Link roundup

Hello! You wouldn't know it from watching this space, but I have been busy lately.

First, my review of Child of Eden is up at thephoenix.com. I liked this game, although I utterly failed to connect with it on the level that most of its ardent fans seem to have. My biggest takeaway was that the Kinect version was slightly, though clearly, inferior to the gamepad version. I continue to think that the Kinect will never work if it is used to perform the same actions that a gamepad does. There's a reason Dance Central was awesome -- it would not have been possible to play it with the stock controller.

Also, I appeared on the most recent episode of the Experience Points podcast. Scott, Jorge, and I discussed what makes a game overrated or underrated, and how the expectations we bring to a game color our experiences. I had a great time recording the podcast. I hope you enjoy listening to it.

Finally, while it's not nearly as incendiary as the first, my most recent column at Joystick Division is all about the game I've been playing the most recently: Words with Friends, on the iPhone. In a late-breaking update, I am happy to tell you that I have won a game or two since that column was published. And also lost several more.

Podcastin'!

I appeared on the latest episode of the Brainy Gamer podcast, along with Brad Gallaway of GameCritics.com and Nels Anderson of Above 49, to talk about what we've been playing lately. You'll find some solid under-the-radar recommendations, one of which I was glad to be able to provide. Hint: It's Yakuza 4. I also took a little more time to slag on LittleBigPlanet 2, which Brad admitted that he hated too, much later in the podcast than he should have.

The super-sized podcast also contains two other GDC-based segments, one featuring cool dudes Patrick Klepek, Matthew Burns, and Chris Dahlen, and one with Sean Duncan of Miami University (himself a cool dude). Give it a listen!

All mod confabs

Another year, another Brainy Gamer confab. This year, I joined the host Michael Abbott and guests Manveer Heir, of Raven Software, and Tom Bissell, author of the New Yorker profile of CliffyB, to talk about our favorite games of 2009.

Listening to it, I thought it came out pretty well, though as usually happens with these things it's a little long. Additionally, I'm rocking some pretty heavy sibilance, which I wish somebody had mentioned at the time so we could have tried to fix it. Even so, the discussion is pretty good, and covers all of our favorites, which were Borderlands, Uncharted 2, and Demon's Souls. Check it out!

This episode, by the way, is part 3 of 4. The last part is yet to be posted, but you can listen to part 1 with Chris Dahlen, Steve Gaynor, and L.B. Jeffries, and part 2 with Leigh Alexander, Nels Anderson, and Corvus Elrod.

Additionally, I've appeared on the Brainy Gamer podcast three times before:

• The confab of confabs
• Confabulous
• Insult Swordfighting visits the Brainy Gamer

Obviously I am running out of "confab" puns.

Big Red Potion

I mentioned it in passing yesterday, and now I'm happy to post the link to Big Red Potion Episode 20, "Out of Our Hands."

I joined hosts Sinan Kubba and Joe DeLia, along with guest and friend of Insult Swordfighting, Michael Abbott, to discuss game controls. As N'Gai Croal has said, we see games with our hands. The controller is the nexus of intention and action. Yet most discussions of games skip right over this topic, or approach it with no more insight than "the control was good or bad." Or maybe we make a snarky comment about waggle.

With that in mind, we tried to take a broad view of play control. We talked about notable successes and failures in the history of peripherals (somehow without mentioning either the U-Force or the Sega Activator in the latter category), what effect the Wiimote has had on game design, and what the future holds for Project Natal and Sony Motion. And we wondered whether standard control inputs are limiting gameplay possibilities, or whether new controller types will lead to a bunch of shallow gimmickry.

It's always hard to judge one's own performance on these things (plus, the sound of my own voice gives me hives), but I can say with confidence that Sinan, Joe, and Michael all said fascinating things about this most important of videogame topics. Have a listen!

The confab of confabs

If you have any of the same Twitter friends and RSS subscriptions that I do, by now you've probably heard dozens of times about the latest Brainy Gamer podcast. Just in case: Have you heard about the latest Brainy Gamer podcast? Michael Abbott has assembled a super-confab for an epic three-part discussion of the best games of 2008. I shared microphone space with Dan Bruno, Corvus Elrod, and Spencer Greenwood, who must always be referred to by his full name.

All three had unexpected picks for their favorites of the year, a trend which extended across every discussion. Michael says he asked 20 different writers for their picks, and got 20 unique responses. That's unbelievable, and maybe unprecedented. We had a bit of a discussion about what the lack of a consensus pick means, if anything, and I'm not sure I said what I really meant about it.

Essentially, when everyone you know picks BioShock or Portal for their game of the year, I don't think that's indicative of a hive mentality or a lack of imagination among gamers -- I think it means that those games were seriously awesome. This year's best games still all seemed to suffer from one massive annoyance or another, and it's a matter of each person's individual breaking point how they responded to that. That may be what accounts for the divergent responses.

If, instead of asking everyone for their top pick, Michael had instead asked for our top 10 lists, and then compiled the results into one master list, you'd probably get something altogether more predictable. Fallout 3 or Grand Theft Auto IV would probably be the number 1 pick, and most of us would think, well, it's not my favorite, but it makes sense to be up there. But that's much less interesting than the way he actually did it! There were games of all types represented here, independent and big-budget, story-driven and wholly competitive, new IPs and sequels. It's fascinating stuff.

Here's that link again.

Confabulous

Above: Leigh Alexander, right, defends Princess Debut to a skeptical Mitch Krpata and Michael Abbott, left and center.

I had the pleasure of joining Leigh Alexander as a guest on the latest episode of the Brainy Gamer podcast, as part of Michael Abbott's new "Gamers Confab" roundtable discussions. We covered quite a few topics, including what we're playing now (Rock Band 2 ftw), the difficulty of keeping up with all the fall releases, the desirability of keeping up with all the fall releases, and the state of the survival horror genre. That last subject takes up about the second half of the conversation. We talked about Dead Space and Silent Hill specifically, with room to talk about classics of the genre, and what the hell makes a game scary, anyway.

I thought we had some pretty interesting things to say, while covering a lot of ground. Mostly it was nice to have the discussion with live people, as these are topics I never discuss with anybody in real life. Sometimes it's nice to just sit down and shoot the shit about these subjects, without all the editing and hard work of a good blog post. You sort of get the impression, listening to the podcast, that we all felt that way.

Have a listen, won't you?

Insult Swordfighting visits the Brainy Gamer

I was flattered to be invited to appear on the Brainy Gamer podcast. Michael Abbott writes one of the most considered, highbrow gaming blogs around, and it was fun to be able to talk to him in person. We chatted about No More Heroes, Burnout Paradise, the state of the gaming community, and a whole lot more.

Cross-blog conversations tend to erupt pretty frequently, particularly when a game like No More Heroes shows up, but the nature of blogging is still pretty solitary. You tend to soliloquize, or invent straw men to bounce your arguments and opinions off of. It was nice, in this case, to actually trade some ideas with a like-minded person. Give it a listen!