Friday, January 23, 2009

Friday afternoon tidbits

No cute intro this week. Let's get to it.

-The news of layoffs at EA's Black Box studio must have been a punch in the gut, coming as it did on the same day that the company's Skate 2 hit stores. Black Box also made the apparently terrible recent Need for Speed games, but Skate is the real deal. Hopefully its core team is sticking around for the third game. Good luck to everyone else there in the hunt for work.

-Denis Farr questions the accepted wisdom that Gears of War is homoerotic. Interesting read, although you're never going to convince me that a bunch of sweaty, muscular dudes crouching together is anything else.

-How bad is Sony doing? So bad.

-Duncan Fyfe takes on Yakuza 2, as only he can.

-Jeremy Parish always does great, high-minded work, but a list like "The Worst Presidents in Gaming" is what brings the links.

-Speaking of which, are we what we link? I've always assumed that when I link something, the implication is that I endorse the quality of the article, not necessarily that I agree with the argument. Context helps, I guess. It's a bad idea to assume that people know when you're linking something ironically.

-I approve of Hardcasual's reinvention as Onion-style satire. Of note: "'Parent Killer 64' Had Nothing to Do With Me Killing My Parents," and "UGO Reverses 1up Buyout Thanks to Brave Actions of bdnjfbdenk."

-Is February the month of DLC? Sounds like it. I'm itching to get at Operation Anchorage.

-Iroquois Pliskin is back! I was starting to wonder if he'd died. Sounds like he nearly did.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Context helps, but I don't follow Shawn Elliott's twitter feed in any case - I don't have time to click every single one of his unlabelled links to see which one might be interesting.

Generally, I wish bloggers spent more time thinking about what they link to. This is a MAJOR problem at Kotaku - Owen Good, for one, regularly links to posts that are basically garbage, either written by people with no particular insight or credibility, or in the case of that "why Age of Conan sucks" link, he repeatedly links to a post whose author admits he never actually played the game before slagging it. It used to be that journalists had to support their stories with research and quotes. Is it too much to ask that bloggers whose only job is to link to stuff and quip about it, actually validate the things to which they link?

Chris said...

Here’s a tangential question off Chris’ comment.

Do small indie bloggers subconsciously want to be the gatekeepers of games journalism? Do they want to decide who does it and who doesn't? I'm definitely not pointing my finger at Chris here, but his comment brought the question to mind.

With the UGO/1UP acquisition and a few hiccups from Kotaku, I’ve read plenty of comments, blogs and tweets about what is and isn’t games journalism.

I know, Chris’ talking about bloggers just meeting basic journalistic standards, but I’ve been chewing on the question and figured I’d toss it out.

As for Shawn Elliot's twitter and context, I offer you a set of numbers without context.

Following 2
Followers 5,570