Oh man, I knew this stuff was going to get complicated. I'll try to figure out the best way to approach this.

When I want to find a recent Sawbuck Gamer, I usually click on the "Games" channel (the green tab at the top) and scroll until I see one.

Bejeweled Blitz is indeed worthy of praise. I got the 500K+ medal for the first time the other day, and I felt like a god. In reality, all I did was rack up a bunch of multipliers and get lucky with a few of those crossways-zapping jewels at the end. Still, isn't that what God would do in my position?

There's also that slathering of social-network icons at the bottom of the article if you have friends who you think would enjoy it.

It's supposed to be every three weeks now; this edition was delayed a week because of a scheduling snafu. Glad you enjoy it!

By the way, WWOFTBBNR, I second your decision to play on "realistic," or at least dabble in it. Normal difficulty is very good, of course, but re-playing on realistic forces the player to improvise new tactics all over again. This really is a deep game despite a relatively short single-player quest.

That's true, and maybe "crouch" was the wrong word for me to use, but in practice, Fisher only really hunches down against the cover if you're holding down L-trigger. He might technically still be "crouching" when you let go of the button (depending on whether you have the toggle set), but the bad guys sure do have an…

I like stealth; for me the improvisational feel of the revamped play more than made up for the fact that stealth was no longer THE central dynamic. If you're looking for a pure stealth adventure, though, then yeah, you're probably going to be disappointed.

What a great list. My email address is listed on my AV Club user profile, so if you ever have a suggestion for the column (or any other burning games-related concerns that are too hot for the comment threads), send it my way. Believe me, I appreciate the input.

That's fair.

You're right. This was an editing error introduced by me; the reviewer had it right. It will be fixed momentarily.

Wow! That is very cool, Shih Tzu. Congratulations on your association with this fine game.

Although the bird in the afro is goofy, I do agree with the consensus that Sazh is the best character in the game.

That sounds about right, RB. My state of mind generally followed this pattern for the first couple days of play:

Yes, a black man with a large afro is one of the characters. A bird lives in his afro.

You joke about Metacritic, Rowan, but it's often the bane of my existence. One reason is the phenomenon Fyodor points out — the AV Club feels free to use the entire grading scale, while some other sites rarely go below 7, especially for AAA games. Metacritic's system gives the impression that you can compare…

I talked to Chris again today. He says that he pictures the game as an XBLA and/or PSN release, and also Steam at some point. But it's too far out to say which of these platforms it will end up on (although PC seems likely since it is being built on PC). It's playable both with a gamepad and keyboard+mouse. He thinks…

Stray Civ 5 Notes
Because I promised in the Thursday thread that I'd give some more Civ 5 details:

Tera: Shared overworld, yes; instancing, don't know the details.
SpyParty: We played it on two laptops with Xbox 360 controllers attached. That's a pretty common setup, and in this case I wouldn't take it as an indication of the platform that the final game will land on.

I agree with you. When Meier talked about the objections to a 120-40 loss as if they were laughably asinine, I had the same thoughts as you. It seemed like an indication that he had gotten so far into the pure mathematics of it that he had lost the forest for the trees a bit.