kirk hamilton .com

2011 was a hell of a year. Twelve months ago, I was a fresh-faced blogger who had just taken the reins at Paste magazine, eager to do something new but not quite sure what that would be. Now it’s December again and here I am at Kotaku, looking back at an insane year of writing, debating, critiquing, traveling, and goofing around. I’ve made more friends this year than I made in the ten before it, and have had more fun than any one person ought to have. It’s all a bit difficult to write about, actually.

I wanted to take some time over the next week or so to look back at the year that was. I figured I’d start with game reviews.

It felt like I wrote a lot of reviews this year, but looking back, I see that I wrote fourteen. That’s not as many as most hardcore reviewers, but I hope that by keeping myself to around one review per month, I managed to engineer a quality-over-quantity situation.

Here, in chronological order, are all of the game reviews I wrote in 2011. (more…)

Friends, honored guests, Pawneeans: I have some time this Sunday and I thought I would look back at my first three months writing for Kotaku. It has been an intense, often overwhelming, extraordinarily educational, stressful and rewarding time. It’s taken this long for me to even get a sense of what the hell I’m doing there, and how it is that this particular job best gets done.

Since starting in August, I’ve covered two conventions, attended a dozen or so San Francisco press events, reviewed two big games, and been at the center of a couple of internet controversies. I’ve made some people laugh, pissed some people off, and made some people think (I hope?). I’ve written around 200 posts, which may sound like a lot but by Kotaku standards is a fart in the wind. Some of those posts have been good. Some have been not so good. But I like to think my batting average is holding up okay.

We’re in the height of the fall rush right now, with more great games dropping each week. That said, I feel like I’ve got some sort of window now that I’ve finished Batman: Arkham City (it is excellent) and have a couple of weeks before Uncharted 3 and The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. Whoo buddy, when Skyrim comes out, I don’t even know what the hell I’m going to do.

Anyway, here are some articles that I’m proud of.

I’ve only done proper “reviews” of two games, both of which I liked. Deus Ex: Human Revolution got a more holistic treatment, and I tried to articulate how the game felt like a playable love-letter to is many influences. I also really liked Gears of War 3, though I got much more specific in my review. That was a very difficult review to write, for whatever reason.

I’ve started or fanned the flames of a few controversies, most having to do with how games represent women and minorities. My very first post as a staff member concerned the Facebook beauty contest that determined the appearance of Mass Effect‘s female commander Shepard. It was the beginning of a longer story, and as it progressed I even got to interview Jennifer Hale, the exceptional voice actor who plays Commander Shepard.

Two other posts generated similar noise–the first, a response to Evan Narcisse’s takedown of an offensive black stereotype in Deus Ex, and the second just last week about Arkham City‘s weird fixation on the word “Bitch.”

With both of those posts, particularly the Batman one, I was surprised by how many people angrily told me that I had no right to be addressing the topic at all. Several of my professional peers suggested that I’d written that “Bitch” post in a cynical bid for pageviews. I can assure them that I did not, and I can further assure them that I’m not the only person to notice that aspect of the game. I was just the first to comment on it in a far-reaching publication.

But even if I had been the only one to feel that way, it was still something I thought, and these days I’m paid to write what I think and show it to people. I appreciated everyone who engaged in the discussion, but I was bummed out by fellow writers who publicly questioned my motivations for writing the piece.

Speaking of interviews, I was happy with an essay/interview I wrote entitled “Felicia Day is Just What Gaming Needs.” Speaking with Ms. Day, I was struck by her enthusiasm and creative energy, and how willing she is to do unconventional and goofy videogame things. She’s a force for good in gaming, and I think we could use more people like her. I was extraordinarily depressed by the comments on this post. That’s a subject for a separate discussion.

I was so happy to reunite with my letter-writing buddy (and buddy in general) Leigh Alexander to tackle the classic 2000 PC game Deus Ex, in what we called “The Deus Ex Letters.” Leigh was hesitant about getting on board with the “greatest PC game of all time,” and given the reactions I’ve come to expect from PC Gamers on… well… just about everything, I don’t blame her. But we had a good time, and I think we shined light on some worthwhile topics.

