It appears that some of the most sought after content for Rock Band, the stuff that has been promised since the beginning, isn’t going to be available via “normal channels,” or, as it’s commonly referred to:  DLC.
The other week Bobby Kotick of Activision opined that maybe (paraphrasing) “Music companies should pay us royalties,” believing that the [...]

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For awhile I’ve been struggling to find a way to describe what I feel has changed about game design in recent years.  My own appreciation of games has been changing, and for awhile I thought it was just me.  I’ve been finding games like F.E.A.R. or HAZE or the idea behind Fracture as tired cliches. [...]

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I just read that the Still Alive map pack (which evidently has been available free this whole time for PC) that is due to be released for Portal on the consoles is going to be missing the voice of GLaDOS.  I recall when I learned a map pack was coming being super excited for a [...]

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Maybe it’s the old coot in me, but this preview comment by Richard Mitchell from Xbox360fanboy regarding his hands on playthrough of the Fallout3 presser just made the hair on my neck stand up and immediately put me off:
Some things must be made clear. One, I played Bethesda’s Fallout 3 today. Two, I have never [...]

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You may or may not have seen this by now, but some average Joe built a sentry gun out of some servos, a laptop, a paintball gun, and a whole lot of ingenuity (and I’m sure some optical sensor equipment).

But what I love the most about it is:

He chose to use the Portal Sentry as [...]

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Awhile back Clint Hocking wrote a pretty kickass piece critiquing Bioshock’s Ludonarrative Dissonance. For a long time I wasn’t sure what the hell he was getting at with the word “Ludonarrative,” and after I just recently did an interview for a gaming journalism student, I learned that he had combined the terms “Ludology” and [...]

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While I would like to investigate what GLaDOS says in this section (I invite players to unpack the audio and listen for themselves, or play through the final sections of the game again), I wanted to first explore what GLaDOS does throughout the game of Portal for this final critique and analysis of the game, [...]

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Every good story needs a love interest, and it should come as no surprise that Portal had one with some very comical overtones. The Weighted Companion Cube has captured the hearts of millions? hundreds of thousands that have played the game, myself included, and now can be purchased as lovable merch on t-shirts, or [...]

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Thanks to all of the great comments in the previous threads, I decided that I wanted to do one more final analysis of the entirety of Portal after the previous two articles, mainly so that I could either convince myself one way or the other regarding my theory on why GLaDOS tortures Chell (and therefore [...]

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Commenter Harvey James posted an interesting image earlier about his own research he started doing after seeing the GLaDOS Bondage piece from earlier this week, and I wanted to link it here, because as it turns out, Valve did use Botticelli’s Venus as their inspiration (as the director’s commentary stated) for GLaDOS.  It’s just really [...]

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