I’ve been enjoying this new “Optimistic Indie Developer” meme. You can see a bunch here. Generator available here.

These two strike a bit close to home!

This one, however, is my favorite:

Paging Shane Liesegang…

Tiny Subversions and Magical Wasteland proudly present:

Press Like This
a Magical Subversions joint

Show everyone just how hard life is as an indie game developer!
These real-life words succinctly capture the drama and the pathos of the struggling auteur.

You asked for it (by “you” we mean Petri Purho), and now it is yours to own.
Available in many colors, sizes, and styles.

Font is “Casual Encounter” by Anna Anthropy. Support her donation drive!

Hah! Somehow I missed this. Back in July, Sean Barrett released a Dwarf Fortress clone called Elf Treetop City. As the game’s multi-million dollar marketing campain puts it: “The only fantasy colonization simulation you need!”

Oh wait, I know why I missed it. Sean doesn’t publicize his games at all.

Heh. The lost books of Braid. Kinda predictable, still funny.

Not only is this some rather funny satire of reader-driven polls in video game journalism: it is also about video games and the color orange.

Eegra: The 10 Orangest Videogame Characters of All Time

(And do read all the way to the end. It gets really truly funny in the last two pages.)

Speaking as a Deus Ex fanboy, this is about 7,000x funnier than it has any right to be. (But you probably won’t find it funny at all if you haven’t played the original game.)

It’s also reminded me of something about the real opening cinematic to Deus Ex. The first time I played it was just a bunch of weird references. What’s UNATCO? NSF? Why are we talking about FEMA? What are those weird lizard things? Why is someone in a vat? Who is this Senator? There’s so much information in it out of context that by the time you’re dumped into the game you can barely remember any of what was said. And it works perfectly that way to set the conspiratorial oh-my-god-I’m-deep-into-something-much-bigger-than-me tone.

But the second time you watch it, it seems like the most spoiler-laden thing ever. “Wait, why did I trust the senator at all? He’s named as a co-conspirator in the opening cinematic!”

(via Rock Paper Shotgun)

This is too funny not to share. Chris Melissinos noticed a similarity between a dental camera and the Atari Jaguar. To the point where it’s pretty clear they actually used the same production mold!

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.

Speaking of Activision, it seems like The Onion’s game industry analysts have come up with a pretty good prediction of Activision’s future plans for the Guitar Hero franchise.

This is a funny story about Randy Farmer and Richard Bartle freaking out some kid in a game store, as told by Bartle (via Intelligent Artifice).

(Also, this is my 300th post, which means I’ve averaged a little over 10 posts per month, a little over two per week. Woohoo!)