Friday afternoon tidbits

Going to be an interesting weekend. I made the mistake of signing up for National Novel Writing Month, which starts on Sunday. There goes my November.

-Brinstar wrote an interesting and all-encompassing look at Uncharted 2. Her comments on the game's portrayal of its female characters are right on. Despite the hyper-sexualized appearance of Chloe, both of the female leads are given actual personalities and motivations. Even better, they act like adults. They're not catty broads who fight over our bashful hero. Brinstar says that "[creative director] Amy Hennig stood her ground on gender issues like this many times over," which certainly wouldn't surprise me, and goes to show how much your game can be improved when you have a diversity of voices onboard.

-Torchlight seems to be dominating a lot of people's time right now. Elysium at Gamers with Jobs writes about the joy of being surprised by a game, which is something I couldn't agree with more. There's some fun in anticipating things, yes, but it always seems like you're setting yourself up for disappointment if you get too excited. Much better to be gobsmacked by something out of nowhere. (Re: Torchlight, it sounds interesting, but I can only accommodate one soul-consuming dungeon crawler at a time, and there's this game called Borderlands.)

-Shawn Elliott (him again?) predicts the upcoming controversy about Modern Warfare 2. I've not yet watched the opening sequence of the game, and in fact wish I didn't know anything about it before playing the game (thanks, Twitter!). Still, I respected the way that Call of Duty 4 coldly regarded the devastating impact of modern military technology, and I would expect its sequel to similarly pull no punches. The notion of killing civilians is, of course, shocking. I suspect that is the intent. Without context, it's impossible for us to say yet whether this serves a greater philosophical point, or, at least, a compelling narrative.

-Congratulations to Ben and the gang at Critical Distance, whose "Week in Game Criticism" roundups are now being syndicated at GSW and Gamasutra. Here's hoping this means a whole new audience for all the great writers Ben spotlights each week. And that he starts including Insult Swordfighting more often!

Friday afternoon tidbits

A small milestone to mark: Sometime today, if it hasn't happened already, this blog will serve up its 200,000th page view. That's not a large number by most blogs' standards, but it seems like a big one to me. Thanks for reading.

-It's the best thing I've seen this week -- Matthew Gallant's mash-up of "I'm on a Boat" with Wind Waker:



-News of Stephen Totilo's move to Kotaku seems strange to me, for reasons I haven't quite been able to put my finger on. Kotaku is good, but MTV Multiplayer is often great. While Totilo will unquestionably be reaching a larger audience, which he deserves, I am hoping that he brings Multiplayer's sensibility to Kotaku, and not the other way around. Kyle Orland interviewed Totilo for Crispy Gamer, and he says all the right things. I just hope that Totilo's reporting doesn't get lost in the hourly press-release snarking.

-Critical Distance is a new group blog dedicated to highfalutin' discussion of games. So far it's a mix of original thinkpieces, well considered links, and a brand-new podcast. They've gathered a good collection of writers. Can't wait to see how the site develops over the coming months.

-Finally, I've deleted a couple of comments this week, so I wanted to take a second to discuss this blog's commenting policy. Simply put: I will only delete comments that are pure spam, or that link to something that seems illegal. That's it.

I won't delete comments for disagreeing with me, even if it's vulgar or just plain stupid. I trust that the tone set by me and by the regular commenters here is enough to dissuade people whose only interest is starting a flame war. Comments provide much of a blog's value, especially when the commenters are as passionate and as intelligent as you guys are. I'd rather err on the side of more reader participation, not less.