Extra! Extra! Read the late edition of eminently readable links known as TWIVGB.
This week Michael Abbott reveals the secret of Pokémon’s success – and you’ll never guess – it’s chocolate ice cream. That’s what he’s saying here, right? The latest Pokémon comes with chocolate ice cream. Misanthropic Gamer also wrote about ‘Pokey Men’ but he seemed to miss the chocolate ice cream. Misanthropic Gamer also wrote a manifesto this week, fingering the topic of the male nude figure and its troubled relationship with heterosexual men.
At Kotaku this week we have a pair of interesting essays, first Owen Good writes around ‘Religion in Games: Less a Leap of Faith, More a Suspension of Belief’, and then Brian Crecente looks at the modern movement away from undead zombies to fast, violent infected humans in ‘Infection vs. resurrection: the new science of the zombie’.
Jorge Albor writes about ‘Quarian Exiles’ and their place in the politics of the Mass Effect universe.
Greg Kasavin writing on his personal blog looks at some of videogaming’s proper villains.
At Pioneer Project, Michelle Baldwin writes about ‘Memories lost: the fear of saving’, saying
All of my most horrible gaming experiences have involved losing or almost losing save files, because anything that puts this fail-safe in doubt means the loss of my most precious commodity; time.
A long time fan of the semi-similar Indie Game Bingo, I was delighted this week to see Brinstar bringing her readers word of ‘Rapelay Bingo’ and the weirdly resurgent media coverage of a notorious game from several years ago.
One of the best pieces from this week’s aggregation is Tom Francis ‘On Screwing Around’:
So I’m in the playpen. On the up side: woo! Playing! On the down: I kinda want to fuck with the grown up stuff after a while. Because I’m not just a child, a scientist, and a brat. I’m a tempest of genuine malice, a power-thirsty psychopath with a crowbar of dysfunction. I want to tinker, but not just with the Meccano set. I want to break the car.
It sounds obtuse, but it does make sense, and he’s got an important bigger point in here about the future of the open world game.
Chris Breault at Post-Hype looks at Sound in Starcraft II and how certain sounds add an extra layer of potential enemy intelligence to observe. Sound in games is area of gaming I’m always keen to see more treatment of.
Andrew at the Little Bo Beep blog notes in ‘The Loneliness of Multiplayer’ [mirror] that, “sometimes multiplayer can exacerbate a game’s feeling of loneliness”.
Pre-empting Ellie Gibson’s much linked and talked about ‘Farmville Diaries’, Brian Longtin of the Under Culture blog wrote about ‘Being and Nothingness and Farmville’ [mirror].
Clint Hocking was interviewed by GamesTM in their March 2010 issue of the print magazine, (a magazine that I was incidentally also interviewed in) and it’s made its way onto the newly launched GamesTM’s blog.
Annie Wright at GamerMelodico find ‘5 Real-World “oddities” that could be games’ [mirror] – my favourite is the ‘Haken Continuum Fingerboard’ and the suggestion of a fingerboard-hero game.
At Rock Paper Shotgun this week Kieron Gillen got tired of an old argument and stepped up to defend the honour of the Computer RPG.
Lastly, The Border House has ‘A few more characters done right in FFXIII’ [mirror].
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