Not everything I’ve been doing at Kotaku has been news, criticism, or other serious(ish) stuff. I’ve been writing goofy-yet-hopefully-enjoyable things as well. Right at the outset I wrote a fake novelization of The Witcher 2, which wound up being some sort of weird mix of humorous criticism and fanfic. I’m not sure if our readers knew what to make of it (I’m not sure I know what to make of it). I do know that I had a good time writing it, and I plan to do more.

Game previews are something we do a lot of at Kotaku—our readership is very interested in upcoming games, and we get to play a lot of games pre-release and share our impressions. Preview events tend to run from “uncomfortable” to “goddamned uncomfortable” for me. Trying to get a real sense of the game is all but impossible, since you generally see exactly what the publisher wants you to see and nothing more. Furthermore, playing a game for the first time while someone watches you, with a (well-intentioned but also intrusive) PR person hovering in the background is just… it’s not very close to my ideal gaming experience. Though often there are cookies, and I do like to eat cookies while I play games. (Also, Milk Duds.)

Sometimes the PR folks at press events practically write your headlines for you, and sometimes that can get you in trouble. (*cough* Batman *cough*) (I actually plan to address the whole “Joker-Gate 2011″ debacle, but I’ll do it this week at Kotaku and I don’t want to steal my own lede here.)

Writing previews can be fun, if you’re creative about it. I had a good time writing this goofy rhyming preview for Saints Row 3, a game which deserves a poetic preview like a German Shepard deserves a plate of foie gras… which I guess is a good reason to do it? It’s a riotous, dumb game, but it’s not particularly lyrical. Anyhow, I had a good time writing it.

It was cool working with our commenters to assemble this collection of Deus Ex hidden secrets and easter eggs, which did over 1 million pageviews. That is a big number! The last hype-related thing I wrote that I liked was my analysis of the whole Dead Island trailer thing, where the emotionally impactful (blerg worst phrase) ad for a game was substantially different than the game itself. I talked about what I thought that meant, and invoked Don Draper while doing so.

I was happy to get to share some more bloggy, critical stuff, including my well-received ”Kill your Mini-Map” post about Grand Theft Auto IV that has been brewing in ma’ brain for a long time, and a post about “The Thrill of the Hunt” in games, and how much fun it can be to hunt… people… and kill them. Uh. In games. It’s nice to pause and take a look back at games that everyone has already played, and allows for much more critical perspective. I hope to do some more of that in the future.

I’ve also covered some “current events,” in that they were things that were happening and I wrote about them. I was happy with my coverage of the Foxconn iPhone game that got banned, as well as my takedown of Fox News’s uninformed take on Fate of the World. I’ve actually kinda become Kotaku‘s unofficial Fox News hatchet-man, which is a role I’m prefectly happy to assume. If you malign video games on TV, beware! I will probably make fun of you for it.

Me at E3, ignoring Jane's Addiction in favor of trinkets.

So there you have it! Some of my favorite things I’ve written in my first quarter-year at the biggest, weirdest, wildest videogame blog on the planet. The fall rush is halfway over and all my convention-attending is done, so I’m hopeful that I’ll be writing more focused, critical pieces in the coming weeks.

As always, if you’d like to keep up on my writing but for whatever reason don’t want to sift through the tons of content we run every day, you can subscribe to my RSS feed, follow me on Facebook, or track me down on Twitter, where I tend to share my biggest stories.

On a personal note, I’d like to thank all my friends for reading my stuff and supporting me. Getting a full-time gig writing about games is a very cool thing, and I feel fortunate to have this opportunity. But it can often feel lonesome, and the job hasn’t always been easy. Working from home, writing super-hard all day, addressing a mob-like comment section of shouted, conflicting opinions; dealing with doubt and isolation, as well as the occasional anonymous social-media anger of people I don’t even know. It’s all tough. Due to the full-time nature of this job, I also somewhat unexpectedly left my music teaching position at Urban, and I miss teaching every day. It has been a significant challenge for me to balance my life without my students in it.

Every reader who has sent in a note of encouragement, every friend who has retweeted my work or said nice things, everyone who’s joked around with me on IM and teamed up with me for some late-night zombie destruction… thank you. My life has never been weirder than it is right now, and thanks to you, it’s also never been more fun.

Thanks also to my editors and fellow Kotaku writers, all of whom are maniacs who work their asses off every day. Special recognition to Stephen Totilo, who has kept me sane and been a massive help in upping my game. He’s a great editor, a funny guy, and he’s a phenom when he covers a conference. It would take another 1500 words to even begin to list the things I’ve learned from him.

