“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.

“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.

“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.

“1UP Yours 7/3/08″ at 1UP
Denis Dyack rants for an hour about the internet and communication. I think he cares too much about NeoGAF, but he still has a lot of interesting stuff to say, most of which I hadn’t thought about before. Apparently, a lot of it is ripped from Neil Postman and other authors [...]

Gus Mastrapa picks out the things he thinks video game reviewers need to work on. I’m surprised he writes an entire paragraph about scores, but doesn’t say anything about removing scores entirely.

A brief article that could probably have better examples (how about Portal?), but one with a message I support. The word “gimmick,” especially since DS was first shown and detailed, is used in most gaming circles as something of a swear word.

Justin Marks is a video game writer, but here writes about how games’ narratives need to be more closely intertwined with their gameplay. That’s something I wholeheartedly agree with, but his attacking the contrast between Grand Theft Auto IV’s gameplay and story I don’t think is right.