Secret Projects and Miscellaneous Errata

So the super secret project I was working on last time (and which has been sucking vast amounts of my time since) is finally out in the open and glistening in the moonlight like a freshly dropped cow-pat. Critical Distance is operating at about 60% capacity so don't expect too much too soon, but the core idea remains solid - accepting submissions for exemplary critical pieces of games writing.

And it's also the new home for my This Week In Videogames series. Hop along now and catch up on the best of the blog-o-sphere of the week.

The Week in Videogame Blogging #3

It’s Friday night here in The Future – that means it’s time for another scintillating entry of This Week in Videogame Blogging! Let’s roll.

This week we’re starting with a first for TWIVGB, with Brilliam’s post ‘Hardcore played casually’, which is all about playing “hardcore” games in a casual, pick-up-and-play then forget about, manner.

Next up, spotted via the excellent blog of designer Dan Kline, is Lost Garden’s ‘Taxonomy of Game Design approaches’, which sums itself up nicely.

That Dan Kline guy, he’s one to watch and Michael Abbott, if you missed his comment about doing an interview at GDC, let me point it out for you again to make sure. This week, he muses on the importance of Time in game development in a great thought piece called, well, ‘Game Development: Time’.

Tom Chick and his wonderful Fidgit blog is my favourite new addition to my regular reading, and this week in ‘Resident Evil 5: Stranger in a strange land’ he realises that he accidentally griefed an unknown Japanese player for a good 10 minutes. Whoops.

Duncan Fyfe at Hit Self-Destruct this week writes about the certain strangeness we have come to accept in our game protagonists. Stoic, detached and unaffected by the horrors around them, they are often ‘A Shark in the Sewer’.

Hardly in need of linkage from this humble blogger is Leigh Alexander and the fabulous Sexy Videogameland. This week she writes about the commonalities between games and music, and is pretty convincing in ‘Tunes for thought’.

Iroquois Pliskin got a Twitter! Iroquois Pliskin got a Twitter, even though he said he never would!! Sooner or later, we all cave. I should also point out that he wrote about Burnout Paradise this week and how it solves some of the problems of open world games and racing games all at once. Sounds like a game I should be playing. Seriously though, that twitter thing is totally the more important story.

Two must read pieces this week from the world-destroying Rock, Paper Shotgun. The first ‘Unreal Tournament 3 and the new Lazarus effect’ is another of those think pieces where Alec Meer looks at the implications of the recent steam sale and corresponding player jump in UT3 giving it a new lease on life. If Unreal 3 is Lazarus, does that make Steam Jesus, and Gabe Newell is God? Speaking of Steam, the second is an analysis of the news that Steam is also allowing DLC for any game on its service from now on. Is this a case of opening the floodgates to unlimited DLC ‘Horse Armour’ packs or something else entirely? Read and find out.

While we’re going round the big name sites, Kotaku AU editor David Wildgoose does another ‘Ask me random questions and I’ll have a go at answering them because I obviously don’t have enough work to do here in the Kotaku tower’ piece. Look for his handling of the tough questions like “Don’t you wish you could say what you want to about a developer without worrying about being blacklisted?” They’ve also got a bunch of competitions on, including one which asks that you to write a Halo themed Haiku. Here’s one of mine, because I like to share:

Excuse me Master

Chief, I have these requests:

Save world. Get Girl. Win.

Moving on! More gonzo journalism in games writing this week from the preeminent Mister Jeffries with his piece for Escapist Magazine titled ‘Out of the Internet and Into the Wild’. I really want to know if he made up that whole bit about kidnapping his neighbour’s cat. Actually on second thought, maybe it’s better not to know.

In perhaps the most important piece to make sure you read this week – Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer writes about being social, responsible and respectful in our attitudes to each other. Oh, and it’s also about Resident Evil 5’s depiction of race controversy. Honestly not to be missed. In a response post, Rob LeFebvre of Ordinary Swords talks about the same issue in another great post.

Questions: Why have these guys not gotten more love from the Ludodecahedron? In another first for TWIVGB, the good people over at The New Gamer write up a great critical piece on Dead Space. They manage to sum up how I felt about the game but couldn’t be bothered saying in print, writing that:

[The] flaws are small. By themselves they'd be the 1% bad in a 99% great game. But 1% bad becomes 2% bad becomes 3% bad, and they keep adding up until you forget the zero-g sections and the scary resurrecting bat monsters and the tentacle babies. You forget the feeling of helplessness the first time you were overwhelmed by a swarm of bite-sized enemies (the kind that would be pistol-fodder in any other game) because the last hour of Dead Space is, under all the spike-flinging babies, an incredibly boring box puzzle with one box and a single track to push it along.