Emo stuff complete! Time to play some more of this game I’m reviewing for next week. It’s not gonna be pretty. But then, “pretty” ain’t what they pay me for.

At least, it’s not entirely what they pay me for.

My latest music/games column is up at Kotaku - it’s a post about voice-acting, melody, and why so many beloved game soundtracks are from games that feature little to no voice acting. It’s an idea I’ve been chewing on for a while, and which I first articulated on Michael Abbott’s Brainy Gamer Podcast last fall while talking with Michael and Dan Bruno about our favorite game soundtracks. While it’s of course not a “final” idea, I’m happy with how I managed to articulate the core concept.

As developers add spoken dialogue and sound effects to their games, they should always weigh the value of those things against the possibility that they will overshadow their game’s other vital aspects: bounce, flow, rhythm, and feel. Games and music can both wordlessly convey feelings of challenge and stress, joy and terror, and progression and release, and a talented composer can weave his or her melodies straight into a game’s mechanical systems to create something dynamic and uniquely beautiful.

The column was also a chance for me to do some collaboration with my friend Sarah Elmaleh, who is a fantastic voice-actor based out of NY. You may remember her role as K’lara Loshachtii in the oft-delayed but epic Sci Fi adventure game Suparna Galaxy. (And the voice of the computer in the PC adventure game Gemini Rue).

Sarah lent her voice to the role of Aeris in a video I made, while… yeah… I played Cloud. My goal wasn’t to win any voice-acting awards, but more to point out how the ear changes focus once a voice enters the scene. That said, I think that a recent YouTube commenter put it most succinctly:

I hope it’s clear in the piece that I don’t mean to “dismiss” any games with voice-acting, and I’m not offering my central theory as anything other than food for thought for fans and developers alike. I love the soundtracks to games like Metal Gear and Mass Effect, and of course both of those games feature copious amounts of voice-acting. That said, I think there’s something to be said for limiting the amount of chatter that goes on in games – lately I’ve been playing a few games that feature too much repetitive NPC chatter, and it detracts from the overall experience as much as it does from the music.

It’s been really fun, as usual, to talk about the column with commenters and people on twitter, and I’ve heard some great thoughts on both sides of the discussion. And I’ve had it further reinforced that at some point here I need to play Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy VI, XenoGears and Crisis Core. You know, when I create a clone of myself specifically to get caught up on older games.

In the meantime, gotta go finish Bastion. It’s pretty cool. I’ll have some stuff to say about it.

-Read “Voice-Acting Sucks Kill It With Fire” at Kotaku-

This past Sunday, I headed down to Mad Dog in the Fog to check out a new event called “BarCraft,” hosted by Justin.tv’s gaming channel Twitch TV. I was covering the event for Kotaku, and it was great fun. My write-up went up today:

In between games there’s a convivial, social vibe as bargoers chat up strangers, discuss strategies and rehash epic games from the past. Everyone seems to agree that it’s a fantastic turnout, and that that fact is a Very Good Thing. BarCraft has that open, optimistic excitement that tends to crop up at the best types of video game events. Here we are at the start, everyone seems to be thinking, dipping our toes into the future.

My impressions are in the piece, as well as some general thoughts on professional gaming as a spectator sport. The short version: I’m totally into it. I’m certainly not much of a StarCraft player; the skill that it takes to compete on the Battle.net ladders is far beyond me. If you want a good idea of what I’m talking about, check out this insane APM demonstration:

But even though I could never hope to be one one-hundredth that fast, I love the game, and have had a blast learning more about the process of its design.

I missed the GDC talk given by Blizzard’s Dustin Browder entitled “Designing an e-Sport,” but I wish I hadn’t – fortunately, I can go watch it on the GDC Vault, which I fully plan to do. But even without seeing it, I enjoyed my friend David Carlton’s notes about the talk that he posted to his blog.

I’ve been thinking about sports and games quite a bit lately, realizing that it seems easier to turn a videogame into a sport than it is to turn a pre-existing sport into a videogame. People play Street Fighter IV and StarCraft 2 professionally, but to my knowledge they don’t play Madden or MLB: The Show. I have a number of thoughts about why that might be, but it’d probably be best to get them organized, do some research, and write a full piece about it.

