Gaming Links
Gaming legend John Cutter has an interview over at Gameshark with DQ reader Jesse Leimkuehler, and it's excellent. Cutter has an absolutely amazing resume as a game designer--one of the top five in history, in my mind--and the interview is well worth reading.Outstanding writer Lara Crigger has another article in The Escapist, this one titled My Big Fat Geek Wedding. Like everything she writes, it's both funny and poignant.
Here's another Escapist article from another outstanding writer, Russ Pitts, and it's titled The Force Is Strong In This One. The opening line should be enough:
Everything I know I learned from Star Wars.
This has to be one of the most unlikely game reviews of all time: a Pulitzer Prize winning author (Junot Díaz, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao") reviewing Grand Theft Auto IV in the Wall Street Journal. It's a tremendously interesting read (more interesting than I find Grand Theft Auto IV, really), and here's an example:
GTA IV is brilliant, but despite what virtually all the reviews claim, it ain't the revolution. If you played GTA III or higher, GTA IV won't exactly catapult you to higher plane of existence or induce metanoia. GTA III was the revolution, and established the grammar for the franchise.
That's absolutely true, at least for me. I still remember being absolutely shellshocked when I started playing GTA III. It was so stunning, so cool, so open. Yes, I quit playing about halfway through the game when I replayed a mission about forty times and gave up in disgust, but it was still a mind-blowing experience, and one that I fondly remember.
Also in all things Grand Theft Auto, N'Gai Croal and Stephen Totilo have a four-part discussion on the game, and Totilo has the best (and fairest) one-paragraph description of the Grand Theft series I've every read:
You and I have played dozens of hours of Grand Theft Auto games. We know them for the mangy untamed beasts that they are. We know that the only thing more impressive than the amount of polish Rockstar applies to each new cityscape of urban delinquency is the amount of these games that remains un-polished. The GTA games are incredible in scale and detail, deft in their portrayal of freedom's limits, aurally grand and as entertainingly violent, disruptive and calamitous as any games before them. Still, each game of the series pokes their players with rough edges: missions of awkward difficulty, controls that improve but can still frustrate, characters who don't seem consistent.
When Croal and Totilo have one of these "Vs." features, it's always full of moments like the one I just quoted--they're sprawling examinations with very few boundaries. Here'are the links to Round 1, Round 2, and Final Round.
Denis Dyack has talked almost unlimited amounts of smack in advance of the release of Too Human, and Chris Kohler has played through a near-final build. Here are his impressions.
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