Oh, it's totally just a mistake on my part. It was just kind of a weird experience for me since Mance is mentioned in the first season in an urban legend-y way. Lots of "Reports say there's a king beyond the wall! His name may be Mance Rayder! They say he's united the clans!" But it's a lot of he-said-she-said which…

Preamble to Saturday's fan-theory discussion: until he appeared on-screen partway through S2, my impression was that Mance Rayder was a pseudonym and his real identity was a secret.

Minor news on the indie front: Massive Chalice by Double Fine will be making its way to the Xbone. It'll be after the PC release (slated for September), but so far it's shaping up to be an interesting (if lean) combination of the eugenics of Crusader Kings 2 with the tactics of something like XCOM.

A small part of me is disappointed that the Kinect has been relegated to the gutter; it really highlights the extent to which big-budget gaming has shifted into "risk-averse" mode. Most of the older console generations marked big shifts in capabilities — the SNES introducing the 4+shoulders button layout, the…

it's even more than that, even. iTunes does a better job of promoting the next big thing, and the community around iOS gaming is, by all accounts, much less fragmented than Androids, in part because iTunes is the only place to buy games. On top of that, Google's position has historically been "We don't want your…

Still, you figure what, 80% of the animations can be reused without modification, with the remaining 20% needing some tweaks from the work already done for the male animations?

Extra disappointing since his favorite Chicago burrito place isn't terribly good.

Part of it was also the fact that Bioware used the same animations for Sheperd regardless of sex to reduce the amount of work, and the result seems to work much better for Femshep, than it did for Meershep. (At least in casual conversation.) So not only is his voice acting not as good, but he makes some weirdly…

Yeah, I didn't think the game had much going for it beyond the spoooooky art. My reaction at the end of was pretty much just "I think I played this before on Kongregate. Possibly multiple times."

I'd challenge you to do it on the original. Even when back when I actually played a lot of Tony Hawk games, I remember going back to the first one and just sucking tremendously because I had gotten so used to manuals.

Ooh, that should be fun. The whole game is fantastic, but Chrono Trigger gets extra credit from me for having such solid side quests - it really feels like you're going out and doing good for the world/your party members rather than just doing random minigames and beating capital-w Weapons. You've got a couple…

I think my muscle memory game has got to be Mario Kart 64 at this point. As part of spring cleaning, I actually hooked up the Wii and finally tried Mario Kart Wii using a Gamecube controller, since I never finished unlocking all the characters. The result? Total disaster. MK Wii's manual drifting is nothing at all…

The ASCII Pad controller for SNES has a setting that will automatically press a button at the controller's Turbo speed. It turns out to be completely perfect for bomb jumping. I don't know if I'd have ever beaten the game as a kid without that.

I do think "gonzo power fantasy" was part of the goal, but it's interesting because I've seen the game catch some flak for not satisfying the gonzo power fantasy of the original X-COM, where you could (apparently) win late-game missions with devastating psi powers without even leaving the troop transport. An arc with…

Love it or hate it, Dark Souls was celebrated in part for ignoring modern game design trappings, whether it's the unforgiving checkpoints, lack of objective markers, or instant-kill opportunities. What current design trends would you like to see go away? Have you you ever had to insert elements you dislike in a game…

It's a good one, but not the only one. The Wheel (link) is an interesting prospect that was put together by a team official and has apparently gotten some traction around the league. It bases draft picks on a yearly cycle rather than regular season performance. And if there's one thing big American sports leagues are…

The best part is screaming "BOWSER REVOLUTION" and stealing everyone else's coins.

I recall the marketing for Assassin's Creed talking a big game about digging into pictures, maps, and historical records of ancient Jerusalem to make it as true-to-life as possible.

The one interesting thing about Metacritic in this case is that there's a huge divergence between critical scores and user scores. Usually everything evens out to the same (terrible) scale, so to see an 8.2 Critical score and a 6.0 user score indicates a pretty significant chunk of the userbase who think the game…

Is there a comprehensive list of Aiden/Braden/Jaden/Kaiden usage in gaming? I feel like I need to quantify the plague to even begin to understand it.