In the meantime, I’m sure there’ll be more BarCrafts soon. The guys from Twitch TV were really excited to host more, and from the look of this Reddit thread, plenty of other folks are going to be taking it upon themselves to organize ad-hoc get-togethers of their own.

I’ll certainly go to the next one, and bring some friends. Maybe in a few months, at the end of the NASL’s second season. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to tear myself away from these YouTube videos and finish the Wings of Liberty campaign.

- Read my “BarCraft” report at Kotaku -

There’s something about print, isn’t there? Writing on the internet is fun, and there’s a certain joy in the immediate gratification of hitting “publish.” But print publishing remains the more satisfying experience; the permanence of print will never die, doom-predicting media soothsayers be damned.

I’m happy to have a few things coming out in print this month, first of which is a big feature that I put together for Kill Screen Magazine’s fifth issue, “Public Play.” In it, I go on the road with the San Francisco-based company The Go Game. The Go Game is a bit like a hirable version of The Amazing Race, with games that sprawl across a city and involve location challenges, hidden actors, creative camerawork, and good-natured competition. I was embedded with a team that worked its way through San Francisco’s Embarcadero district, and I also spoke at length with Ian Fraser and Finn Kelley, the company’s founders.

Some other great writers have stuff in the issue as well, including friends Simon Parkin, Jon Irwin, Brian Taylor and Michael Abbott. So go order it. Or better yet, get a subscription, because I have a feeling that the next issue in particular (the “Sound” issue) is going to be pretty out of sight.

I’ve also got some stuff in the newest issue of EDGE Magazine, including a lengthy feature I wrote about Bioshock Infinite. Infinite was easily one of the most impressive demos at E3, and it was great fun to chat with creative director Ken Levine and several other members of the team working on it. I don’t have a print copy of the issue just yet, but you can buy a digital copy online or find it in stores. (I should note that Edge doesn’t publish bylines, so I’m kind of bending the rules by saying that I wrote this feature. But whatever, it’s my first article for them and I’m proud of that. In the future, go ahead and buy Edge, since I’m already working on more cool stuff for them.)

And finally, I’m so excited that Paste has finally launched its digital print mag, the mPlayer! Back in the halcyon days of its print run, Paste was known for the music CD sampler they sent out each month; that sampler returns in digital form with the mPlayer. The second issue has a reprint of my very first column, “Home Again,” and I’ll be writing plenty more things for it as we go forward. It’s free through September, too, so do check it out.

Whew. I’ve been running a bit silent lately, and just finished a big move that sapped a lot of my free time. Fortunately, I’ve got some good stuff in the works. Hope everyone out there is doing well, and finding the time this summer to sit back in the sun and do some reading.

My review of Valve’s new puzzle game Portal 2 is now online at Paste. I liked the game a whole lot, which is not a huge surprise given that it’s the sequel to one of my favorite games of all time and was made by probably my single favorite design studio in the world.

Everyone has had a lot to say about the game, so rather than get too nitty gritty with my criticism, I thought I’d try to illustrate how it felt to play. To do that, I headed down to Cliff’s Variety in the Castro, picked up a big box of dominoes, threw them onto our living room floor, and started taking pictures.

Let me tell you, dominoes do not make for very cooperative photo subjects. Many of the formations I made required a good deal of time to set up (read the review and you’ll see what I’m talking about), and a single mistake would send me back to square one. There are few things more frustrating than toppling a huge domino-heart for the fourth time while Stephen Merchant’s grinning face silently mocks you from the floor.

Interestingly enough, I actually learned a thing about design as I progressed. I was initially constructing the shapes from the beginning to the end, which meant that by the time I got twenty dominoes in, a single mistake could undo all the work that led up to it. In other words, I was unwittingly enforcing old-school game design upon myself, making a game with no checkpoints and a single life. Death resulted in starting all over again. It was stressful.

I quickly figured out that it would be smarter to leave a couple of empty spots in the row, thereby limiting my losses should an errant domino topple. This checkpointing system both of saved me time and helped me to relax, which in turn made me much more effective at laying the actual dominoes.

The moral of the story? Hooray checkpoints!

