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Like my piece at The Daily today says, Star Wars: The Old Republic is almost egregiously large. 200 hours per class, according to Dallas Dickerson, one of the leads on the design team at Bioware. And there are eight classes, so, um.. carry the 1.. that’s a lot of play.

At this point, a real review is impossible, considering the beta of near-final content lasted only a couple of weeks and the full-game preview only started Tuesday. I pushed forward to write an impressions/preview for The Daily this week, but when it was edited for space, my bosses removed, er, most of the actual “impressions,” turning it into more of a “what is an MMO?” piece for novices. That would’ve been fine, except I made some pretty big judgment calls on the game without critically backing them up.

The key paragraph that got nixed was the following:
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Suppose I should hire someone to redesign this site. Until then, a quick update:

Most of my most recent games writing has been hosted by The Daily, a magazine meant to be read on an iPad. Lucky me, those wind up on the web as well, but finding archives is tough; even Google doesn’t cache ‘em. So I’ve taken to marking any of my pieces there as a “favorite” on my Twitter account. I suppose I could launch an RSS feed or a Tumblr or whatever the kids use these days, but this is how I’m rolling for now.

If you want the quickest way to see what I’ve been writing, and you don’t want to bother following me on Twitter, just check this link from time to time: Sam’s favorites!

Video game debuts, rolls for initiative and grown men in tunics: the total-nerd ecosystem of this year’s Penny Arcade Expo served an estimated crowd of 80,000, its biggest yet. The house seemed to hold 80,000 games, as well, and my goal to play every single one of them went unmet.

Still, by skipping meals and forgoing sleep, I racked up a decent gaming tally. In the days since the fest’s closure, I’ve split my time between sleeping and cataloguing my every move at PAX, playing equal parts big-name games and indie sleepers; the result is as much a look at the biggest public games show in the nation as it is a state of the union in games. Don’t expect brevity.

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At E3 2011, Ice-T performs "Cop Killer" in front of a Gears of War 3 logo.

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After seeing Microsoft’s gaming lineup at this year’s E3, you’d be forgiven for calling its Xbox efforts family-friendly. In particular, its most recently announced Kinect-enabled games that week included incredibly kiddie fare like Sesame Street and Disneyland.

On Tuesday night, that sure seemed to piss rapper/actor Ice-T off.

Taking the stage at an LA nightclub, the Law & Order: SVU star reunited his notorious punk band Body Count at a party celebrating the upcoming Xbox shooter Gears of War 3, even unveiling a song with the game’s name in the chorus. Minutes later, clad in an orange jumpsuit and spraying f-bombs like machine-gun fire, T demanded that a crowd of game designers and businessmen in suits shout along to the song “Cop Killer,” going so far as to ask fans to “sing it from your nuts.”

That’s one way to get your game rated M for mature.

Xbox’s E3 presence repeatedly bounded between the polar extremes of Gears of War’s skull-crushing combat and Sesame Street: Once Upon A Monster’s adorable critters. Consider that stance a necessity for the company. Unlike its rivals, Microsoft had no new hardware to show off, so its PR message instead revolved about being the game system for “everyone,” from the hardcore to the family.

Certainly, Microsoft tried to proclaim that Kinect, the system’s motion-sensing add-on, could satisfy both extremes. Emphasis on “tried.” Read the rest of this entry »

I’m on a games writing tear as of late.

Last week, in-flight magazine American Way published my take on all of this year’s new motion-control game systems. Next month, they’ll print my piece on Gran Turismo 5.

My column at The Atlantic in Washington, DC, has been filling up with game reviews, as well. Here’s one for the downloadable, lovable Super Meat Boy. Here’s one for Halo: Reach. And here’s a musing on the industry’s reliance on patches and bug-fixes, and how that affects the hobby’s reputation as “art.” I strongly recommend that one, even if its commenters by and large disagree.

More of my Atlantic articles can be found here.

Lousy cop beat coverage: it’s the worst artifact of old-school journalism. A reporter takes a cop or judge’s juicy quote when a crime is fresh news, rushes to the editor’s desk, and perverts a story to get attention.

Readers don’t notice it that often, as we typically don’t empathize with alleged one-note perps. But niche audiences sure notice when they get mixed up in criminal blame-games, so we have KOMO-4 News in Seattle, and its recent blast against video games, to thank for such a reporting farce today.

Its opening line:

Detectives investigating the strangulation death of 16-year-old Kimmie Daily are trying to determine whether her accused killer might have been acting out a violent fantasy from Dungeons and Dragons [Online].

