I think that this is largely a function of the questions being asked about her book, though. Like, coming from the perspective of somebody who's read the book, this interview made Tampa seem to be much more exclusively a Serious Investigation or Cultural Critique than it really is. I mean, that is there, definitely.…

"IRL" Alissa is nothing like the character Celeste. Like, at all. But she definitely has a ... I don't know how to properly describe it without sounding like a 70-year-old. A dirty sense of humor, I guess? A big part of why I always liked the writing of hers that I saw is because you could picture a lot of it coming…

Also, you're going to have a Kinect that needs to be hooked up to it, which is another box. So it should really be called the XBox Three, or XBox Living Room Entertainment Center Filler.

It's not a matter of Kinect sucking or not sucking, in objective terms. The tech is incredibly cool all on its own. But I have severe doubts as to whether game developers will ever take the time to do truly great things with it. The original Kinect sold amazingly well when it was released, and yet we saw basically no…

No, it's wrong of them to make customers buy something as part of a package, merely because they've sunk millions (actually, I believe they acquired the company which created the technology for over a billion dollars) into it. They need to stop trying to push tech on us that has no real track record of good…

Oh yeah, I definitely agree that the launch price for the PS3 was way too high. I don't necessarily think that it was all due to the Blu-ray drive, but that certainly didn't help things. I think that Sony was just trying to take a more bullish position in terms of recovering more of the cost of the console up front.…

Actually, it was a great move because it was instrumental in Sony winning the war over HD disc formats. Sony gets a cut of every Blu-ray disc and player that gets sold. Microsoft is even planning on putting a Blu-ray drive in the XB1, which means that Sony would get a cut of every console and disc-based game they sell.

And there's nothing wrong with charging a different price for a game in a different region. The specter of imports is just that, a specter. And even if it were this enormous issue, I don't think that instituting this big, broad, region-locking scheme is the answer to it. They should consider reducing their prices if…

Microsoft's 180 on region-locking basically proves, beyond a doubt, that there's no real utility to it anymore. One month before they made the reversal, they were feeding the same excuses to the media. There's no way that they could have invalidated any those excuses in the period of a month if they were being legit…

Touch is brilliant as well. Adachi Mitsuru's character designs are fucking excellent.

But there's a distinct difference between Zynga and your ordinary game company. Zynga is far more a part of the Silicon Valley bubble crowd. The way they think, in other words, is not in terms of how they can improve what they actually produce in order to make their company more viable, but how many symbolic gestures…

Or he could be telling the truth. Apparently he was approached by EA, which certainly doesn't have a great rep with many gamers, but is nevertheless still an actual game company, unlike Zynga.

The problem is that Mattrick doesn't appear to be there to turn things around, but because he actually likes the direction of the company. In his statement to his new team, Mattrick lauded Zynga for bringing real "value" to customers' lives with games like Farmville. It's no surprise that somebody who would think of…

It's open to debate. But there's no doubt that what lies at the center of these disputes is the ongoing resentment about occupations and war atrocities. If you heard the rhetoric people use to talk about Dokdo in Korea, for example, you'd see that pretty plainly. Nobody is talking about strategic importance,…

A CEO is the person least inclined to actually give a shit about the actual games in this industry. If you're looking for people who are worth a damn, look at companies that don't have CEOs (i.e. companies that are too small to really have a position which qualifies for that title). You know, companies where the…

I just want to point out to all those people who are hanging onto the "You guys KILLED the innovation!" meme ... uh, yeah ... your beacon of innovation just left Microsoft to head up a "game studio" that specializes in publishing endless iterations of the same damned game mechanic (I use both of the preceding words…

I think it has something to do with the fact that, on Japan's side, there is little in the way of official recognition of wrongdoing. They still, for example, dispute the allegation that Korean females were used as "comfort women" for Japanese soldiers, and various other atrocities that took place during the…

Now that's what I call a downgrade. Either that, or Mattrick must be getting a big payday out of this, the hope being that his profile can restore investor confidence in Zynga. That's really the only angle I can see here. It's like when an out-of-left-field movie idea gets floated in Hollywood and they attach a big…

Anything that pisses off Debito is fine by me. Seriously, before I even opened the link, I could have guessed that his eager-to-be-offended ass would be referenced somehow.

A headset is something that should have come with the PS3, considering its pricepoint at launch. Oddly, Sony appears to have learned its lesson in this regard, and the PS4 has become the XBox 360 of its generation. Microsoft, on the other hand, has somehow morphed into early-PS3 era Sony by shipping at a more…