Isn’t it more like, your player started automatically skipping the first song of an album everytime you wanted to listen to it, because most people do not like song 1, and thus, well, you’re out of luck. I could get mildly angry about that. Or maybe I just sounds even more late night dorm-y than the original article.

But that’s the thing, innit? If they actually wanted to give you control, they would have that option. They could just leave the opening sequence in there and give you a range of options to deal with it, from auto-watch it in its entirety to auto-skip it completely. It’s increasingly not what they do, though — they…

To be honest, I think that semi-ghost writer/co-author Tom Bissell is an important factor in the quality of the book. I can highly recommend most of his books — Extra Lives is probably the best-written book about video games out there, but even if you’re not into the medium, his Magic Hours is highly enjoyable.…

You probably mean Miami Connection, but yeah, the comparison is apt. They’re both not only bad in a “somebody failed to achieve even basic competence in what is expected from a movie”. They’re more like “those people don’t have the slightest idea of what a competent movie should look like”. But it’s the fact that…

Sod it, I’ll just put a period in my username. Crafty! Seems to have worked this time. I’m here, then? And even in Technicolor this time. Oh what a time to be alive.

While "populist" and "populism" is used in different ways — and not only precise ones —, it definitely has a negative connotation in European media at large. I lately read a pretty succint essay (in German, by Jan-Werner Müller) which defined it as a phenomen characterized by a list of traits:

Oh, only realized now that you had already mentioned it a few comments above. But good to know that you're sold, too — it's one of the games that I'll probably back, just because I think that I'd really like to get an insight in the development of the game. I can't imagine that Swery writes boring updates.

Oooh, that's extremely interesting, thanks for mentioning it. Bonus kudos for linking to a video that puts the complete version of "Night On The Galactic Railroad" in the "up next"-queue. I wanted to re-watch that one for a long time — one the most hypnotic animated movies I've ever had the chance to see in a cinema.

I think that's one of my favourite things as well: how Nick and Girard started contributing to the site proper. That proud feeling of seeing them grow up, so to speak, but also the fact that this mobility just underlined how much all of the site — not only the commenters, but also the writers and editors — felt like…

I'll probably play… nothing, again. Seems like I'm still in the post-travel blues*, and since I hardly played games during the travels, it's hard to get into them again. I tried a bit of Night In The Woods, but the very first door bell-puzzle seemed so arbitrary that it took me right out of the mood. Which is a shame,…

I second that. It's one of the games that is vastly improved by customizing the map to your own playing preferences. I actually would have loved to turn off everything, even quest markers and so on. Both because it's such a lovely world to explore that I would gladly have paid more attention to it, being forced to…

Oh, this sounds… bird's intestines. Never anything good come out of bird intestines.

Asterix was not by Konami (it was Infogrames, Google tells me). But yeah, that was a perfectly fine, albeit a bit by-the-numbers platformer, aswas The Smurfs by the same dev. Which of course only underlines your point: there are stinkers among licensed games that were bad enough to give all of them a bad name, but…

Talking about influences: Chris Thursten wrote a really convincing essay on Eurogamer in which he argues that BoTW takes a lot of inspiration from PC games, namely the immersive sim. This is the genre that follows the ideal of creating a world with defined rules that do interact in a lot of different ways (not all of…

I know that Kickstarter has a bad reputation, but you know what?

He would have had a stronger argument if he based his claim on the 'game'-parts like the Skinner box elements. What was easier to attack was his insistence on how games could never be art because they could not reflect authorial intent due to their interactivity and the role of the player. A claim that is based on a…

With Platinum in a special advisor role for the combat design.

A house in the village I grew up in had to be abandoned due to a pretty serious fire. The inhabitants didn't go back to save all of their stuff, mostly because a lot of it was black and smelled a bit toxic. Of course, we didn't mind and took it is an opportunity to go spelunking. There was a NES console in the living…

This is actually why I still hold out hope for the day Nintendo realizes that one of their brightest futures waits on the path paved with indie devs. While AA(A) devs never will invest more than a fleeting thought in how to use those things, there is a whole scene of innovative indie developers who are doing silly and…

You take that back, sir! (If I ask in a civil and polite manner? Please?)
In our village, Zelda II was the definite and defining Zelda experience. Don't know why, but a local seller (we had to get our games from a camera store, of all things) sold the cartridge in all its golden glory, and not fewer than three kids got…