Back in the elder days of Ultima Online, some friends of mine used to play on a roleplaying server. (I couldn't play it myself, because I did not have internet at my house.) That was actually pretty awesome. Since you could not actually play as other races, people would forge Orc masks, forming tribes, and everybody…

Might already have mentioned that, but it's likely that Ice-Pick Lodge will start a Kickstarter soon to do a remake. (They made a call for extras a while ago, asking them to be dressed in a way that strongly suggested it was about Pathologic.)

I just played it for the first time last year, wanting to relieve that old Zelda-magic I hadn't experienced in a long time… and I loved it.

Nobody will read this since it's at the bottom of the page, but I wanted to mention it nevertheless: Just two days ago, I rewatched the intro to Captain Future for the first time in decades, and I was absolutely amazed at how it's basically the opposite of everything else in 80s cartoons. It's slow, it's long, and…

I would have hesistated to mention Les revenants because it has not yet stood the test of time… but yeah, it's the first thing that came to my mind right after (or even alongside) the undeniable classics. It's just beautiful, and I figure it will be so even in a decade.

If you watch the trailer and listen very carefully, you can actually hear Michael Bay sobbing over the realization that orange, teal, and green do not mix all that well.

In the German dub, he says that he had lost a "Wurfstern", meaning "throwing star" aka shuriken. A shuriken! I was a wee lad back then who couldn't understand a word of English… but you better believe that it was the day my lifelong hatred for shitty German translations and cheap voice actors started.

While I'm usually more than wary to plug my own stuff, I hope it's ok if I do make an exception here. Sometime last year, I launched an (ongoing) series of articles, (long interviews, mostly) dealing with the thin, fuzzy line separating literature from videogames. I talked with the guy behind Black Crown, for example,…

You could always save the money and read Richard Cobbett's abridged version instead. Shorter, and probably also funnier!

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.