I am going to get shit on for this…

A few weeks ago, an article I wrote about the New Jersey Green Party Convention was quoted on Game Politics:http://gamepolitics.com/2008/04/14/report-green-party-presidential-candidate-blames-school-shootings-on-video-games/

I already posted a response to their less than kind words toward the Green Party, but since it was a whole week old and apparently that is the lifespan of interesting conversation on the internet (what do you expect when your average person has the attention span of a gnat?) I figure I’ll expand on it a little. So, YOU!, Game Politics Dot Com, your ass is on my plate today.

First off, there is enough punctuation in your “quote” to fill War and Peace if, for some reason, the periods and commas became animate and decided to get the hell out of Dodge. As a fellow writer, you should know that quoting (and misquoting) is a subtle art, and simply chucking in the ellipsis for the sake of grammatical correctness does not help your case. It gives away the fact that you are only pulling specific information out of an article that is otherwise unrelated to what you are talking about. That being said… (Read more…)

Some of you may know Andrew Mathas, the lovable Internet personality behind several videos making fun of how easy it is to misunderstand some songs’ lyrics. His first video, and probably the most well-known, lampoons Fall Out Boy. I know you’re thinking, “how can the serious, heart-wrenching lyrics of Fall Out Boy be taken lightly?” This is how.

He recently posted a challenge to the Internet community on his blog. If 250 people leave comments, he’ll play through every Guitar Hero game in a row on expert mode for charity. All the money he raises will go to the Child’s Play charity. And if he manages to raise $500, he’ll play through Rock Band on drums. So go comment on his post HERE and let’s get the kids some games.

At least in my experience, it’s not a common misconception that gamers are disinterested in politics and world affairs. In my experience it’s actually pretty true. And when you want to talk about games and politics in the same breath, everyone assumes you want to prattle on about how those violent, sexual games turn kids into serial killers who want to go Doom on their high school, Grand Theft Auto on the town, and Hot Coffee on the cheerleaders. Or you get those paranoid, anti-Dungeons ‘N Dragons groups who want to ban Everquest or World of Warcraft because it will eat your children. (Personal experience alert: I had a D&D buddy in high school whose parents burned his Player’s Manual because they thought, at night, while he slept, demons jumped out of it and danced around his bed. True story!) (Read more…)

I played a lot of the new Super Smash Bros. Brawl this weekend. The attention to detail and overall crispness of the game is fantastic. Every sound effect is clear, every hit is realistically flesh impacting. The last Smash Bros. game, Melee, is a lot faster and the characters handle harder, like they were carved out of granite slabs. The characters in Brawl have a looser, more floaty feeling to them, like they all huffed too much helium. (Read more…)

I’m a big fan of blending text, images, language, and video. Unfortunately, most things that try to combine all those things end up jumbled and terrible.

I’ve found two people who are doing it well, and they give me justification for the entire Internet.

Yahtzee from Escapist Magazine does a weekly video game review video that combines simple drawing, fast talking, and the occasional explanatory text snippet. The great thing about the Zero Punctuation videos is that they’re some of the funniest videos I’ve seen on the Internet. They also contain some of the best game reviewing online. (Read more…)

Ok, maybe this is old news to many of you… but here is a game that, for a brief moment of my life, I became quite addicted to. It soothed my turbulent soul like strains of Sibelius would have King Kong (had he been able to hear it over the biplanes).

Maybe it was the awkward, yet haunting, Japanese accents on the soundtrack that says things like “Get ready…” (tripping slightly on the “r” as many Asians do) and “Quicken”; maybe it was the pulsing soundtrack that brought me back to gin-soaked nights in a Williamsburg bar when techno still seemed new; maybe it’s that the game is actually quite short — about three minutes if you don’t know what you’re doing, five if you kick ass and get to meet the major bosses — good for my “I really shouldn’t be playing video games” attitude. (But of course, I played — sometimes for a couple of hours, getting better and worse by turns.)

Maybe it’s the weird “All Your Base Are Belong to Us”-meets-Kurt Schwitters style poetry of the text – ”HONTO are,” anyone? — or maybe I just like blowing shit up? The mysteries of the human heart.

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I hope I can be forgiven for still thinking the Experimental Gameplay Project is the greatest thing since Hot Pockets – the video game equivalent of comfort food.  

Started by four students Carnegie Mellon, the project’s immodest goal was to create something like 50 new video games over the course of two semester, utilizing a rapid prototyping technique which they cheekily try to explain, but don’t, on their site. It’s grown to take on new games, many by non-Carnegie developers, even after the original group moved on to bigger, more lucrative undertakings.

The great thing is that the games reflect the individual personalities of the creators, who didn’t work in teams but made their games, start to finish — music, graphics and programming — solo. Viva the auteur. Oh, and did I mention each game had to be completed within 7 days?

Probably my favorite so far has been “On a Rainy Day” (pictured) by Shalin Shodhan, which gets really weird when the hands start clapping for you.