Anyhow. I had a lot of fun with the review, and even more fun playing the game itself. I still have quite a bit of the co-op campaign to play, as well as the full developer commentary on the single-player campaign. It’s really good.

I’ve noticed several people complaining about the single player campaign’s short length while others are saying that the pacing feels off, that the second and third acts feel bloated. I disagree.

I watched many friends online simply charge through this game, beating it in a single day. While I’m sure this would have been possible, I opted to take my time with it (ten hours for single-player), playing for an hour or two each night for a week. I’m glad I did.

I got stuck a couple of times, and rather than looking for an answer online, I turned off the machine and slept on it, returning the next day with fresh eyes. Personally speaking, I had no problem with Portal 2‘s pacing; with each new hour, I was simply happy to be playing more Portal. Sure, a few of the puzzles in the second act felt a touch too spacious and undirected, but that’s a fairly small complaint compared to the vast number of things the game does right.

There are so many great little touches, many of them musical—the way that lasers generate complimentary tones, the grooves generated by the electronic catapult-levers—as well as the seemingly endless amount of macho dialogue given to the malfunctioning turret bots and the scores of hidden jokes and references that I have yet to find. Valve’s Source engine might be showing its age in terms of its its ability to stream content and eliminate loading screens, but it remains clean and beautiful and is a joy to see in motion. And the big finale! While I wouldn’t dream of spoiling it for anyone, suffice to say that I almost fell out of my chair due to the awesomeness.

Anyhow. You can get my official thoughts over at Paste, along with my dominotastic rendition of what it feels like to play Portal 2. Hope you dig it, and I hope you get a chance to play the game.

-Read my Portal 2 Review at Paste-

When it came down to it, back in the 90′s you were either Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat; there was no middle ground. The era had a lot of divisions going on—Coke/Pepsi, Nintendo/Sega,  Nike/Reebok—on the one hand  the refined classic, and on the other the edgy upstart. For whatever reason, the refined classic tended to be “red” while the upstart was “blue.”

There was never really much question which franchise I preferred; I was a Mortal Kombat guy through and through. From the first time I saw someone playing the game at Aladdin’s Castle in Bloomington’s College Mall, I was hooked. I remember witnessing:

• Johnny Cage uppercutting someone onto the spikes in the pit
• Kano ripping out Johnny Cage’s Heart
• Sub-Zero tearing out someone’s spinal cord
• Goro

That was pretty much all I needed. The digitized actors, the claymation, the gouts of ketchupy blood… who needed precision balancing and deep combo-sets when you had all that? I liked the comparative simplicity of the gameplay, like… I always liked the “uppercut” move. With a simple combination button press, I could launch my enemy across the screen and knock away a sizable chunk of health at the same time.

I wasn’t allowed to have any set-top consoles growing up, so the only way I got to play the game was either over at one of my friends’ houses or, eventually, on my Sega Game Gear (I was allowed to have portable systems). I remember when the Game Gear port was finally released. I had pre-ordered, so I went to the Software Etc. (also in College Mall), picked up the tiny box, plugged it in and played and played.

I’m still surprised at how great the portable version was; surprisingly little was lost in the translation. And the Fatalities, oh, man. That was the whole reason you played, just to get to that final moment when you could frantically press buttons in hopes of pulling off a particularly gross finishing move.

My sweet collector’s edition of the game just arrived, and I’ll be doing a review for Paste soon. In the meantime, some fellow Kill Screen writers and I wrote up a bunch of half-serious “reviews”of the new fatalities, based on videos we watched. I got to do some really good ones, though my favorite was Mileena’s:

She sensually saunters over, laying her hands upon his cheeks and gently turning him to face her. It’s a quiet, intimate moment, almost shocking in its immediacy. Conquered and conqueror, their eyes nearly meeting—in another lifetime, in an entirely different kind of game, this could melt into a romantic embrace. But … no. Mileena tears his head from his body, stepping into the spotlight and removing her mask. With her true visage revealed, she lowers her horrid maw and feasts upon the severed face of her foe, throwing the remains to the ground and moaning in blood-soaked ecstasy.

Also I use the phrase “cursed with the fang-laden mouth of a Lovecraftian fish-monster.” The whole thing is pretty funny and gross; go give it a read.

With the intense amount of great games I’ve got to play, I’m beginning to wonder about how I’ll get through them all. When it rains, it pours. Sometimes it pours blood.

