal, or dress a wound. A slurry of cynicism, negative affectivity, and acute anhedonia give rise to a personality best described as “unpleasant.” I’m freakishly resistant to cold, but that power comes at a high price: my cognitive abilities begin to break down above 85°F/29°C, collapsing completely soon after.

You may be curious why I’m telling you all this.

2007 seems so long ago. That was the year THQ and GSC Game World finally released the absurdly ambitious open-world shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. It surprised us by being phenomenal. Broken, incoherent, and phenomenal. Released after six years of troubled development, it was a heavily redacted copy of the original vision – more than 50% of the game was cut – but even in its mangled state it was a landmark in the “future of shooters is RPGs” concept. To this day nothing has quite replicated the feel of your first time. And throughout it all rumors persisted, about the STALKER that they’d intended.

Welcome to the Zone that was. Welcome back, to a place you’ve never quite been.

Yesterday afternoon found me at my desk with the vague expression of a lobotomy patient or a recreational user of thorazine. If a passerby had said “whatcha thinking about?” I’d have said, “Nothin’,” which was better than the truth. I was really thinking about narwhals, and Kate Beckinsale. I rarely think of narwhals, since they don’t usually impinge on my day. Kate Beckinsale is a more frequent mental guest, though not one I typically associate with narwhals – or, indeed, with any marine life. Then, because I hate myself, this reverie was interrupted by The Other Voice: “No wonder that Thief article is four days late, you’re so busy there.” God damned Inner Guilt.

Being a couple days late on a game nobody expects much from isn’t a big deal, but yesterday had been a bad day – and I’ve been late on stuff a lot recently, and kinda kicking myself for not having as much time to write like I did, and the usual. Something about the day made an otherwise innocuous deadline push feel like a double helping of Ennui Cake topped by the Scrotum-Pulverizingly Judgmental Cherry of Self-Loathing. Fortunately, my mood was about to improve dramatically.

I’ll always buy Naughty Dog games, they having convinced me of their undying committment to our love via the Uncharted series, but I don’t tend to slaver with excitement before they actually come out. Thus I wasn’t suffering from the can’t-waits in the days leading up the The Last of Us, their fungus-fueled post-apocalyptic proxical-parent TPD (third person depressor). I just waited until Friday and bought the game. Didn’t even unwrap it until the next afternoon.

You’ve probably seen boatloads of perfect scores from full reviews already, along with the odd 7.5 outliers that’ve caused such internet furor. Here’s what I have to say, after several hours, several more hideous deaths, and more clicking feral mushroom-zombies than you can throw a bottle to distract.

Despite no family history, my blood pressure is apparently higher than Cheech & Chong. One specialist, upon remarking that I was maybe a millimeter of mercury – maybe less – from stroking out right there on her table, opined that perhaps I am “carrying my stress wrong.”

I carry my stress in a bag. That’s how I’ve always carried it. A messenger bag, with a shoulder strap. And now every headache in my life comes equipped with a flash of fear that maybe I should clean the bathrooms and wipe the porn from my computer, so a family member doesn’t have to do it after my rapidly cooling body is found.

Games like Impire, which causes headaches, do little to ease my mind.

Dishonored and XCOM came out on the same day in the United States, doing few favors to the free time of serious gamers. As for me personally? I haven’t had any free time in the past six months. It’s been one very long, very exhausting sprint of professional responsibilities, leaving me scarcely time to check my email, let alone immerse myself in games. I haven’t seen anyone socially in months. And then Dishonored and XCOM arrive, both on the same day, and of course I bought them both because I’m me, and here I am trying to insert slivers of play time no wider than acupuncture needles here and there into the unyielding mass of my schedule. Luckily I think that’s a light further on down the tunnel, so hopefully things will go back to normal soon. And I have been finding a little time to play.

My biggest game-writing project to date wrapped a while back, and I thank you who chose to explore even part of it. Like all things, the story grows in the telling. I never planned to publish the Dark Souls Diaries. It started as nothing more than an email series to disinterested friends. The first several installments were just heavily edited versions of those emails.

When I elected to put them on Tap, it stopped being a goofy thing and became a matter requiring a degree of journalistic integrity. As the Diaries grew in popularity, so also grew my responsibility to be accurate. As such, the evolution of the Diaries took place alongside the evolution of my knowledge regarding the game. This epilogue is the story of that journey, plus the final moments of the game upon which the Diaries are based, and a short look at the recent Prepare to Die PC port. It may not be the last thing I’ll ever write about Dark Souls. But it is the end of this particular (and for most of you, unendurably tedious) chronicle.

It was the final Guild Wars 2 closed beta last weekend before its highly anticipated release on the 28th. My brother, Lewis B, who left Tap a couple of months ago to write for MMOG site Ten Ton Hammer, invited me and fellow MMOG noob Steerpike to join him to see what all the fuss was about. Between the two of us, our combined MMOG experience before the beta weekend amounted to making a character in Ultima Online, killing a carrion spider in Dark Age of Camelot and spending eight minutes in Rift. We were surely destined for doom.

As some of you around here may know, I like tower defence. I like tower defence because I’m a real-time strategy wuss; a turtler who loves nothing more than holing up, hunkering down and awaiting my eventual demise. Venturing out was never my thing. AND IN-GAME (sorry). Most of my favourite tower defence games however, have offered a lot more besides mere towers and defending. In this regard Gratuitous Tank Battles is no different. Tipped as an RTS/simulation/tower defence hybrid, GTB marks Positech Games’ follow up to the highly praised Gratuitous Space Battles. It’s hardly Gratuitous Hoverboard Battles but it’ll have to do.

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.