I want to know what love is and I want you to show me, Eskil Steenberg.

That's what I thought as I tried to see him demo the game in the emptying third floor of Moscone West on the last day of GDC. A gaggle of nerds (pictured above) blocked my view; like a puppet master, a guy in the thick of it shifted back and forth, making everyone behind him shift  in the other direction. Another guy sitting to his left leaned in to obscure another pocket of visibility.

I imagined that it was a fascinating look at the tools that Steenberg  created for the game... caught half of a screen where he manipulated a shape with a single click of the mouse. People came up the escalator and stopped for a...

You might have seen this video of Mister Rogers chatting with a boy about Donkey Kong. I stumbled on it yesterday through some idle "Related Videos" clicking, and I was charmed.

The clip shows why Mister Rogers was such a unique force in kids' TV. His approach is straightforward: He talks to Brandon about games. There's no moralizing; we're not railroaded into a lesson. Nobody worries that Brandon is going to play video games too much, that he'll never go outside, that he'll go on a barrel-murdering rampage because of Donkey Kong's pernicious influence. As kids, we loved Mister Rogers because he engaged us with unadulterated respect and honesty, as he does here.

And then they open up the machine! "We're interested about the insides of things,...

So, yes, my kitchen table is a mess. Instead of actually eating there, I tend to use it to open my mail. Ah, bachelorhood; isn't it wonderful? Anyway, here's another creative packaging job from the Nintendo team at GolinHarris. The last time they pulled the old talking-box trick (for the DS Lite), the damn thing kept going off in the middle of the night (playing some sort of trumpeted fanfare) and scaring the sh*t out of me, until I had to kill it like it was that evil clown doll in Poltergeist. (And even after I thought it was dead, it STILL kept making noises.) (Creepy.)

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Just had an interesting chat with a good PR friend of mine. This individual has been having an ongoing battle with the marketing folks about review scores: How are they arrived at, what goes into a score, why can't PR people control the press (?!?!), etc. Then the topic of price came up. Does that factor into it? Interesting question.

My answer? It depends. If you get a game for $20 and spend 15 hours on it and enjoy it, you probably think it was worth the money. But buy a $60 game and finish it in 15 hours, it probably had better be some of the best gameplay in your life to make it worth the money. In that case, price is definitely a factor and should be factored into a review, especially in Crispy's format of Buy, Try or Fry. Also, is the game an expansion? How much is added to the game for the amount of money you had to lay out...

Jonathan Blow's "Experimental
Gameplay Sessions" today made one thing clear: Gaming's having its modernist
phase. Every game we saw attempted to deconstruct a gaming mechanic or trope. Examples:

The Unfinished Swan -- vision. FPS where
you have to feel your way blindly through the world by painting its invisible surfaces
black.

Where Is My Heart? -- visual coherence. 2D
platformer that splits your view of the level into fragments, like a bank of poorly
aimed and sometimes overlapping security camera feeds.

Shadow Physics -- dimensions. 2D
platformer whose surfaces are created by the...

I downloaded Super Punch-Out!! (800 points) bright and early on Monday morning, and I've been playing it obsessively ever since. I'm a fan of Punch-Out!! I worked in a rundown amusement park when I was a kid (http://www.sylvanbeach.org/amusementpark/), and on breaks, I'd hustle across the park to the arcade and dump quarters into the dual-screened Punch-Out!! machine. "Body blow! Body blow!" Good times.

The NES version was aesthetically crude by comparison, but it was no less exciting. And when Super Punch-Out!! shipped for the SNES in 1994, I skipped my afternoon classes--I was a graduate student at Syracuse University at the time--and drove to the nearest game store to buy a copy.

Super Punch-Out!! provided my brother and me with one of our...

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Nintendo dropped by the office recently to do a live-action demo of Rhythm Heaven. Here's where our own Evan Narcisse's choral training was put to some good use.

Having played through 99% of the import, I can say that it's even better than this acoustic rendition. I hear they gave free copies of the game to everyone who attended Iwata's GDC keynote. T_T

(For a better-quality version of that vid, go here.)

I don’t play MMOs.

In my career as a games writer, I’ve barely written about them. I understand where aspects of the offline RPG and the ones online intersect. I know about the genre from friends and peers, and those same people have helped me become familiar with some of the culture and specifics of various MMO offerings.

Now, the reasons I’m not juggling avatars on servers are many: never been much of  a PC gamer, Tolkien-esque fantasy rarely grabs me, level grinding just isn’t my thing. Also, any kind of online gaming tends to bring out my inner misanthrope, with the exception of Left 4 Dead.

But, a few upcoming MMOs will be giving me reasons to finally explore the massively multiplayer landscape. I’ve written about one before and I got the chance to see another at GDC. 
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I marched into Day 1 of GDC with the Crispy camera, intent to record everything. After a GDC staffer helpfully informed me that I could only record the first five minutes of each panel, my mission to "upload at least one video a day" became "just see as many games and people as you
can before falling asleep." Here are my Day 1 scraps, starring the view from my hotel room, breakfast with news editor James Fudge, the Indie Rant panel, and some guy shooting a zombie (I mean Majini).

GDC went by in a flash. I'll upload other, less Brakhage-aping scraps later.