“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.
Latest Feature: Impulse Buyer
Can Stardock break into the marketplace, and will it help reduce piracy?
COLUMNS
The best stuff written about video games from the week.
“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. Especially the Spartan: Total Warrior one, which is a good review of the genre as a whole. It’s a shame Viking: Battle for Asgard, Creative Assembly’s next game, was such a letdown after it. But yeah, expect to see the “Manifesto” covered here over the next few weeks.
“First Annual Game Makin’ Shindig WINNERS ANNOUNCED HOORAY” at Eegra
This is the best link this week if you want to kill a couple hours. After three months, the Shindig is over, and here’s the Eegra staff’s ranking of the games they received. Each has a description by the creator and short reviews from both Patrick and Dan, as well as a free download link. The top few are definitely worth playing.
“Zero Punctuation: The E3 Trailer Park” at The Escapist
I disagree with Yahtzee’s overall sentiments here (we aren’t that hopeless), but his review of each trailer is fantastic. I’ve been wishing he’d do more stuff like this since he did the Resident Evil 5 trailer way back when. I don’t get why he’s just now complaining about sequel-itis though as if it’s a new problem. Things have been this way for years.
“E3 2008: Can’t we all just get along?” at Destructoid
This article comes down to “fanboys are dumb,” essentially, which is a pretty pointless thing to say, but I like its description of the fallout and post-fallout of Nintendo’s press conference. Extremists on both sides of the argument are guilty of being stupid, and they do deserve to be called out.
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.