One-Sided Interaction: Death, Dead Space, and DLC

Being a man that constantly strives to have a cheery disposition, I view winter as a seasonal metaphor for death. It’s a shitty time of year and I hate it. It’s cold, everything wilts and shrivels, and snow pummets from the sky, raining down death and destruction on the roads. It is, as far as I can tell, a time unsuitable for the sustaining of human life. It’s also the perfect time for a new Dead Space game.

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One-Sided Interaction: Last Week, Today, and Next Year

I have a real beef with Ubisoft’s marketing department. They tried like hell to make sure I didn’t know how awesome Far Cry 3 is. As I said last week, the only part of the game that was really marketed was the ‘shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot’ and ‘dude, it’s like crazy, man’ stuff. Games that are only shooting are boring. Far Cry 3 is not boring. It’s great.

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On Another Level with Chelsea: Hello!

Now that GalaxyNextDoor has graciously accepted me into their tiny little gaming family, I thought my first article could be a bit of an introduction to myself. A little something to get to know who I am and what you might possibly see over the course of me writing here. I’ll describe some of my favorite games in my library and why my heart belongs to them more than others.

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One-Sided Interaction: Mass Effect & Dead Turkeys

Since I only ever discuss BioWare and their games here, I am going to do the same now. I am an emotional cripple, and venturing too far outside of my comfy RPG zone forces me to confront the wasteland that is the non-RPG-player’s vapid and pointless existence. I am not ready to admit that such a dearth of intellect exists on such a pandemic scale, so I am going to talk about Mass Effect 4 today. If this does not sit well with you, shove more turkey in your mouth and let the tryptophan do its thing.

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Casually Hardcore: Geek Girls, and how we can prevent being labeled

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You may have missed it, and I don’t blame you if you did but last month there was a huge kerfuffle over some comments by famed comic book artist Tony Harris on Facebook over the validity of cosplaying females and geeky girls in general. Here’s the whole post to get you up to speed

The rant went viral. Tons of people responded, and there has been general outcry from the geek/gaming community as a whole. It has spawned numerous editorials and blog entries, comics and vlogs…it seems that all of a sudden, the internet can’t stop talking about what role women have in the geek subculture (if it can even be considered a subculture…maybe it should just be culture).

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Nintendo set to bring a new generation of fun

If you’re a child of the 80s or 90s then growing up Nintendo meant a lot to you. Nintendo for many years was synonymous with video games. When my grandmother asked if I was playing video games, she would call it Nintendo.

During the late 90s Sony’s PlayStation took that throne a bit away, but to this day Nintendo is a brand that carries with it an air of nostalgia and innovation that gamers and also the rival companies in the gaming industry hold in high regard. Next week launches Nintendo’s next-gen system — the Wii U. This generation Nintendo did incredibly well with the original Wii. Sure, it was basically a super powered GameCube but Nintendo managed to sell the thing on the sheer novelty of the Wii controller. To put it blunty: It was fun.

That was Nintendo’s gimmick. And while it racked up trucks of money.It also managed to become the home to some of the most enjoyable games that anyone could play. Hell, we have 76 year old grandparents throwing it down in Mario Party and having a blast. 

I’m not even going to go on a diatribe about hardcore and casual gaming; I’ll leave that for another time. The Wii U does seem to be a middle point for Nintendo. A sort of compromise of sorts, trying to woo back some of the core gamers it lost this generation and still usher in the more casual crowd it discovered with the Wii. The Wii U isn’t a technical beast and you can bet that Sony and Microsoft’s next-gen systems that are right around the corner are going to handedly put the Wii U in a position where it’s once again the weakest of all three next-gen consoles; but will it really matter? Nintendo has always found a way with their IPs to bridge the age gap with one unifier — games that are fun for just about anyone. Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong and even the more mature Metroid franchise have managed to go beyond the core and casual labels to become experiences that for lot of gamers of any age are always enjoyable. HD graphics or not. The new shiny HD graphics of a next-gen Zelda is pretty damn mouth watering though!

By: Mike-T

Dead Drop: How Sony Can Save The Vita

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This years Gamesom undoubtedly belonged to Sony and the strangest thing to say is the PS Vita had a big part to do with it. We all know Sony has been slow on the portable platform and even slower on how to work in it, now they may have finally found their legs. Their first run in portables with the PSP was a horrendous failure. It alone had potential due to the Sony badge slapped on the front, but it never clicked with most gamers.

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One-Sided Interaction: On a BioWare groove

It’s been a crazy few days. A very close presidential election, the Halo 4 release, and I’ve been spending all my free time doing fresh installs of Windows 8 to all my gaming PCs and putting a lot of my games through the paces to test them out on the new OS. So far, so good (if you follow my Twitter feed, I apologize for the insane amount of Raptr activity.)

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GameDaze: A New Dawn for Halo

In less than 24 hours 343 Industries, a studio made up of some of the most talented artists, programmers, designers and musicians in the gaming industry will present to the world their 3 1/2 year effort in not only taking on the mantle of an established and loved property, but also moving forward one of the gaming industries biggest franchises. It’s no small task, and one that if I were in the position of, would be crapping myself. 

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GameDaze: 5 games to creep you out this Halloween

Halloween is next week and while most of us are still slogging through a back-log of games to try and get ready for Assassin’s Creed III, Halo 4 and the many other big games coming in the next few months; there’s still time to get some Halloween gaming in. Below are just a small taste of some highly recommended creepy games to get you in the mood to crap your pantaloons.

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