John Walker, one quarter-ish of RPS also has his own blog. This week he elaborates on his first forays into game development, having been part of the writing team on the Broken Sword: Directors Cut, a re-release of the classic adventure game for DS and Wii that is getting good reviews. It seems to me that this kind of thing is the future – great game critics applying their experience in practical ways.

Last link for the week – the ever indomitable Daniel Purvis of Graffiti Gamer writes about ‘The Fantastical Resident Evil’. Influenced by Left 4 Dead, he asks that for RE6 they dial it back a bit and go for a few less fanciful settings.

Bonus links – I missed a couple last week, so once you’re done digesting this weeks, don’t pass up Nel’s Anderson’s ‘Cost of Realism’ post and Ed Borden’s ‘Far Cry 2: The Next Step In Ultra-Realistic Gaming’, both of which are Far Cry 2 related posts! Didn’t I say they were bonuses?! =D

Till next week intrepid readers.

The Week in Videogame Blogging #2

It’s Friday night in Australia, so the week is technically over for me. Time for another issue of The Week in Videogame Blogging. A touch shorter this week, but we refuse to lower our standards – these are after all only the posts that are most worth reading from the Videogame blogosphere. If there’s even one thing you’ve missed from this list, then my work here is done.

Rock Paper Shotgun lead us out this week with a swathe of posts worth looking at. In ‘Settling for Less’ the sleeping giant of the boardgame industry ‘Settlers of Catan’ is discussed, along with it’s potential playing in digital form. In ‘Should gaming ratings be enforced?’ John Walker postulates that tougher policing of the legal age restriction in games could actually benefit us adult gamers because then those pesky 18+ games could afford to really be 18+. No luck for us Aussies and our lack of an 18+ restricted rating for games, however. A post I’m sure most people would have already read by now anyway, but I’ll link it here to add to this series cachet as a ‘best of’ post series, is ‘What cruel teeth you’ve got: The Path impressions’ which is a lovely entry point to the Indie Game ‘The Path’ which looks set to be a smasher. Lastly, in a rather self-promoting angle, take a listen to the latest RPS podcast and skip to 3-ish minutes from the end for a special contribution from yours truly. I’m not bitter I lost the compo; I’m just pleased at being described as “right ‘fessional”.

Versus Clu Clu Land brings up a question dear to this authors heart in ‘Don’t you wonder sometimes ‘bout sound and vision?’ Yes Iroquois, I certainly do.

The Brainy Gamer drops a new podcast this week which includes an interview with Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago from ‘That Game Company’ (flOw, flower) . I never knew Jenova Chen was Chinese, but it certainly makes sense that there would be a growing number of Chinese game developers. The most interesting thing I think he mentioned was how culturally detached from much of Western AND Japanese game design he felt, due to his Chinese heritage. He also said ‘I couldn’t do a Madden game, I’ve never seen football!’ Which is probably why he makes games about flowers instead.

This week is turning into ‘the week of the podcast’ as I listened to newly discovered podcast gem ‘The Hatchet Job’ and their intelligent discussion with academic Ian Bogost. While not technically from this week, I listened to it this week and that counts for a first time entry. I played Fallout 3 with it on in the background.

Hit Self Destruct talks about Far Cry 2 this week (a sure fire way to get an easy link from this writer!) with the excellent ‘War Crimes’. While I think Duncan maybe missed the ‘profound’ target a little with this post, it still manages to be quite deep, and the comments thread fleshes the issue out a bit better.

Kotaku AU editor David Wildgoose is starting to build an editorial voice of his own with his link outs and interesting thought pieces. This week he invited reader questions in the post ‘Ask me stuff’ and provided some insightful answers. Never let it be said that at SLRC we eschew the popular just because we’re elitist. Also check out his hard hitting expose on RE5's unlockable costume for Shiva - cause RE5 is totally not aiming for the cheap thrills...

Denis Farr from the Vorpal Bunny Ranch posts about ‘The Aeris Syndrome’, examining archetypes in the Final Fantasy games.

Contrast and compare with The Quixotic Engineer’s discussion of Burnout Paradise’s recently patched-in ability to restart a match in the post ‘Restarting, Downtime & Variety’. If fans screamed loud enough for a ‘bring back Aeris patch’ would it get done? And should it?

