If there is one thing I have learned observing this medium for about 15 years, it's that betting on technical solutions for difficult problems only rarely works. Or at the very least, those solutions usually come much, much later than my naive, jetpack-propelled hopes used to think.

Yeah, that migration is still going on and strong. Come to think of it, I'm somehow happy that this kind of osmosis is possible. (It's better than all the journalists being sucked up by PR departements, in any case.)

Gauntlet II on the NES was very weird, in a way. We never fully got it, I think, but we thought that it was entirely too easy. (We also had read that if you stood immobile in place for long enough, all doors would open, and soon after that, all walls would turn into teleporters… so, maybe it was us, not the game.)

Absolutely not. The tutorial is very unefficient in that game. The main problem is that it let's you pass whether you succeed in the task or not — it tells you how to parry, but if you just end up mashing buttons and cutting everyone into pieces, it won't say so. The effect is that you probably won't even have…

I would even go further and say that much of the beauty of the game lies in the fact that you do not have to see large parts of it, and you will never feel like you have missed out on something. (I have finished Dark Souls without ever getting to see Ash Lake… I certainly do not feel cheated, even though I will return…

I'd like to second that. It's by far the best article I have read to understand what was so very special about this seemingly so mundane event. Well done.

Talking about Netrunner: Shut & Sit Down recently published a collaborative feature dealing with Leigh Alexander's attempts to learn the game.

With the years, it's becoming more and more clear to me that what you talked about is probably my favourite thing about video games, something that other media can't really reproduce in the same way. I think Tom Francis put it best when he talked about getting to hell in Spelunky:

Thanks a lot, I was too lazy to the research myself, but that's really interesting!

What's strange is that I remember a magazine writing about a cheat you could use if you put a Game Genie on top of an Action Replay. It would let you play as the four boss characters (or just one of them, don't remember) in the original Street Fighter II. Obviously, I couldn't check it, but it sounded like a forced…

The (still ongoing! support them! etc.) Kickstarter for the sequel finally had me start La-Mulana, which I already had bought twice before.

I heartily agree, as I had intended to communicate — even though that I'm not a bad enough dude to just say so. "Can't help loving" — more like "can't help the president", amiright?!

I don't know, I actually liked the fact that you could not max out every social link. It's something I also thought about when talking about Bully recently with the Gameologicans:

Not politically-laced at all, I have a big, although inverse interest in this piece of information as well. The review makes it sound like it could be a possible gateway back to the genre for me, but, you know… I struggled to see the end of both Mother 3 and Ni no kuni last year, and those were Mother 3 and Ni no kuni!…

[Since I have literally been too late to participate in any reasonable discussions during the last weeks, firing off comments that only the seldom lost soul might hear from afar as a faint echo, I'll allow myself to re-post something I wrote earlier today, in an article that was already dead… sorry, I hope that's not…

Edit: I "moved" the post over to Keyboard Geniuses, in order to maybe a get a few more answers… but I asked what video game titles people think of as genuinely great.

The day you get to your "Weird Russian" folder and start playing Pathologic, let me know… I might join you, and god knows it's a difficult journey to make if you're alone.

Just a bit of advice, but: are you familiar with the fact that Dark Souls on PC is, in fact, limited to a supbar resolution — but that there is a mod out there that let you choose the proper resolution for your monitor?

(I doubt that somebody is going to read this, but still…)

"Ghostbusters"! That was great, actually. Or at least, I remember it being great. (Very difficult, though…)