How Time Flies

Hey Medium Difficulty isn't dead! And they let me put out a hit-job on some easy targets like Ben Kuchera and Randy Pitchford and PA and Kotaku. Maybe it's old hat, but sometimes you wanna just revisit the classics. But now, also, another thing.

So: one year of this nonsense...

Vision Quest

I'm not a big fan of Kill Screen. I think I've made that pretty clear here. They've done several pieces which I enjoyed quite a deal, but they mostly came early in their run, and often from non-regular contributors or interviews carried on the strength of their subjects. As a bit of a confession, my big 2012 In Review joke was, in great majority, pull-quotes from Kill Screen; I'm talking well over half with a couple of repeat appearances. And to think I once bought a T-shirt off them as a starry-eyed dreamer.

So I'm bored and spinning my wheels, so why not fling a little more mud in their eyes? Everyone loves a scrappy underdog, right? Better than adding another voice to the din surrounding that torso fiasco, anyway. Thankfully I had the Kill Screen vision statement re-tweeted into my timeline today, so I got a good chuckle from the short form. But I felt that wasn't just being snide, but unfairly cheap. So why not really take a fine toothed comb to where their mission falls apart at the seams? I can even give it a score on a 10-point decimal scale like their estranged mother, Pitchfork! So, have I wrongly misaligned our critical community's Kid A or been overly charitable to our Travistan? Let's find out... together.

Another Goddamn PAX East Diary (But Different)

I figure I should probably get back into the swing of writing things before I lose any sense of personal momentum. For the sake of easing back in, I figure the best thing to do is cobble together my snatches of experience from Twitter posts and/or drunken photo ops and compose them into a singular overarching idea.

I didn't have a Media pass; I was at a Holiday Inn with three good friends. I didn't go to any of the major panels or booths; no Ken Levine, no Casey Hudson, no Bioware, no Assassin's Creed, no Max Payne 3. Patience is a virtue, but there's only so much any of those spectacles are worth. I generally drew the line at 30 minutes to an hour, and had a far better four days for it. So, what did I do, see, think, experience? Who did I meet at talk to? We'll get into that. But, as someone who's now a repeat visitor to this thing, consider this an alternative guide on what to do.

Pictured: idiots who are doing it all wrong.

Three Girl Rhumba

Look I promise the whole "name articles after songs" thing is not going be a pattern. It's just… it's fitting okay get off my back.

Anyway: women in video games! They make them, they play them, they review them… and apparently lots of people seem to have a very hard time dealing with any of that. If you were to believe the rest of the Internet, behavior towards women primarily falls under two major categories. One is the "white knight", in which you cannot agree with a woman or enjoy anything a woman does unless you want to have sex with her and think expressing your praise will lead to it. The other doesn't seem to have a particular name, but it generally involves verbal sexual harassment from a position of perceived anonymity. So let's have a look at three instances where the latter group made its presence felt and then see if we can't hone in on a cause!

Some people believe that other people believe this.

In The Flesh

With these stories finally told, we can at last answer the primary question: so what?

Consider it a parable. The world of video games, as it stands today, is a very warped and bizarre place that is slowly but surely forming the black hole center of a cultural quasar. Rather than engage with the world around it on the terms of reality, it chooses instead to create an entire supporting psuedo-culture, either by bending existing media to its will or making new abominations to further extol its own virtues. "Hardcore" players of plastic instrument games are generally attracted to metal because of its difficulty as gem sequences, and clamor for video game-related novelty songs because their subject matter reinforces their lifestyle. It's why people remember "Jordan" by Buckethead from Guitar Hero II, "Through the Fire and the Flames" by DragonForce from III, and why when given the keys to a content pipeline in Rock Band there came a surge of Jonathan Coulton and Evile. To be fair, though, those are also some of the artists that sold the best, so they at least deserve credit for knowing their audience (themselves).

"Note Shuffle", i.e. "Just Put The Gems Wherever"

Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 3

The Rock Band Network, or RBN for short, was an extremely bold move with great potential at redefining the kind of music that could be made available for band rhythm games. As of this moment, any act with master recordings and legal reproduction/sales rights to their songs can, with time and effort, make their music into a playable file, or "chart", of for-profit downloadable content for the Rock Band series. The entry cost is relatively low, even with hiring outside parties to do the charting and the added cost of piggybacking onto Microsoft's XNA indie development distribution program; most songs are capable of at least breaking even financially under the right circumstances. Acts from well-respected independent labels from Sub Pop to Fat Possum to Polyvinyl to Barsuk have all released material at some point or another, and even Matador and EMI made attempts to release music through this alternative pipeline. This was a major opportunity at expanding the song selection exponentially, and hopefully appealing to a wider swath of people and realizing the promises of series-as-platform on a new level.

Ugh.

Suffice to say, this did not happen.