On the off-chance that you’re not aware of it, I want to point you to my favorite gaming blog, hands-down: Rock Paper Shotgun. It’s a group blog, consisting of the best UK-based game journalists out there, and it’s entirely PC-focused. But just because you don’t live in the UK or you only own a Mac doesn’t mean that this blog isn’t worth reading. Kieron Gillen, Jim Rossignol, Alec Meer, and John Walker are all brilliant, incisive, and fucking hilarious.
Gillen introduced me to the parody text game Liberal Crime Squad through his amazing (and ongoing) series, “Rebel Without a Pause Key.” It’s made by Bay 12 games, the guys who brought you Dwarf Fortress. LCS is basically a testosterone-soaked recently-enlightened college freshman’s dream of what a liberal revolution might look like. And it’s hilarious. Unlike DF, this game is actually playable, yet it features the procedurally generated goodness that we’ve come to know and love. Gillen’s articles tell the story of his rag-tag squad of liberal ne’er-do-wells.
There’s an excellent interview with some Team Fortress 2 devs that shows you just how they managed to make such an amazing game. Also the guys wrote a bunch of articles about the 9 TF2 classes which are well worth reading if you actually play the game. While we’re on the Orange Box, John Walker actually convinced me that I needed to try Half-Life 2: Episode 2. This is no small feat.
Gillen, again, writing the article about sex and The Sims that I always wanted to write. And again, the article about humor in games that I always wanted to write. Filthy bastard’s living out my imagined career in game journalism before my very eyes. On the other hand, “game journalist” is possibly the only worse career I can think of than “game developer,” so I think I’ll let him steal my ideas.
And a recent article by Alec Meer that makes me actually want to play Call of Duty 4.
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Their interviews with the Portal devs were well worth reading as well. Very interesting read, especially for those of us outside the development world.
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