This video show Jerry Holkins – Tycho of Penny Arcade fame – performing a song in Rock Band for the crowd at PAX. He wrote the lyrics. Harmonix put it in the game. He sang the song. Soon you can get it on Xbox LIVE. (All proceeds benefit Child’s Play.)
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Continue reading ⟩⟩ “WARMACHINE”
We’ve hardly had time for my comics this week, what with all the crazy PAX stuff and such. But the Old Traditions must be upheld, so here are the links to my stuff at the Escapist.
Stolen Pixels #225: Public Service Announcement – Breen has An Important Message for gamers everywhere. He might make some off-color remarks, but he means well.
Experienced Points: What’s Wrong with Xbox LIVE? – Nothing really earth shattering. Just outlining that the disadvantages of Microsoft’s hermetically sealed experience are not the price, but the omission of freedoms which can be taken for granted elsewhere.
Shamus Plays Champions Online, Part 8 – I’m still re-running this series over there, in case you’re in the mood to read it again.
If you follow the MMORPG market closely, as I do, you may have noticed one very specific thread in regards to Star Wars: The Old Republic: It will be awesome. More than that, it will be the single greatest video game of all time, and will soundly crush the competition into a finely-ground powder that will then be baked into the bread of sandwiches for the EA execs.
Or, at least, that’s what all the pre-release press would like you to believe. Now, to be fair, almost everything written prior to the release of a game is probably a good deal more generous than it right well should be, but honestly, the hype machine for this game is enormous. I don’t think I’ve seen a single critical preview of the game, and the community is passionately supportive of it. Looking at the hype, it almost seems as if it would be impossible for the game to fail. As if The Old Republic were â€" dare I say â€" unsinkable.
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| There has never been a recorded case in history where this sort of attitude has caused any problems whatsoever. |
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “PAX Coverage: The Old Republic”
Here is part 2 of my interview with Josh and Mumbles about their last day at PAX. Once again, huge thanks goes to reader Gale for putting this together. Transcribing nearly 55 minutes of conversation is a lot of work.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Twenty Sided @ Pax, Part 2 – TRANSCRIPT”
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When Josh and I started to divvy up the games at PAX that we were going to cover, the line between our interests and experience became very clear. I’ve always been on the action side of the spectrum, while Josh knows a lot more about strategy games and MMOs. For that reason, it might come to a surprise that Tera was my favorite game that I played at PAX. This Korean made MMO was passed into the hands of American developers for Western distribution and has the potential to be a serious contender with Guild Wars 2 and Old Republic. It’s beautiful to look at and the combat is full of action and fun. In fact, I’m certain Tera will pull in gamers like me who aren’t attracted to the typical MMO targeting combat system. And, no one is more surprised about that than me.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “PAX Coverage: Tera”
Here is the second half of our conversation about what Josh & Mumbles saw at PAX.
Hello, person from the future. This space used to have an embed from the video hosting site Viddler. The video is gone now. If you want to find out why and laugh at Viddler in the process, you can read the entire silly story for yourself. At any rate, the video is gone. Sorry. On the upside, we're gradually re-posting these old videos to YouTube. Check the Spoiler Warning page to see the full index. |
I managed to forget to turn off my push-to-talk sound, which means there are faint beeps in the background. And the segment ran way long. And I sidetracked us in a few spots. Which, as the host, is the opposite of my job. Ah well. If we did these more often, I’d get good at them.
Spoiler Warning should return next week.
Here we are with part 3 of our history of pretend stuff that never happened. This series is eventually going to talk about the character Dr. Mordin Solus, but to make sense of his story I wanted to first make sense of history. And make the preceding cheesy pun.
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The Krogan were breeding like crazy. Left unchecked, they could wreck the galaxy. They weren’t driven by malice or greed. Like locusts, they were just doing what their species did.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect 2: Mordin Solus Part 3”
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
It's not a good movie, but it was made with good intentions and if you look closely you can find a few interesting ideas.
I'm a very casual fan of the series, but I gave Civilization VI a look to see what was up with this nuclear war simulator.
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
T w e n t y S i d e d
