Friday afternoon tidbits

I haven't played any video games this week, and I've had no problem falling asleep at night. I hope these two facts are not related.

-Some very smart people are trying to get a new gaming magazine called Kill Screen off the ground. They're trying to raise $3,500 to publish the thing. As of this writing, they're over halfway there. Take a look and see what you think.

-Congratulations to Denis Farr of Vorpal Bunny Ranch, who is the newest writer for GayGamer.net. Here's his first article, "NieR's Gender Confusion."

-Michael Abbott says it's time we paid more attention to the Sims. It's a point he also made persuasively about sports games: lots of non-"core" games actually have incredibly deep role-playing and storytelling elements, if we'd bother to look for them.

I don't know, though. All I ever did when I played the Sims was make a bathroom with glass walls, and then I named two Sims after my friends and got them to kiss.

-This is only marginally related to video games: (former?) NBA player Paul Shirley writes in his ESPN.com column that the Beatles don't hold up. I am glad to see somebody make the anti-Beatles case in this ham-handed a fashion, because it deflects attention from my much milder criticisms of the band. Among Shirley's silly, self-evidently false statements are things like "We were not around for The Beatles. Therefore, we cannot judge their impact on popular music," and "The arrangements used by Oasis are more complex, the sound is denser, the production is better."

Shirley also claims that Dean Koontz is superior to Bram Stoker.

-Hey, since we're not even talking about video games at this point, why not also take a look at Dan Brown's 20 worst sentences? Sometimes I think that I should read one of Brown's books before declaring him a shitty writer, but I really don't think it's necessary.