I just realized while playing a bit of Soul Calibur 4 at work that the Apprentice (or whatever Jr. McEmo’s name is) is really nothing more than a re-inventing of Luke Skywalker.
Granted, he looks nothing like Luke, but he’s young, emotionally driven, and pouts when he loses.  I fully expect him to whine about wanting [...]

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Or really the Not Greatest Hits Edition.  While I’m at a loss for things to say this evening (and the past few days), I’ve been poring over newsbites and games that just came out thinking back about some of the things I’ve written in the past, and I felt these old posts that went mostly [...]

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While I was on the phone with EA Customer Support last night ordering my second replacement guitar, the Customer Support rep gave me a very helpful piece of advice regarding replacement hardware:
By September 2008, they will no longer be honoring Rock Band 1 hardware extended warranties.
I don’t know if this was a known date, talked [...]

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There’s been tons of articles written ad-nauseum about how video-games do or do not impact people psychologically, most of them seemingly designed to reach a pre-determined point of view, backed up by extensive “research.”  I’m no scientist, so I’m only going to leave research in scare quotes and move on and leave the statistical debate [...]

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Oh, Kotaku, how I love it when you try and be intellectual.  To be fair, I love Leigh’s and Maggie’s think pieces (they’re the most intellectual editors they have), but Kotaku’s demo is just so overly fan-boy driven that their advertising (and commenters) tend to undercut any attempt at seriousness with a healthy dose of [...]

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Okay, fine, we will chalk this one up to pareidolia right off the bat, but I had to document this just to get it out of my system.  Consider this my group therapy session.  I show you what I see and you laugh in my face.
My wife likes having birds around the house to look [...]

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Maybe you’ve heard the news by now, if not, swing by Giz and check out the horrible awful bootleg for the teaser of TR2N that was shown at nerd prom earlier this week.
Normally, I’d be nonplussed about a TRON sequel (the TRON 2.0 game was a decent enough FPS, but a horrible shadow of what [...]

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Stop me if I’ve gone on about this before, but I’ve been wondering if user created content (specifically on consoles) is something that we really want to be courting as an industry, or even as gamers.
On the surface, yeah, this sounds like a very good thing.  I think mainly because we’re all operating from the [...]

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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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Got the strangest comment today, and although I’m remiss to give anyone free advertising, ARGs are technically games, and this is a game design site, so I figured I’d bite and throw this out there for folks to chew on.
The comment in question was posted by one “Gashel,” who uses the email addy gashelandjoan@rocketmail.com. [...]

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