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Monday, August 10, 2015

Gaming Round-Up: August 10, 2015

Master Chief - Created by Jude Smith




After 30 Years of Being a Dude, There's No Reason Link Shouldn’t Be a Lady argues Vice's Nick Gillham.  I disagree completely.  After thirty years, Zelda just deserves her own damned game.  Yes, the franchise could do with a female lead, but Zelda's earned that role about twenty times over.  I think a game that begins with Link NOT returning from a quest would be a power reboot for the series.

Errant Signal’s Chris Franklin dissects The Magic Circle, describing it as being less “a game about games” and more “a game about game developers,” and in particular how its thematic through-line of challenging designer constraints is undercut by the game’s post-story ‘build mode.’

If you can’t decipher fighting game tournament EVO in real-time, Patrick Miller offers a bit of an introduction in which he breaks down the top 8 lessons from the tournament. It’s heavy in detail both in terms of the game’s mechanics and the scene.

In the best bit of data porn posted this week, Rob Lockhart looks at game names from a dataset including nearly 150,000 games. What are the most common title words, subtitles, in general, per year or per platform? The most generic PC game title would be War World Online: Wars Star Dark Game – Space Battle Simulator.

Jason Schreier of Kotaku explains what it’s like to work in QA, testing games for a living.  I always thought that this would pretty much be my dream job, but then again, maybe not.

At Kill Screen, Savannah Tanbusch wonders why so few games are set within Japan’s Meiji era, one of the most interesting a periods of Japan's history, rife with Westernization and unrest.  

Now In Theaters, Video Game Tournaments On The Really Big Screen

The Quest for the Perfect Retro Game Experience: "...why bother? That seems to be a prevailing sentiment when the topic of any sort of big-ticket retro investment is broached online. After all, all of these games can be played through emulation for free; matters of legality aside, why not just load up MAME or RetroArch and call it a day?"

RockPaperShotgun's Edwin Evans-Thirlwell posted a really excellent piece last week in which a policeman weighs in on what police games get wrong.  From the stories I've heard from family members who work in law enforcement, what's most notably missing is the dozen forms that need to be filled out in triplicate  every time you make an arrest or draw your gun.  I guess that wouldn't make for a very interesting game.

Slate's Laura Hudson argues that Ernest Cline’s Armada is everything wrong with gaming culture wrapped up in one soon-to-be–best-selling novel.  Personally, I was disappointed that it wasn't anything like Ready Player One, but I didn't think it was quite that bad.

Skepchick's Rebecca Watson discusses the implications of a recently released study (YT) that suggests that men who harass women in online games tend to be the game's more unskilled players.  Does that mean the harassment is coming from the younger gamers who don't know better or from unskilled players who are all buthurt over losing out to girls?  It's difficult to say at this point, but the phenomena could certainly benefit from more extensive study.

Tom Jubert, one of the writers of The Talos Principle, recently gave a talk titled How Video Games Will Destroy Humanity:
"Recently I gave a little talk to games dev audiences at Subotron in Vienna, and Gamelab in Barcelona. The idea of the talk was to first establish some strong design rules I learnt from authors like Terry Pratchett and George Orwell – keep it simple, make it speak – and then to develop a science fiction world using those principles which might form the basis of a future game. As I did this I realised that video games were going to destroy humanity."
Turn videogame sprites into LEGO mosaics

At Unwinnable, Rowan Kaiser writes about the most difficult fight in Mass Effect 3.

This video on how Microsoft capture video for HoloLens may interest tech nerds.


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