essay

With Video Game Writing, The Devil Lives In The Details

In DmC, the new reboot of Capcom’s Devil May Cry series, hero character Dante is the offspring of an angel mother and demon father. He looks human but is of another breed altogether, a species of celestial rarity called nephilim who are incredibly powerful.


The Video Games That Showed Up When I Least Expected Them

A controller gets put down. A disc gets shelved next to dozens of others just like it. But, sometimes, the game lingers. It creeps into your sleep and live on in the backs of your eyelids, demanding ever more from you.


The Games For All Of Us

With respect and admiration for, if not apologies to, the late Ernie Harwell, here’s something adapted from his famous Induction Day speech at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Aug. 2, 1981, which itself was adapted from this 1955 essay.


The Game May Be The Same, But Here’s Why The Controls Change

Editor’s Note: In my sports column Sunday, I noted a rather significant change to the control system in NBA 2K13 and pondered why sports video games remake their controls more often than other genres, including series that are now releasing annually. Zack Hiwiller, himself a former designer of sports video games, sheds a good deal of light on this issue in the following response. — Owen Good


Should We Know Our Own Strength — Or Any Rating — In Video Games?

On Friday,Madden NFL 13 revealed the ratings for every quarterback in the league, inviting the usual pointless discussion about who should be ranked ahead of whom and why.


Load ‘Great Memories’,8,1

The Commodore 64 turns 30 today. Reams of copy have been written in tribute to this machine. It wasn’t the first personal computer, but it truly was one that democratized them to millions of middle-class households. Releasing in August, 1982, it stepped into the breach a year later, when console video gaming, as we knew it then, utterly collapsed.


No Game Save For My Backup

Three days home, sick, with the complete understanding and sympathy of my employer. Fully conscious and ambulatory, with some grade-A camaro-drivin’, country-music-songwritin’, shirtless-guy-on-COPS prescription narcotics on the bathroom sink. Can’t go outside and enjoy this nice day, cause I’m sick. Can’t work, I’m sick. Can’t brush my teeth, put on deodorant or underpants or mow the lawn or call my mum, sick.


A Rite Of Passage In The Legend Of Zelda, Now Shared By Father And Son

A great dad makes sure his son is better than he was. If you measure fatherhood by the accomplishments of offspring, then I’ve got substantial evidence that I’m the world’s best dad. Well, one of the best, at least. Outside of maybe George H.W. Bush or Archie Manning.


Colouring Outside The Lines Of Sports Video Games’ Pretty Picture

Brent Nielsen has a corner office catching 270 degrees of Florida sunshine, and his face lights up whenever you tell him a good golf story. Especially one that happened inside the game he makes, Tiger Woods PGA Tour.


Video Games’ Strangest Disappointment: When The Ref Doesn’t Screw You

This Saturday was about as throwing-things livid I’ve been over a sports contest in a decade. The last time I was this angry was in 2003, when Jorge Posada doubled off of Pedro Martinez to tie the seventh game of the American League Championship Series. I kicked a rubbish bin across the newsroom of the Rocky Mountain News and cursed Grady Little and his mother. Brian Crecente asked the supervising editor to reprimand me.


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