GOTY

They said it couldn’t be done. They said the 360 wouldn’t be around long enough. They said it would take a decade. They said… a lot of things. It has been a tumultuous last year, but BioWare and Mass Effect 3 have done what couldn’t be done. Thus there is no other choice, no game that meant more, or will be remembered as much as Mass Effect 3, this years Game of the Year.

Sextet

"Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime, and every kindness, we birth our future." - Sonmi-451, 2144

Just saw Cloud Atlas, it was amazing.

Merry Christmas!

Because really how can you have Christmas without It's a Wonderful Life.

The Rise of CSR Racing

I’ve been ignoring mobile gaming for a while now. After testing it out last year when I first got my IPhone I had dismissed it out of hand. With the exception of a few games, mostly made by traditional game makers like Epic and SquareEnix; everything I played felt derivative. I dismissed mobile gaming because I felt that it would never rise to the level of quality that we see in console and pc gaming; that we’ve longed for and only rarely saw in handheld games like The World Ends with You for the DS. With the barest of exceptions mobile games have always felt like businesses first with a secondary, far smaller concern that they be fun. Enter CSR Racing.

100

This is the big 1 0 0. I’ve been pondering where to go from here. When I started this blog, I started it with the intent of merely marking time, to force myself to write and see if I had the goods. I’m at 100 now, I haven’t been tarred and feathered, and I’m still here.

I look at the industry and I see turmoil. Developers are losing their jobs, the print journalist is a becoming  extinct with magazines going the way of newspapers and dodo birds, and gamers get a lot of their information from the internet as opposed to just a decade ago when most everything was print. Things are changing in this industry we love and no one is quite sure how the dice will fall.

The Newsroom is one of my favorite new shows. The characters are always talking and putting it all on the line, even when things don’t always come out as they might have hoped. I asked myself, how can I do any less than fictional characters. So here’s my promise to you dear reader:

I will never pander to your fears, nor let the fear of an adverse reaction, change what I believe to be true.

I will always ask questions, and give strong, sound, well thought-out answers.

I will always be civil.

I will never give you anything other than my best.

I will always respect the reader and the material; if I’m writing about it, it will be excellent.

I will never use lies or allow the obfuscation of others to win an argument.

I will never pander to the loudest denominator.

This is my promise to you, I will never break it.

The Digital Game Monetization Summit

Gamesindustry.biz has an article about the business side of gaming, especially as it relates to the mobile market. Here are some excerpts I thought were quite interesting:

“If you look at what people successfully did on Facebook or the early days of mobile, a lot of it was about cheap user acquisition through the spammy virality that Facebook allowed for a while, or manipulations of the terms of service from Apple or Google on the mobile side. That's gone away,” said Greg Richardson, CEO of Rumble Entertainment. “Of the $50 billion that was spent worldwide last year on games, less than 10 percent was spent on casual content. These companies were really smart around analytics and monetization and very light in terms of product and content creation. I'm not sure any of those things are particularly sustainable. The future lies in going into the larger part of the market which is people that self-identify as gamers, and where the user acquisition and long-term value creation comes from making great games.”

The MMO Market 2012

Interview
Home Site

The Old Is New Again

I’ve been really enjoying the videos of FFXIV: ARR’s alpha testing. I enjoy the old school feel to the game. It’s pretty like only a Final Fantasy game can be, it’s also enormous and I can’t wait to explore the world that SquareEnix is building. All they need to do is tap into the joy I had playing FFXI and they'd be golden, as least for me. I loved the old Everquest vibe FFXI and FFXIV had. More than anything what I'd really want is a slightly, very slightly modernized take on FFXI. Eleven did so many things well; I hope they stick to their guns on how they wish to make a game. So many times I see games with mashups of the "best" feature of other games, but in trying to collect the best of the best, the game lost its soul; I don't want FFXIV to do that.

Great Game, Wouldn’t Play

You ever have a game that impresses you; a game that surprises you with how it does things. You sit down and take a look at the game and you are impressed, but when you get up from you’re seat you think to yourself ‘too bad, great game, wouldn’t play’.

A Tank’s Life

I love playing a tank character in MMO’s. I loved playing Guild Wars 2 but there is something positively seductive about playing a tank. It was one of the reasons I went back to The Old Republic. Everybody always goes for the damage dealers when they play. I understand that, after all my first 50 in TOR was a Juggernaut. I always like to say a Juggernaut in Ravage is the most beautiful sight in The Old Republic. I love the fact that my Juggernaut giggles when she procs a Ravage, it always makes me smile. But I’ve been on a tanking kick the last few weeks. In The Old Republic, none of the three tanking specs play alike.

The Best of the Best IV [Modern Movies]

The best romances in modern movies. Yes romances and not romantic, I loathe most romantic movies; blissfully ignorant of reality. You ever notice how most romance movies never tell anything about the happily ever after; it’s just assumed? Life is the afterwards and yet somehow they always manage to ignore it. I just finished Halo 4; the Master Chief and Cortana. One a genetically modified human who is seeing for the first time cracks in what defines him as the other an artificial intelligence is faced with an all too human mortality. Halo 4 dared to say that War had welded Cortana and The Chief into something even they couldn’t fully understand, something that they knew had meaning beyond all hope. For Cortana, the best romances in modern movies.