“EA Partners Is A Murderers’ Row - Who’s NOT On This List?” at MTV Multiplayer
This is a good bit of investigative reporting from Stephen Totilo. With last Thursday’s announcements by Electronic Arts of deals with Grasshopper Manufacture and Epic Games, they now have at least half a dozen major partners, and that’s not counting the smaller companies they have outright purchased over the last couple years.
I have become amazed at what XBLA has done in the past few weeks. It started with Geometry Wars 2, a game Jim Canapa described perfectly in the previous column (he should know, since his high scores are far better than mine). Bionic Commando, another great game I will go into detail about later, was the most recent addition. But in the middle was Braid, the first game to ever cause an internal conflict for me.
Morrowind really helped pull itself head and shoulders above the crowd by developing a realistically complicated world in such an unfamiliar setting that its players can’t help but explore every nook and cranny, finding new reasons to love it every time they play.
“Gaming’s 20 Greatest Challenges” at Edge
Colin Campbell doing what he does best. I can’t imagine coming up with this list, not to mention writing as smartly and concisely about them all. The one problem here is that he doesn’t always offer a solution to these problems, but it’s still important either way.
“THE ACTION BUTTON DOT NET MANIFESTO: A LIST OF THE TWENTY-FIVE BEST GAMES OF ALL-TIME” at Action Button
They’ve been teasing it for months, but finally here it is. Twenty-five full reviews. It’s a lot, so they’re releasing them three at a time twice a week. The three up now are all good examples of why Tim Rogers is important to the topic of this column.
There used to be a lull in summer releases. I almost welcomed it; there was finally time to catch up on the games I missed during the previous November crunch, or at the very least pad my gamerscore with marginal releases. XBLA and the advent of console digital distribution has brought an expensive end to that.
I admit I was disappointed when Microsoft didn’t have any surprise XBLA releases during E3. All’s not lost however, since they announced some exciting new games for the service that will arrive later this year. But before I get into that, let’s talk about this week’s nice pair of releases: 1942 Joint Strike and Go! Go! Break Steady.
One of my ambitions when writing for a development team is never to have my plots compared to Jade Empire’s.
“Game|Life the Video 21: Shigeru Miyamoto” at Game|Life
This is worth watching whether or not you were disappointed with Nintendo’s presence at E3. As should be expected by now, Miyamoto doesn’t reveal anything new (I still say mentioning Pikmin 3 at that round table was not something Nintendo meant to do), but it’s interesting to see how Wii MotionPlus and Wii Music tie into his philosophy about games.
If Portal had done with elevators exactly what Mass Effect did, the game would be the stuff of legends, as its last remaining discs were ground into a fine powder, sold on the black market, and eventually snorted by Asian businessmen seeking to imbue their body with the power of fucking incredible.