I like RPGs. So yeah, I like Borderlands . But the Borderlands hybrid RPG-shooter formula (recently co-opted by Bungie’s Destiny , and taken in a very different direction by the Mass Effect series) is...

       I remember a time in about 1991 when I borrowed Super Mario Brothers 3 from a friend for a weekend. I wanted to beat it before I gave it back, but this being the relatively early days of console gaming,

            A few weeks ago, E. Ortiz wrote an interesting article over at Big Blue Die (Which is no longer Live) is about why board games aren’t going to be killed off by video games, noting the emphasis on in-room socialization and tactile engagement with the game.

Spoiler Alert: This post contains spoilers about The Wolf Among Us and Season Two of The Walking Dead by Telltale Games (and implied spoilers about Season One).

Spoiler Alert: This post contains spoilers about Season One of Telltale’s The Walking Dead.

 In the last couple of years, interconnected games in which player actions in one game affect options or situations in another have started to pop up more frequently than usual.

As I discuss in a related post [here], escort missions are usually terrible, bringing otherwise fun games to a screeching halt with shoddy mechanics, annoying characters, and terrible AI.

Escort missions. Few things in videogames can elicit a Khan-like scream of despair from players so quickly.  You’re progressing through an entertaining, tense, action-packed game when suddenly, for reasons known only to themselves, the designers force you to replay the same five-minute (if you’re lucky) section over and over, trying to prevent natural selection from improving the human gene pool by letting your hated escortee remove him/herself from it through rank incompetence.

            Where we game has changed a lot in recent years, not only with the success of the Nintendo Switch as a system where games are played in a space, not just on a screen.  Also as mobile devices led to a huge wave of casual games and as increasingly powerful and affordable laptops and cloud servers let PC gamers take AAA games around the house or even out of it. With such variety, gamers are more aware of where they are playing – and the relative perks and drawbacks of those spaces – than ever before.

Movies have the Oscars, TV the Emmys, theatre the Tonys, and music the Grammys. What do video games have? Thinking about game awards reveals how different from older entertainment media today’s game industry really is.  The first movie theaters appeared in the U.S. in 1896. The Academy Awards (Oscars) began 33 years later in 1929. Pong, the first commercially successful arcade game, was released in 1972. 48 years later, no Academy Awards of Video Games yet dominate the gaming awards scene.