Well, that was the subtitle I submitted for my Joystiq review of the new XBLA Slash-em-up The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile. Unfortunately, it was too long for their format so they went with “Fangs a lot,” which is cool too.

Regardless, the game itself is ridiculously cool, and I made no bones about that in my review.

It’s a bloodbath, all right. The young girl swings and stabs, ripping her blade through flesh, metal and bone, eviscerating foe after foe until the room is covered in a thick, rich coat of red. Your eye can barely track her movements as she flits from corner to corner, vanishing in a puff of crimson smoke only to reappear, strike, and then vanish again.

Perhaps that dramatic opening has your intrest piqued? Then go read the whole review! And hey, if you’ve got an XBox 360, you could sure come up with worse ways to spend your money when the game launches this week.

-Read The Diswasher: Vampire Smile Review at Joystiq-

Or really, just one.

I have a whole slew of post-GDC stuff that I want to blog about (not a partial slew; an entire slew), but I am only just now coming back to an even keel after the whole affair so my bandwidth is limited. I did want to write a post to talk about a very cool letter series I’m doing at Paste, discussing the classic videogame Final Fantasy VII.

I’m playing the game for the first time and as I do, I’m writing letters to fellow game-brain Leigh Alexander. For those who don’t follow gaming closely, Leigh is a fantastic writer and an ever-present, singular critical voice on the gaming landscape. She’s written for just about every gaming publication out there as well as a bunch of other places, and she writes particularly well about people, the games they play, and why they play them. She is also a hilarious person and one of my favorite friends in games journalism (or anywhere else, for that matter), and I’ve counted myself lucky to get to know her.

I do hope you’ll read our letters—we ran the first two parts this week (Part 1, Part 2). The easiest way to keep track of them is to bookmark Paste’s automatically updated index, which is here. (The truly interested can also follow both of us on Twitter, since a fair amount of errant FFVII randomness occurs there as well.)

Our discussion is not constrained merely to FFVII—even over the handful of letters we’ve written so far, we have branched out to talk about many other aspects of modern games and gaming, as well as a lot of other things. We’ll run parts 3 and 4 next week, then most likely go to running them once a week on Tuesdays. I’m sure that as we go, we’ll stretch even farther… I mean, I only just got Vincent into my party and judging by what Leigh’s said of him so far, she might wind up sidetracking us into a separate series of letters entirely devoted to his hotness.

I’ve been so thrilled at the writers that I’ve gotten to contribute to Paste over the past month, and will post more links and other stuff here as soon as I have time. If you’d like to subscribe to our games coverage, Paste‘s Games RSS feed is here.

Enjoy!

-Read “The Final Fantasy VII Letters” at Paste Magazine-

What more can I say about this? I’m so happy have been given the opportunity to publish a meaty letter series between two of my very favorite game critics, Tom Bissell and Simon Ferrari. In three letters apiece, they discuss their views on videogame criticism, and in doing so raise more interesting points and questions than I could hope to coherently list.

If you are interested in videogames and game criticism, I suggest that you go and read it. I’ll avoid reiterating my preface here, so I’ll just thank Tom and Simon once more for their time, and for taking the conversation so seriously.

-Read “On Videogame Criticism” at Paste Magazine-

It’s been a little while since an update here, thought I’d post about some things I’ve been up to at Paste and abroad. It’s been a hell of a couple of weeks; I’ve added a few musical projects on top of all of my writing and editing, so I’m probably the busiest I’ve ever been.

[We're a bit enamored of the word "busy" these days, aren't we? Seems everyone I know is always talking about how busy they are. I guess that more than busy, I feel for the first time as though there is always something I could be doing, so maybe that is a better way to put it. Like, I will never respond to all the emails in my inbox, both literally and metaphorically.]

I wrote a piece about the voice actors of the Mass Effect games; in my opinion, the actor who plays the female version of Commander Shepard is by far the superior actor. It was a bit of a tossed-off article, but it would up kinda blowing up; feels good to get a couple of thousand shares off of something, particularly while spreading the word about a cool and talented actor like Jennifer Hale.

