Infinite Lives

• Ars Technica – Opposable Thumbs – An edu-game that entertains? Inside The Curfew’s dystopia
  Commissioned by Channel 4’s Alice Taylor and written by RPS’s Kieron Gillen, this free-to-play point-and-click adventure game has great writing, terrific (if scene-chewing) acting, and high production values. A review at Ars Technica.
• Chris Hecker – Achievements Considered Harmful?
  Chris Hecker’s GDC lecture, now online! (via Christian Nutt)
• Gamasutra – In-Depth: No Female Heroes At Activision?
  ‘Black Lotus’ was allegedly stripped of its main character and ultimately reworked into an entirely new game, thanks to Activision’s semi-unspoken policy against female protagonists
• Laughing Squid – Nerdcore For Life, A Documentary About Nerds, Geeks, Dorks & The Hip-Hop They Make
  Now on DVD and Netflix, you guys!

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• ALBOTAS.com – ALBOTAS is now on Tumblr!
  Holy shit! I’m actually a little bit in shock! Does this mean no more indieclicks ad banner, though? Man. I mean, I have tried, and indieclicks does not just give that privilege out to people. However: now it’s a lot easier to read ALBOTAS from work! Yaaaay!
• DOS Nostalgia – Leisure Suit Larry (VGA) review
  Meant to repost this awhile ago (via @gnomeslair)! There is something unspeakably, face-punchingly endearing about Anatoly’s "DOS Nostalgia" video reviews, which themselves focus mainly on DOS-based point-and-click adventures. Here, Anatoly praises the good-lookin’ Leisure Suit Larry I remake.
• The Bygone Bureau – Editor’s List: Required Reading
  Wow. Um, I saw I was getting a little traffic from this particular link, and Bureau editor Nick Martens has absolutely paid me I think the compliment of my life. But all the articles listed here—this is a mid-year best-of-2010 reading list—are utterly due your time and interest.

  For instance: I know the Robin Sloan piece well, and David Cole’s "Metagames and Containers," an interactive demonstration of our human tendency to invent our own games and little rulesets, is a tremendous accomplishment. As a reader and gamer and Internet-user, you’ll find plenty more hyperlinks to articles sure to engage: there’s "Playing the Odds," "Toy Soldiers," and "On Tetris," to start. So follow the link to, uh, find all those links.
• SideQuesting – The Trouble with GameJournos
  I’m a little obsessed with GJAIF, but only in the same way I was—for years—obsessed with Perez Hilton (who will get totally burned today? Let’s watch and wait!). The unhappy truth is, I can’t help but agree. There is now more wrong with Ben Paddon’s humorlessly vindictive Tumblr than ever. Time for me to disconnect?

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• Joystiq – Atari’s Haunted House returns to scare PC, Xbox 360 and Wii
  If there’s one thing I’m internet-famous for, it’s talking about Haunted House. Like, I talk about it a lot, and I’m not even sorry. So what do we think? Does the Haunted House remake seem promising? (P.S. Thanks to the two of ye who Tweeted me.)
• Tiny Cartridge – Hotel Dusk sequel coming to the West
  ...or at least to Europe. But that means gorgeous, hand-drawn noir is sure to come to North American DSes, too, right? Right, you guys?

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• Indie City Games – The Indie City Games July 2010 Meeting
  Because the inaugural meeting was such a success, the organizers of Indie City Games have arranged a tidy, half-day symposium for current and aspiring game developers based in the Midwestern United States. Among those scheduled to speak at the July 24 event: Ben Collins-Sussman demystifies interactive fiction; Dai5ychain’s Jake Elliott demonstrates the possibilities of Flixel; Puzzle Bots designer Erin Robinson explains Adventure Game Studio.
• Game Journalists Are Incompetent Fuckwits – I think I’ve made my point, don’t you?
  You know, there have been other blogs before this one that subscribed to exactly the same theme, and those made me laugh. (When I worked at Ziff, a coworker constantly refreshed one such blog out of grim paranoia, scanning the page for his own name, and that also made me laugh.) This Tumblog never made me laugh, though—in fact, it made me a little bit uncomfortable—so alarmingly serious seemed its author. Which is too bad, because vitriol can be hilarious, so long as it doesn’t get personal. And I’d rather laugh and squirm uncomfortably than never ever laugh, maybe.

  In any case, author Ben Paddon now writes that he is closing up shop and hiatus-ing. I have strongly mixed feelings about it because, the truth is, I and a few friends have very actively followed Paddon’s ongoing catalogue of complaints, and as a reader, I’ll miss his blog. I suspect he’s exhausted himself by caring too much, though, and I do think the good games writing is more worth caring about than the bad.

  Morning edit: without so much as a dramatic pause, Paddon keeps blogging

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• Pixel Prospector – The Big List Of Indie Game Sites
  Whoa. (via superlevel.de’s @Fabu)
• McSweeney’s Internet Tendency – Roland Barthes Reviews "Pac-Man."
  Cross-saving Mike Nowak’s (@n0wak) hilarious del.icio.us link.
• GameLife – Spooky Platformer Eversion Gets Polished Up for Steam
  Guilherme Töws, whom I know best as "Zaratustra" from IRC channels, now has a game on Steam! And while you can still grab the freeware ‘Eversion’ from his website, the US$5 download promises redesigned levels and better graphics. Hop to it!
• Numberless – Sight Unseen
  Scott Jon Siegel wonders: with HD televisions and cable services, three-dee tee-vee, the iPhone 4’s "Retina Display," and now the Nintendo 3DS, how is a company supposed to market a technology that the consumer cannot see until he is, well, actually seeing it?
• Lost Levels – Review: Colors
  Oh, man, I can’t believe I am only just reading this. I have always dreamed of somehow getting ahold of the source code for this game, slapping it on an SD card, and loading it right up on my beloved Gizmondo. As I understood it back in 2005, ‘Colors’ was meant to be one of two planned ARGs for the Gizmondo handheld device: using cellular network service and the gadget’s built-in GPS, you were supposed to basically wardrive around town until you found another player to brutally murder in-game—kind of like foursquare for Haters. (Or, OK, the idea of cell phone drive-by social gaming is actually pretty old and, I think, Swedish.) Anyway, apparently the solo play in ‘Colors’ is not too great. Oh, well! I guess I’ll just go back to looking for the Gizmondo source code for ‘Johnny Whatever’ instead.
• Drunken Moogle – The Rainbow Road Shot Challenge
  The best looking worst idea ever.
• GameLife – Next post UK’s Channel 4 Uses Games to Teach Teens Happiness
  Games for good.
• Artful Gamer – The Changing Nature of Gaming Interfaces
  Excellent read that elegantly conveys, ultimately, my own horror at touch screen devices. Here’s Chris Lepine’s footnote on button-mashing: "I am using a very special meaning of the word ‘repression’ that Merleau-Ponty introduces in his phenomenology of the body. ... For more details see Lawrence Hass’s book Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, pp. 89-90."

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