rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

not sure how to react to the papo y yo article, but i am interested

silicon knights downfall definitely interesting to me, just for their work on Eternal Darkness and Twin Snakes, but it sounds like their glory days are long gone

It's a seemingly unavoidable fact that not every game can be great, or good, or even average.

seemingly

paragraph 2:

So how does a game, one made by a celebrated studio and backed by one of the richest game publishers in the world, turn out to be a bad video game? This is a story about exactly that.

paragraph 7:

The following story excerpts extensive interviews with former Silicon Knights employees who describe their experiences at what they say was a disorganized, unfocused company that squandered ample time and resources before being forced to release a game it was far from proud of.

paragraph 12:

But X-Men: Destiny stands alone as the worst game that Silicon Knights has released since it was founded. How did a company that was once known for compelling, original, quality video games come to release a title best described as "mediocre," "mindless," "generic", and "an absolute mess"?

JUST FUCKING TELL ME

spoiler: poor leadership

Thanks for linking the Errant Signal guy - enjoyed the violence one and the DOOM one equally. Nice takes, feels pretty on-the-money without ever trying to be the single definitive take or anything.

yeah, they've all been good
can't say anything for the "game grumps" thing he recommended though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB2ty4Qhdlw
i kinda hate bastion but the points he makes are all good. it's just no fun to play is all.

His Sonic the Hedgehog one is pretty quietly truth-bomby too I think.

nice read on Bastion! admittedly by the end I was kind of trudging though the fights, the music and graphics got me through it. i also really appreciated the themes/ending as discussed well in the video (regardless of the heartbreak interpretation)

I liked the article in general, but "Kid finds a memento from a girl he knew. Always used to fancy her" to "This is about the breakup of a serious long term relationship" is nearly hilariously creepy.

Or he played braid.

Oh yeah!

this might not be worth reading, but i dug it
http://gameological.com/2012/11/on-the-level-secret-of-mana/

CRPG and The Adventure Gamer are simultaneously playing through So You Want to Be a Hero

http://www.salon.com/2012/11/25/big_buck_hunter_meet_the_worlds_best_fake_marksmen/

http://i.imgur.com/Eo9kJ.png

this is going to confuse the hell outta metacritic
http://www.oxm.co.uk/47898/reviews/family-guy-back-to-the-multiverse-review

are there any other smart youtube channels like errant signal? or is he in a league of his own?

i certainly wish he wasn't; i could watch a dozen of those every day

tenuous, but http://gameological.com/2012/11/the-stuff-of-knightmare/

Where are those graphs from forks? Are they releases or sales? Presumably the former. Weird that that don't always sum to 100% either - I mean I can maybe believe that 10% of the games released in 2010 don't fit into any of those genres, but 20% of the games released in 1982 weren't on any platform? huh?

Maybe other platforms not covered? 5200, Colecovision... just guessing, though.

honestly, i found the graphs on a random tumblr; no sense of veracity or methodology.
but GRAPHS! INFORMATION!

Id love the data set, maybe make something a bit more legible

holy crap that family guy review is amazing

are there any other smart youtube channels like errant signal? or is he in a league of his own?

― ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) (diamonddave85), Wednesday, November 28, 2012 2:53 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i certainly wish he wasn't; i could watch a dozen of those every day

― (alternatively, “Respec’”) (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, November 28, 2012 4:28 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he did a collabo video with "HyperBitHero" on RE 5 that really just underlines how good he is and how unnatural the other guy is imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0Xtbb669eg

Interesting piece from Eurogamer on GTA San Andreas and the story behind Hot Coffee: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-11-30-who-spilled-hot-coffee

"Why would a 17-year-old be allowed to run around the city bearing weapons, a game in which you're free to shoot cops and beat up women but in which you're not allowed to make love to his girlfriend after dating her for a while?" - Patrick Wildenborg

i kinda forgot about sweet home... and that it's based on a kiyoshi kurosawa movie, one of the only one of his i haven't seen. gotta watch that. maybe my fave movie director!

errantsignal has some good stuff. just watched the Deus Ex: Invisible War one which is pretty on point, though I will slightly defend that game as passably fun, more awful in comparison to the original

i like the holographic britney manque in dx:iw who appears in every level turns out to be an advanced form of AI surveillance equipment and ends up helping you in oblique oracular ways, and then after you become accustomed to thinking of her as v wise you meet the actual flesh-and-blood pop star she's a holograph of and she's a stereotypical Dumb Pop Star; that was kind of neat. but yeah, he's otm that every single room had a keypad, a vent and a guard. and the right answer was always the vent because it didn't use any consumables.

ha, i remember that - nice running subquest plot

http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/games-are-art-rock-band-and-its-history-prove-it/1

i know "games as art" is a dead horse, but i really think this is a well-written, researched, original article

Yeah, interesting stuff. Mainly, though, it reminded me of how much fun I had playing Rock Band games, and then super-annoyed all over again at Activision for running the videogame/band idea into the ground with their torrent of shitty Guitar Hero titles.

I don't mind that these titles don't get released any more though, because they don't need to. Rock Band 3 is basically a platform in itself now, it does everything you'd want one of those games to do and the content updates still come like every week or whatever.

kinda wanna know from anyone who's played Far Cry 3 is this article has some teeth to it, or is just total garbage:

http://killscreendaily.com/articles/reviews/kill-screen-review-far-cry-3-first-game-about-millennials/

http://archive.org/details/crt_emulation_test_videos_2012_11
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3786
shocking how nostalgia inducing the video is

wow, totally! The sort of thing that's changed sort of gradually and you forget how everything used to look.

i went to an arcade auction recently, so definitely feelin' it

http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/iPhone/Curiosity+-+what's+inside+the+cube/feature.asp?c=46406

kinda wanna know from anyone who's played Far Cry 3 is this article has some teeth to it, or is just total garbage:

haven't played it & read that article & it sounded interesting but then i read dude's article on hotline miami and i am thinking maybe he is just future EUKARYOTE thread fodder

"the first postmodern videogame?" ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

punctuation his not mine btw

people are trying really hard to pretend far cry 3 is an unflinching stare into the heart of awful bro dudes instead of, like, a really hamfisted embrace of awful bro dude ideology in service of stupid, stupid storytelling.

i really like this piece

http://killscreendaily.com/articles/essays/press-x-not-die/

http://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/2982-a-link-to-the-past-how-to-add-crt-filters-to-16-bit-games-on-pc/

I haven't really done the emulator thing in a while, but this CRT emulation is pretty interesting. Problem is it seems like there's no standard easy to use collection of this stuff, you kind of have to download multiple filters and then mix them up? Or is there a simple and good-looking all-in-one thing?

http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2012/12/28/john-butterfields-battle-of-the-bulge-rejuvenates-an-old-rogue

(vaguely disappointed that the Butterfields pictured are not stoot barfield's parents)

(sorry, I have never had the patience for war games, so the rest is lost on me)

Depressing article:
http://nightmaremode.net/2012/12/the-negative-influence-of-games-an-autobiographical-essay-24380/

These were all pretty good:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/12/28/the-very-best-of-rps-2012-gaming-made-me/