Game Theory: A Sexy Witch, Zombies and Death: Who Needs a Story?
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Story aside, Bullet Witch is reasonably entertaining, with a plethora of zombies occasionally aided by giant-brained creatures and 50-foot monsters.
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Tycho: Our third book is now available on the store, if you haven't purchased it elsewhere. Entitled The Warsun Prophecies, it incorporates all the strips from 2002. I'm usually scared to read something I've written once I've written it, which may help you to understand the state these posts sometimes arrive in - but I think this one turned out really well.I've just now finished the final edits on the fourth book, which will be released... in the future. Also, on the very same store, our Fire Sale continues to rage - with the heat of a thousand bargains! Huge savings in every department, etc.(CW)TB
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When virtual crime finds its way into online role-playing games, should real-world authorities step in?
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Tycho:  Having already purchased two fifths of The Orange Box over the last few years, the level of value I have derived from it is "fantastic" but not "supernatural."  For Gabriel, who never finished the second Half-Life and never purchased the first episode, the aforementioned Box represents an intimidating and possibly even brutal level of content for one's holiday dollar.  It's hard enough trying to keep up with all the games that are coming out, but when you start putting more than one game on the disc the difficulty is compounded.   We're lucky, then, than the best thing on there can be completed in only a couple hours.     I've tried to make my rounds through the disc, but I kept coming back to Portal until I'd completed it.  I expect every part of this strange collection to be full of virtue, in the way that Valve's anomalous position in the games industry allows: self-funded development in their sky-high Bellevue commune until each product sings.  But Portal is strange, even for them.  Risky on every axis, we may now say that the "first person puzzle comedy" has now been proven out as a genre.  The gameplay is strong, but Portal's unique combination of hilarity and menace elevates it, resulting in a few perfect, indelible hours of gameplay.          My TeamFortress 2 experience so far on the console has been fairly uneven.  Coming from the PC beta, where I sometimes battled with stability concerns but the games played smooth, I'm now grappling with the reverse.  I love the play experience, as I've already expressed, and I'm rarely of the opinion that having more players automatically improves a game - so the differential between the PC and 360 platforms isn't as important to me as it might be to others.  No, the problem with TF2 on the 360 (and likely the PS3, as well) is that peer to peer hosting just ain't cutting it.  There are games that seem to manage it better, but with Vista PCs authenticating into the service now peer to peer games should be an option.  This needs fixed overnight.     I'll try to complete the second Episode over the weekend, interleaved with finishing the writing on my own game, which has become more difficult since completing Portal.  I'm starting to think that Precipice needs a greater concentration of synthesized ladies.      I would be abdicating my duty if I neglected to mention the EA thing, which is really the EA/BioWare/Pandemic thing.  I was under the impression that BioWare and Pandemic had merged precisely to give themselves leverage over monolithic publishers like Electronic Arts, but who knows.  The biggest fallout in the short term is that, beyond the first Mass Effect, a multiplatform release is almost certain.  Of course, I wholly endorse that kind of thing, but I imagine that Microsoft might hold a different opinion.  After spending years promoting the series, enduring delays, and now having spent months beating the shit out of it in test, it's fair to say that MS was investing in a larger trilogy - one that gamers would associate exclusively with their brand.
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Popular books applying Darwinian logic to everything from religion to dating to dealmaking may fly off the shelves, but attempts to apply evolutionary theory to literary analysis tend to make novelists, English professors and other humanist types break out in hives.
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There is a part of gamer psychology that is rarely discussed, but incredibly important: We are thrilled by wanton destruction. We need it like a form of food. Commentary by Clive Thompson.
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Psychologists and neuroscientists have spent several decades producing theoretical models of the mental processes and neural networks that might  be involved in the kaleidoscopic state of psychosis. Largely concerned with simulating the nuts-and-bolts of the mind and brain, these  computer models generate results that tend only to be of interest to researchers and their scientific colleagues. More recently, scientists have decided to harness the power of virtual reality, in an attempt to move beyond the confines of theory, to simulate the experience of psychosis itself.
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By Anonymous  Critical Thinking About Sex, Love and Romance in the Mass Media, Mary-Lou Galician and Debra L. Merskin, eds. Erlbaum, 2007,408 pp., $34.95.  Contributors to this fascinating book examine popular media's roles in perpetuating romantic fantasy and myth.
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Will you kill the Little Sisters and steal their genetic bounty? Ethical conundrums make this beautiful, brainy new game a must-play.
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Game designers work to distill the magic that gives a game broad, mainstream appeal. Susan Arendt reports from the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Plus: Full GDC coverage in Game|Life.
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The Lab judging panel will be busy this weekend picking a winner in the speak-to-the-Prime-Designer contest. (You can still enter today.) As they toil tirelessly, let us ponder this designerâs ethics, and whether it&#8217;s better to live in simulated joy or be really miserable. The posthuman Prime Designer may not care much what our puny [...].
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Some actors might balk at being cast as an evil witch. Not Helena Bonham Carter.
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Can a computer program generate new works from long dead legends? By Douglas McGray from Wired magazine.
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Tycho:  We never sit down with the firm intention of making another Bioshock comic - indeed, we intend the opposite - but somehow Bioshock comics continue to be written.  One day, science will pierce these mysteries.  Until then, you'll simply have to endure more strips regarding interactive storytelling's electronic opus.  My recovery from this weekend's rigors would be quite accelerated if I were not up until two or more every night, which is to say morning, hacking and slashing my way through the new releases like some malarial jungle guide.  I put Bioshock to bed last night, and theoretically this should be cause for joy, but I suppose it's like finishing a pie.  There is a whiff of accomplishment, semisweet - but the pie is gone.  Without pause, I slapped the input stud on the video switcher before the final cinema faded to black.  Hurling the gamepad into a knitting basket, I dug deep into the faultlines of the couch, producing a wiimote/nunchuk pair.  I've now played enough of Metroid Prime 3 to know that they've washed the filth of Red Steel completely from the system.  For awhile, I was doing that thing we sometimes do, playing until "the next savepoint," which so frequently becomes "until the savepoint after that," only to meld seamlessly into "until I can no longer see."  They've been spinning the tumbler at Retro for awhile on this one, trying to define first person on Nintendo's weird little chimera, and they've drilled down with enough diligence to find it.  No doubt some measure of the enthusiasm directed toward the game is due to the fact that people are actually using their Wii again, but that shouldn't diminish what they've done.    People have seen Corruption for a couple years, now, builds that bubbled up at different press events, and it's been slightly different each time.  I think they've moved some of the interactions since I last played it - things that were mapped to the nunchuck's gyro before are now handled by the wiimote's pointing device, and I understand why.  Gestures are a very immersive, intuitive means of interaction, but when they fail (or when they fail to express us correctly) they are Goddamned infuriating.  In a case when your hand is actually "present" in the simulation - such as when your left hand is pulling, then twisting, then pushing forward - those motions need to be as authentic as possible.  They must have chosen the perfect translation of the pointing device over the more "correct" left hand interaction.  It creates situations where you are using a different hand than your character, but because the motion is really one to one it still feels pretty good.    That's the long way of saying what you could learn in five minutes, sitting in front of it.  This entire exercise has only stoked my ardor.  It is my intention to begin playing this game at ten, and continue doing so until light begins to creep under the curtains.
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Games with a political and social agenda have provided a novel take on world events.
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I played a dungeon crawler for 36 hours in a week. Is that bad? Commentary by Clive Thompson.
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Letâs not lose the plot. In defense of âbadâ words in childrenâs books.