rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

dear lord. i should've known what i was in for when the first paragraph describes this as an excerpt from the book "GENERATION XBOX"

coming at the movie/game crossover from the opposite angle, i liked these two wired pieces:

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/04/halo-movie-generation-xbox
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/04/generation-xbox-super-mario-movie/

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/may/01/zone-chernobyl-tarkovsky-video-game/

Stalker, game & film

i just read the new yorker blurb on that book; think i need to watch stalker tonight. never got around to it.
Free on youtube! Hit CC for english subtitles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYEfJhkPK7o

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2012/5/3/diablo-3s-ability-system.html

that Nephalem Valor buff sounds like amazing design

i guess i'm gonna buy this

definitely sounds interesting, but i'm retaining skepticism - with the millions who will play this, it will be somehow be broken soon enough

if there's a good launch deal i'll get it, otherwise i can wait

This really long writeup on Super Mario Bros. 3 is my favorite piece of videogame writing I've ever read.

http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=426
(for some reason my Chrome warns me of Malware at this site)

His style is pretty awesome, stream-of-consciousness, Unnecessary Capitalization, lots of real world asides from some kind of uber nerd hipster fantasy lifestyle.

nooooooooooooooooooooo Tim Rogers

Hah. He's like the Pitchfork Reviews Reviews of videogames.

*cough*iknowthatguy*cough*

is that something you're really proud of? :P i don't even want to imagine what that guy would be like in person

*cough*idon'tlikehim*cough*

hah!

Yeah, i've read maybe a dozen or so of his pieces. Only today did I realize the amount of hate he gets online. If i lived in Japan for a long time and worked for videogame companies, I'd probably write life anecdotes all the time too.

definitely sounds interesting, but i'm retaining skepticism - with the millions who will play this, it will be somehow be broken soon enough

I'm not entirely certain what counts as broken here though - they're not claiming that all billion possible builds are going to be of exactly the same power, just that if you find a style you enjoy, you can go pretty far with it, and you can switch later on if you change your mind.

my guess is eventually there will be a maxed character build that everyone uses

btw i will admit i used to love some of rogers' earlier stuff, but he eventually crossed this threshold where i couldn't take his style anymore. i think it was around the time he wrote this 20 page article on FF7 with about 2 pages about the game itself

"The question was “How to fit a cinematic narrative into Pac-Man“, which didn’t even end in a question mark (this is crucial)."

The "this is crucial" tick is v. v. Tim Rogers. Anyone know where he got it from particularly?

Also this a tim rogers thing is this indiedev fetishism of simplicity:

"The game begins with our hero, Mario, facing the right. He must now run to the right. The “visual language” communicates the character’s goal in a dreamlike fashion to the player: our hero is standing just to the left of the screen, facing right. Finish three stages, and Mario enters a castle. The castle feels different — more dangerous — than the other levels."

My problem with him is basically that the games he likes, which are about mood and twitch in equal parts, are nothing like the games I like, which are about escapism and transitory accomplishment and never feeling too anxious because there's enough to be anxious about already thank you.

It is a very nice article though, once it warms up, and makes a good case for SMB3 as a sort of Disco Tex "Keep Dancin'" moment.

he makes no bones about wanting to be as "punk rock" as possible

i think lots of tim rogers' ideas are thoughtful and accurate and i like the severity of his taste but christ his prose. i've read a lot of him anyway because he has an aesthetic and when the style settles down a bit he writes well about mechanics. he's also good at making me want to play games; he has a really evocative thing about the original diablo (embedded in a furiously and pretty convincingly negative review of the sequel, itself embedded i'm sure in a cloud of irrelevant bullshit) that describes the atmosphere w/ total accuracy and joy. but yeah.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-05-07-definitive-years-in-gaming-history-1991
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df-hardware-the-ultimate-console-collectors-guide
NB: I have not read these yet

Not only videogames, but a nice article: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2012/05/09/two_universes.html

Cool articles. If I ever see a PC Engine at a reasonable price I am picking it up. Lots of really cool, undiscovered gems on it.

i read a bit, liked what i read, but didn't make it all the way through those EG articles

i really liked that article comparing photoshop to portal, mostly because it's one the few things i've seen (recently anyway) that explains why gamification is actually a cool concept (yay fun learning fast!) without hammering on its abuses

t’s incredibly satisfying to sneak out of a tight spot by performing an action you didn’t know you could do, but created instinctively because of your experience.

shooting the moon was the absolute peak moment of this.

http://insertcredit.com/2012/05/14/tentacle-bento-and-kickstarter-when-no-regulation-is-bad-regulation/

not sure if this is worth reading, or just because i want to pooh-pooh it

very well-meaning and very dumb i think

just glancing at that article, the first line i saw was "Again, Tentacle Bento won’t make anyone rape a girl"
Go Back One Page

this is worth reading b/c it is stupid and ridiculous and New Games Journalism should just take a max payne slow mo bullet to the jaw http://killscreendaily.com/articles/essays/dealing-urban-decay/

Verdigris is the word I thought of most through Infamous 2, along with corrosion.

You are lying, sir!

I liked that article a lot, though I would like it less if it ended "7/10"

http://lukehalliwell.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/where-realtime-worlds-went-wrong/

so that tentacle game had its kickstarter revoked

Mr. Cadice: as a fellow game developer and designer, I hope you're reading this page and still open to comment and critique of your work despite the conflicts that have erupted around your game.

It sounds to me you're trying to have your cake and eat it too -- you're claiming that your game references rape, but doesn't actually include rape. So what you've created ends up looking like a painting with a big rape-shaped hole cut out of the middle of it

classical japanese manga hentai action linkified

Cool NSFW image. Mods???

i am giving that post the shifty eye, just so you know

"rape-shaped hole" is a top ten ugggggggh phrase

do y'all thing this'll be good? http://www.theverge.com/about-vox-games

is Tyler Bleszinski related to Cliffy? i don't recognize i think any of the names on the masthead but that doesn't necessarily mean anything...

i'd say it won't be good just bc 99% of video game writing isn't

lol

thanks mod, i almost got peeped at work with that post. ilx needs a spoiler hider

btw the tentacle hentai thing moved to its own site and already exceeded their donations on kickstarter, proving once again - nothing

also the only name i recognize in there is Crecente, not a good sign

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_board_games

http://i.imgur.com/TYfJS.jpg

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/physics-are-the-new-graphics

tom bissell's cool http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7989584/on-rockstar-games-max-payne-3

http://crpgaddict.blogspot.co.uk/

i don't know whether this is so much 'worth reading' as 'a thing that i just spent six hours reading' so eh