Next best thing: Paste magazine still exists as an online presence even though their excellent print magazine is dead. They even do pretty good video game coverage. Like there's this piece about the final hours of Star Wars Galaxies:

I hope he *does*. Anything that offends and infuriates Rick Santorum is wonderful.

*After hearing that many Chinese learn sex-ed from Japanese adult videos, the former blue movie star replied, "Since adult videos are meant to satisfy fantasies and many parts of are faked to fulfill that purpose, they can't be considered as a manual for proper sexual education.*

Think you're pretty badass at Rhythm Heaven Fever? Up the ante this way: Turn your back to the screen and play using the sound only. No visual cues.

When I'm playing Rhythm Heaven and I'm hitting the beats one after another, bam-bam-bam-bam, it's . . . it's like "A Beautiful Mind". I see numbers in the air. I understand it all. ALL of it, I tell you. I see where matter merges into energy and energy into thought and thought into the curvature of space itself. At…

I was all skeptical. "Oh no," I said, "I can't get back into RPGs. Too much grinding. Too many boring random encounters. Too many tiresome tropes."

Ending of Sands of Time

Maid cafes are so very much a parody of themselves. They're like a self-assembling art installation where neither the owners, employees, nor patrons know that they're not actually real people but rather part of the scene itself.

No. I will not help you, fighting game community. You long ago burned RIGHT through my goodwill when you encouraged masculine posturing ("BOO-YAH! How ya like me now?!"), questioning of others' sexuality, and the easy equation of worth as a human being to ability to hit buttons in a particular order.

Does your Wife feel okay about you giving your Fiance gifts?

I dunno, there's something to be said about a game that knows when to quit. There seems to be no firm idea about how long a game 'needs' to be and in the absence of such consensus, it seems like things trend toward the ridiculous (i.e. how long does FFXIII take at a minimum? 50 or 60 hours?).

I know, really. As it stands right now, it seems like each genre of game has One Official Mode of multiplayer interaction. If it's MMO's it's raiding-n-guilding. If it's RTS's it's ridiculous fastclicking South Koreans. If it's FPS's it's a core of absolute Slayers who do nothing but play 80 hours a week and headshot…

They ARE colorful, though.

I've said this so often that the protective coating of Funny is starting to wear off and it's becoming just plain old True. But here goes again:

At this point, the best way to publicly assure people of your non-racist bona fides is to admit honestly, "I have not a single black friend."

*...his snobbish PS3 collection*

That and/or those of us who've spent much of this console generation living in Wiiland.

I think Western RPG designers are all at some point approached by the powerful Color Mafia, who tightly control the supply of the world's Color, and are told rather smarmily that they've got a real nice game studio here, be a shame if anything happened to it, but them being smart boys and all, they'll know not to mess…

*...and general palette of browns and grays...*

Damn, you beat me to this.