This Week In Video Game Criticism: Clone Wars And The Fate Of The World

"Gameloft's clones are whole cloth derivatives of aesthetic elements like character design, art style, user-interface, and even color palettes. No art is wholly original; we all create from the inspiration of others. But these copies aren't simply inspired by their originals. They appropriate the creative work of artists and designers and re-purpose them with mostly cosmetic changes."

"Fewer titles, bigger bets - this is the modern mega-publisher's conservative recipe for success - or at the very least, for survival. The traditional portfolio is unlikely to be the norm, when money spent on marginal concepts and riskier ideas could be doubled on surer bets. The danger is that if everyone follows this path, where will the next Wii Fit or Guitar Hero come from to blaze the trail for entirely new categories of gaming? It's at times like these that survival and mutually assured destruction look virtually indistinguishable."

"What's fascinated me about my response more than anything is what it showed me about my attitude toward the world. I was quick to institute a one-child policy in India, but not in the United States. I was willing to dump tons of money into the U.S. and Europe to fund research, but struggled to come up with funds to fight political unrest in Southeast Asia. I pretty much ignored Australia entirely. While I was happy to enact technological reforms in the industrialized world, I was hesitant to levy extra taxes on those regions to fund them. I was excited to spread 4th-gen nuclear power plant technology to the world, then found myself wishing I hadn't, as rebels in northern Africa got their hands on weapons-grade nuclear material. I'm a huge proponent of nuclear energy, but coming face to face with even a fictionalized consequence of my political beliefs was a little bit humbling."

"L.A. Noire stars a strictly defined character, so on the surface it seems more suited to a simplified Mass Effect system than a complex Dragon Age one. However, its dialogue scenes are not casual, open-ended conversations. They're interrogations. These interrogations require detailed information, observation, and a bit of luck to properly resolve. There's no back-tracking or second guessing, and navigating the system with the vague options of truth, doubt and lie can be a bit frustrating."

"The mystical quality in kids' creations, that purity of spirit we wish to recapture, is fearlessness. And this is what strikes me as timely in this girl designer and her Ponycorn Adventure: their innocent, vibrant lack of concern with seeming silly or derivative. Lemon enemies (lemonies?) don't need to make sense to make satisfyingly sour foes. The Ponycorns are hardly original or even a proper hybrid, per se, but Cassie don't care. Likewise, ask her if she gives a toot that she heard some of these phrases - "How do you like them apples??" - elsewhere (if she even remembers.) Just try and suggest that such prose stylings belong to popped-collared, thumbs-flashing dudes and not little girls."

"I also learned about brogrammers. They're software engineers who also like sports, fantasy sports, e-sports, Sports Center, sports bars, fist-bumps, clubbing, loafers, pink polo shirts and all the other Freudian underpinnings of an unapologetic male culture. You know. Brogrammers. They write the same code as everyone else, but anyone serving as their producer ought to know that dealing with them is not the same as dealing with a programmer who has more cerebral hobbies. They wouldn't go into specifics, however."

...a particularly notable advancement has been the development of what I will call transitional space, moments in video game play that process and demarcate advancement toward the achievement of the games' overriding goal, such as the movement from a preceding to a successive level. Transitional spaces are those moments between the playing of levels, instances in which the computer processes the player's successful completion of a micro-level goal as the player advances toward a following objective.

"Bulletstorm's sport-shooter makes more sense in Duke Nukem's world than its own. Duke's been stranded on that alien planet for so long and he's killed entire populations of alien scum that he's no longer satisfied with just killing them. This isn't about survival or saving the world and the girl. It's something more important: this is Sport. Each kill is a way of measuring how big the big man really is and satisfies his own perverse amusement alone."

"Jon's instincts to hype, to mourn and to think big - futuristically big - merged last December with his idea about bringing Tina back. He was at a crossroads of self-promotion and private emotion, and a possible pioneer of high-tech grieving."

"I'll try to explain six things that can make a game great, for me. Games don't need to do all of them well, sometimes one is enough. But the hope is to cover every kind of draw they can have. Every game I like, I like because it does one of these things well."