Dots are connected: violent crime, video game, official investigation linking the two. The intro does its job, creating instant Internet linkbait: “D&D tied to murder.” We have seen this story before.

As the KOMO-4 story continues, it clarifies the intro’s use of wimpy modifiers (“trying,” “whether,” “might”), eventually admitting in the final paragraph that the premise is a lie:

The true cause for this crime is still unknown. They aren’t blaming a game for this violence, but they are trying to understand what triggered this murder and why.

The author took 12 paragraphs to convert from “might have been acting out a violent fantasy” to “not blaming a game.” It’s not until the near-end of the article, as well, that we see a quote from the aforementioned detective:

“The defendant admitted some kind of connection between the murder and the video game,” Lindquist said. “I’m not clear at this point what exactly that connection is. The defendant himself said he went to play video games to forget.”

It’s a wobbly premise, that a coping mechanism after acting out caused that very action. If you get into an angry argument, then take a long stroll to cool off, do you return home and burn your walking shoes as part of the apology process? No. It’s stupid.

KOMO-4 acknowledges no responsibility for common sense in its reporting – no willingness to apply higher-level thinking, because they have a quote! Detectives said it, right? We report, you decide. Lucky us, at least, this old-school journalism disaster has been launched on the Internet, where we can comment, copy+paste, highlight, embolden, and cast doubt. The article’s comments section is proof of that.

This article isn’t a burden for gamers. Video game fans are no longer the maligned niche of old. Nowadays, shoddy, ancient journalism is.

What life awaits after death? Most forms of expression, from books and films to poetry and philosophy, have taken turns pondering on it, and the maturing world of video games is no exception.

LIMBO, in spite of all appearances, isn’t one of those games. The brief, downloadable video game for Xbox 360 appears to dwell in the afterlife—and beautifully so—with a black-and-white aesthetic, lack of conversation, creepy inhabitants, and balance of darkness and light. Yet the Danish title is most compelling because it speaks to the struggles of living with loss, not fading away into death; and it does so not with text, nor with musical cues, nor any concrete storytelling. You simply drop into LIMBO, and it forces you to find your own meaning through exploration, puzzle solving, and inhaling its lonely world along the way.

The game opens with a child’s silhouette waking in a shades-of-grey world, himself all black save his tiny, white eyes. With no story as impetus, players immediately encounter forests, ponds, and caves (and strange foes within each), all rendered in 2D with shimmering particle effects, as if LIMBO’s entirety had been drowned in fresh, falling ash. Other than occasional tones and background effects, the sounds are as simple as the boy’s feet plodding along grass, dirt, and hard metal, and the sound direction turns out far more colorful and organic than the fuzzed-out looks would lead you to believe. Read the rest of this entry »

I grew up in the Tecmo Bowl generation, which meant my friends and I burnt out our copies of the 1988 football game on a daily basis. No other video game put us in Bo Jackson or Joe Montana’s shoes like this, complete with detailed cinema scenes at big moments, and no other sports game at the time was snappier or simpler, to boot. For years, its big, breakaway runs, colossal sacks, and “Guess Your Opponent’s Strategy” system had no peer.

As I got older, so did Tecmo Bowl. After a remarkable sequel in 1991′s Tecmo Super Bowl, the series didn’t see any major upgrades, instead bowing out silently as Madden NFL took over the virtual pigskin crown. But I didn’t fall for Madden. When my friends and I hit the virtual gridiron over the years, we used an old NES. Still do.

…at least, until this week. Tecmo Bowl: Throwback is now available on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3′s online stores for $10, and it delivers what my friends and I want: almost nothing new. TB:T sticks to the series’ speed and simplicity to great effect. But it also misses an opportunity to tweak the original formula—or, at least, offer enough customizations for the fans who want an old-school experience—potentially leaving all comers in the dust of fictional Bo Jackson.

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Yep. And they gave me a spiffy URL: http://theatlantic.com/sam-machkovech. Visit that link for my music column at their new Culture portal. My columns run about every two weeks. Whee!

The short answer: samred.com doesn’t have much content up because I’ve been busy at PubliCola.net, Seattle’s News Elixir, as its GameNerd columnist. Additionally, my freelance work for magazines and my tutoring work for 826 Seattle have filled out most of my free time. If you’re anxious to see what I’m up to, hit up PubliCola, subscribe to my Twitter feed, or be a pal and send e-mail (contact info, as always, is linked in the left sidebar).

If you don’t see another update at samred.com in the near future, assume that 2010 is treating me well. Hope yours is, too.