Apr 14, 2021Reckless Hate — Shadow of WarThere are two kinds of bad fanfic, and Shadow of War is both of them at once at war with each other, and that sort of rules except when it does not. The worst kind of fanfic is by someone who clearly loves whatever the original work was, but fundamentally…Shadow Of War8 min read
Oct 1, 2020Copland — Wasteland 3The world ended in nuclear fire and the only ones hard enough to survive were the cops. Ms. Wong is a recurring annoyance in Wasteland 3. The landlady of the dingy Sans Luxe Apartments (get it?), she lives in squalor in an apartment full of filthy furniture, sleeping on a…Wasteland 37 min read
Sep 20, 2019The Direction The Bullets Are Coming From — Gears 5I got completely lost in the Outsider village in Gears 5. The Native-coded protagonist, Kait, is here to convince her surly uncle and the rest of the townspeople to join up with the cryptofascist COG. The locals aren’t too keen: they’re proud of their self-reliance, or understandably don’t trust the…Gaming7 min read
Aug 25, 2019Doki Doki Literature Club is a Video GameFine, you win. Let’s dust off this old relic I haven’t touched in a couple years to talk about a game from 2017. Doki Doki Literature Club appears to be a conventional renai game, a vaguely-Japanese high school’s after-school reading club. The personality-free faceless protagonist pursues one of the…Doki Doki Literature Club6 min read
Dec 26, 2017Some Games in the Year of 2017I didn’t have the money for AAA games this year. Game development costs creep up year after year, but while publishers look for new money beyond the $50, $60, going on $70 price tags on new titles, I don’t even have that much. …Videogames10 min read
Jun 8, 2016Stellaris: the cricket people kept wrecking buildings forever. They knew no other way to live.In one of my first games of Stellaris, I conquered a couple of planets from a neighboring mushroom-person empire. On one of these planets, the mushroom colonists coexisted with a species of non-sentient humanoid crickets. Both the truffle people and the (non-sentient!) cricket people rose up in revolt against my…Science Fiction7 min read
Oct 11, 2015Millenial Pledges — Do These Things or ElseSo written are these commands from a gross old man, but not quite as gross or old as Chris Erskine of the Los Angeles Times. Heed my demands, puny younglings, in order to earn the esteem of a humor columnist for a newspaper struggling to maintain relevance and readership. I…Minimum Wage4 min read
Jul 4, 2015The Myth of Objective Game JournalismA common demand of both fans and professionals in video game circles is “objective” game reviews. Often without any further explanation of how that is possible or desirable, just a vague implication that bias should somehow be avoided.. This idea is approximately as old as the idea of making video…Editorial4 min read
Nov 16, 2014GamerGate and the New MisogynyGamerGate is a movement with more different aims than it has members. As a disorganized, headless mass, everyone has their own reasons for participating. These reasons range from proclaiming the diversity of video game players to somehow dealing with supposed radical feminists and “professional victims.” While dealing with supposed corruption…6 min read
