Last week a Stanford librarian and a rather distinguished four-member committee released a list of the 10 most important video games of all time, recommending them for enshrinement in the Library of Congress. (Yes, this was last week. What, I was on vacation.) The New York Times has the story here. The list went as follows:
* …
Freshly back from vacation, I’m going to “kick things off” with a pro forma link to some piece I wrote for the magazine! Actually this is a hugely important piece to me, in a personal way, because it’s about Douglas Hofstadter, the guy who wrote Godel, Escher, Bach (no, we’re not doing umlauts today), an incredibly brilliant, funny …
Here’s the demo:
OK, so this is cooler than I expected (though the Second Life-meets-XBox Live thing was essentially correct): a fairly clean, sane 3D environment for socializing, multi-player matchmaking, and sharing media. All to a chill-out ambient soundtrack, narrated by some chick with an anglo-australian accent.
For …
There’s an incredibly vague piece in the New York Times today about Playstation Home, Sony’s answer to Xbox Live. “As players progress through a game, they will unlock various virtual prizes that they can then show off to friends and rivals, the executives said.” According to an earlier Kotaku post, this is implemented as a little …
My piece on 300 is in this week’s Time. You can shell out for the print edition, or you can enjoy its pallid digital ghost here.
I knew I wanted to write about 300 the minute I saw the trailer — the minute I saw the shot where the Spartans are slowly, inexorably backing the Persians off a seaside ledge — bodies tumble off the ledge …
I remember being assigned a review of Manhunt with the warning that it would be the next great hyper-controversial lawsuit-engendering game, a la Grand Theft Auto. And it is pretty brutal, what with, you know, the slitting of throats with stray shards of glass and such. But as with Bully, it never actually generated much legal paperwork …
This really is pretty cool: Kratos vs. Giant Gold Guy With Blue Glowy Eyes. Especially given that it’s on PS2. Pulse-pounding previous-gen action! Some further notes on the battle here.
Props to Kotaku. Now they can get back to posting pix of cakes baked in the shape of Zelda characters. Oh snap!
The finalists for this years Independent Games Festival are up. Usually I just ignore this kind of thing, because I’m a lazy bastard and consume whatever corporate America shoves down my limp, lifeless esophagus.
But for some reason I clicked on a free Flash game called Samorost 2. Wow. It’s incredibly atmospheric and beautiful and charming.
GameSpot and GameSpy are both posting their Most Wanted Games of 2007 lists. Why don’t they just go ahead and merge already? Ooh, I am totally registering GameSpite.com!
GameSpy is stingily doling its list out day by day over the course of this week, but GameSpot’s full list is up. To wit:
BioShock (2K Games/Irrational Games – Xbox …
Today I woke up and thought to myself, holy dammit, I’m going to stand the blogging world on its head with a post that reinvents, nay, transcends the very blogging medium itself. Or I could just complain about Gears of War. I flipped a coin, and waddayaknow?
But seriously, I don’t quite have the sloppy make-outs for this game the way a …