Alex Myers, always insightful, writes about engaging with games on a level where everything strips back and you just play the game, in ‘flow/ing/ames’. This quote from Frank Lantz got me thinking:

“…when you play a good game long enough, the surface sometimes melts away and you forget that you are herding zergs or putting out fires or whatever. That aspect becomes transparent and you engage directly with the formal systematic qualities of the game…

And lastly, in what looks dangerously set to become a tradition for the final link on The Week In Videogame Blogging, the gents over at Hardcasual score some 'Hot Scoops' with an interview of Ken Levine on the design of the Big Sister from upcoming title Bioshock 2.

Till next week.

The Week in Videogame Blogging

Straight into it: What has been worth reading this week in videogame blogging?

The Brainy Gamer has two pieces this week; the first is ‘Gee Whiz’, about a visit by prominent author James Paul Gee, known best for his writing education reform and his book ‘What videogames have to teach us about Learning and Literacy’. The second is ‘Cold Jungle’, an opinion piece about why Far Cry 2 left him out in the cold. Be sure to check out the comments thread on that one.

Insult Swordfighting has another of his unique amalgamation of Gamespot user submitted reviews for the as-yet unreleased game ‘Resident Evil 5’. I like these posts, because Mitch Krpata has to add so little to the “reviews” themselves to highlight their ridiculousness and by extension, the absurd level of hype often surrounding upcoming videogames.

Versus Clu Clu Land goes admirably high-brow in discussing Theodore Adorno’s ideas about ‘the culture industry’ theorising that it may explain some things about why we play games like Golf and Halo in his post ‘On Masochism’. Iroquois Pliskin also writes about the departure of venerable game journalist N’Gai Croal from his regular position at Newsweek – because obviously ‘Games Journalism Needs Games Journalists’ and good ones at that.

Level Up, in it’s first and also the last entry in Noted on the Blogs is the now defunct blog of the aforementioned N’Gai Croal. He posts his farewell post in which ‘The Man Behind the Royal 'We' Says 'So Long'’. I personally learnt a lot about blogging by reading Level Up – his talk about developing your own voice in writing guided my own early efforts. Croal will be gone, but not forgotten I am sure.

Rock Paper Shotgun, which is now apparently the UK’s biggest gaming blog, can always be guaranteed to have something worth reading. This week the best has to be ‘Bangalor Galore - An Empire: Total War After Action Report’ by RPS sometime-contributor Tim Stone. The ability to capture the sound and the fury of a battlefield in writing about a videogame is why RPS is consistently among the world’s best. More relevant to the business side, an interview with ‘Capcom on Digital Distibution, PC Ubiquity’ reveals a surprisingly forward thinking and proactive game developer. They remind me of Valve Software, actually. And lastly from RPS, less a piece of writing and more promotional video: ‘Laid Back Payback: Soviet Assault Blues’ which is notable for an emerging trend in utilising music effectively in promoting games (Remember those Gears of War trailers? I actually wanted to play that version of the game – the poignant, introspective, intelligent one).

Banana Pepper Martinis proves why L.B. Jeffries is one of the best semi-professional writers out there this week by synthesizing ideas from Carl Jung and some work done by psychologists studying dreams in the post ‘Videogames and Dreams Part 1’.

Hit Self Destruct is the blog of Duncan Fyfe, who I know nothing about other than his name and that he lives in New Zealand. However, geographic isolation means nothing when you have as unique and distinctive writing style as Fyfe, which he shows in a mini-series of posts this week called ‘Domestic City’ of which there are 9 parts. They focus on games in some strange, hypothetical future where people take games seriously or something! Like that’d ever happen…

Pentadact, by actual professional games writer Tom Francis, writes a great series of travelogue posts about Fallout 3. Strictly speaking not from this week, Francis writes somewhat New Games Jouranlism-ish in ‘Fallout Girl: Striking Distance’, and it’s a cracker of a read. I wish I had that much fun in Fallout 3.

Pixel Vixen 707, everyone’s favourite Alternate Reality Game blogger writes in ‘The Buddy System’ how it’s often the little things, rather than the overwritten, unbelievably corny storylines in games that mean the most to her. I’ve come to realise that I feel similarly, and much prefer compellingly immersive details to overblown narratives.

Hardcasual the satirical website with a decidedly ‘Onion’ feel writes just about videogames. This week take a tongue in cheek look at both the ridiculousness of some claims that videogames are a waste of time in ‘Video Gamer Realises Frivolity Of Hobby’ and at… I’m not quite sure what, in the post ‘Other Blogs Just Popular Because Girls Write Them’. Pre-empting calls that “Oh teh noes gurlz are taking over mah game blogz!!!!1!!!!1!” perhaps?

Lets go with that, until next week readers!