Took me 1.5 playthroughs to determine how I felt about Fallout 3. Eventually decided I hate almost everything about it except the atmosphere it cultivates when you’re all alone wandering ruins/wastes (these opportunities are all too few since there’s stuff to fight everywhere.)

I mean, this one should be completely obvious. If your game can (and should, sometimes) have male characters who are old, fat, scarred, disabled, unrealistically muscular, or rock monsters then your game can (and should, sometimes) have female characters who are old, fat, scarred, disabled, unrealistically muscular,…

This is kind of how advertising works everywhere else though isn’t it? If you’re an established name, you can do stuff without displeasing your advertisers because people are tuning in for the name (you have the power in this relationship). If you’re not a big name though, the advertisers have the power and since they…

That Youtube allowed people to get paid for talking about literally anything they wanted to talk about is kind of an anomaly in the history of advertising. That big companies don’t want to be associated with nonsense like “here’s why one race is just better than all the others” is hardly surprising.

All marketing is misleading, but to actually prove advertising is “false” is extremely difficult. I get that people feel bad when they are manipulated by misleading advertising (this is the purpose of advertising), but it’s probably illuminating to consider what actually constitutes “false advertising.”

I really think that things in pre-release trailers or streams ought to be treated as “these are things that we hope to have in the final version” and not “these are things we are promising will be in the final version.” Game development in essence consists of triage between three lists: 1) Stuff you absolutely need in…

I miss when Fallout knew how to deal with its silliness (inherent or introduced) by either taking it seriously enough that it turned into a point about something (e.g. all of Old World Blues) or just threw it away immediately after it happened leaving the character to wonder if that was just a hallucination (e.g. the…

You could have said approximately the same thing about Bioshock Infinite when people voiced concerns before it was released, and we saw how that turned out.

It’s beyond bizarre, however, that they’re choosing to market the game with the social allegory stuff (which will be good or bad only in the full context of the way that the game presents it) and not “you’re a cool cyborg and you can sneak around an do stuff.”

I like this idea, but I wish it wasn’t limited to 5th edition.

1) Fallout: New Vegas

Apparently a lot of people don’t understand the effect of the Watergate scandal from a historical perspective.

Hooray, this is easily my favorite game of the last generation. Shame that we probably won’t get mod support on it, since there are some really outstanding mods for New Vegas on PC.

First off, Nixon was not impeached. He resigned because he was almost certainly facing impeachment. The popular perception of “Impeachment” is that it’s synonymous with removal from office, but it is not. An impeachment of a public servant is simply a formal finding of wrongdoing, it implies no particular punishment…

The “ruin my career” bit seems to point clearly to a Gamergate reference, rather than a Watergate reference. The former harassment campaign was explicitly an attempt to ruin Ms. Quinn’s career, whereas the political scandal is more synonmous with making careers (notably Woodward and Bernstein, but the Washington Post…

One of my major complaints about how Bethesda has handled Fallout was their near-complete lack of interest in humanizing Raiders beyond “they’re cannon fodder with Mad Max inspired fashion choices” and completely stripping whatever tribal identity they might have had. Strictly speaking, in Fallout terms, “Raiders”…

Color me genuinely confused as to why Zelda, (male) Link, and Gannon (a woman and two men) is “balanced” but Zelda, (female) Link, and Gannon (two women and a man) would not be.

This is a really common tactic in your anti-feminism/gamergate adjacent troll hives. Generally, though, it’s mostly fake tweets. Unfortunately this is also a really effective tactic because a lot of people hang out in those channels in order to hear what they want to hear. So you can see waves of harassment towards…

I’m not sure that the videogame that would make a great film adaptation exists yet. To my mind, in order for a video game to qualify for a tremendous adaptation to screen it needs to pass two tests:

I believe that blaming review scores for toxic behavior among fans of games or for the moneygrubbing behavior of publishers is probably confusing the symptom for the cause.