I also did a lengthy interview with the guys who are making InFamous 2, a superhero game set in a fictional version of New Orleans. Since I recently visited New Orleans myself, I thought it would be fun to talk to them about their process as they set about recreating the city. It was fun, and so I folded the interview into a feature. It’s probably a bit too long, and would’ve been better had I pulled choice quotes and worked it into a one-page essay, but that’s not how I wound up doing it. Next time.

I also wrote a guest-post for a blog I really like called The Border House. Founded by a handful of really good games writers, TBH has set itself up as a bit of a crusading force in gaming, a place where they embrace diversity, tolerance and equality, three qualities that are sorely lacking from a good amount of mainstream gaming culture. Every so often they run a “Characters Done Right” post, and so I wrote one about Scarlett, the lead character from the Scarlett and the Spark of Life iPhone game. I’ve been in contact with the two gentlemen who made the game, so I got one of them to give me some background on her creation. It was fun to write, and always feels good to point people to a gem that they might’ve missed.

Finally, my second Bit Player column is up at Paste. This time I talked about the concept of “Over The Top” in games, which has become a bit of a marketing term lately. I talked about the upcoming game Bulletstorm in particular, and tried to offer a measured critique of what I see as a pretty ordinary First-Person Shooter selling itself as an over-the-top freakout.

Countless blogs, gaming websites, and even Fox News columnists have gathered to discuss, decry and defend this game, yet as I played it I was struck by how ordinary it was.

In both single- and multiplayer, I spent most of my time running about with a whip in one hand and a gun in the other, blowing up red barrels and kicking dudes into environmental hazards. My character said “dick” a whole lot, sometimes hilariously (“Son of a dick!”) and sometimes eye-rollingly (“You scared the dick off me!”). I took the gunner’s chair on a giant spaceship, I aimed down my iron-sights with the left trigger, I manned a machine-gun turret, I pressed ‘A’ to climb over obstacles, and I did an on-rails vehicle segment. It was well-crafted and enjoyable enough, but if there was a top, I felt pretty firmly under it.

My post sparked some good discussion on Twitter, and eventually raised the ire of Adrian, Bulletstorm’s lead designer, who posted a lengthy note to twitter. Hm. An excerpt:

Kirk writes: “[...] it seemed pretty clear that People Can Fly had simply grafted some provocative language onto a fairly derivative scoring system with the hope that it would attract controversy and media attention”.

Now this hurts. Like, seriously hurts.

I was a bit taken aback by that “hurts” line—I felt I had written a fairly even-handed critique, and certainly meant no harm. I really enjoyed speaking with Tanya, the game’s producer, and as I mentioned in the piece, she did quite a bit to disabuse me of the notion that the developers had added their provocative language entirely to get media attention. I’m not so sure how I feel about his claim that the game’s “Gang Bang” and “Double Penetration” achievements come “from the heart”, but hey, to each his or her own. At any rate, he and I had a perfectly pleasant back-and-forth after his initial post.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone. Go read Leigh’s latest Thought Catalog piece, ‘The Best Kiss I Ever Had‘, and try not to drown in nostalgia for the wonderful, wandering chill of the winters of our youth.

I’ll just be over here playing Ochre songs on piano and writing internet comments.

My first weekly “Bit Player” column is online at Paste. It’s titled “Home Again” and in it, I discuss the different ways in which videogames can conjure the feeling of home. I talk about a lot of very good games, from Chrono Trigger to Dragon Age: Origins to Far Cry 2 to Minecraft.

The experience conjured childhood memories with a surprisingly forceful immediacy; memories of building forts as a kid and hiding away from the world, safe from the peering eyes of adults. I lit a torch and my small cave was flooded with warm light, a flashlight’s hooded glow beneath the covers of my childhood bed. As the moon rose in the sky, I began to dig.

I hope you enjoy it.  The past month has been a crazy ride of emailing, scheduling, interviewing, and reviewing games (this week’s review: Dead Space 2). As a result, it’s been a little while since I wrote any straight-up editorial. Doing so again felt very nice indeed.

-Read “Home Again” at Paste Magazine-

My latest review is up at Paste, this one of the outstanding PS3 game LittleBigPlanet 2. Which, as you can maybe guess, is a sequel to LittleBigPlanet. It’s a very, very good game that presents an almost infinite amount of content wrapped up in a tiny world so brimming with life that it’s almost tangible.

“The levels run the gamut in terms of length, style, look and feel, sprawling across six different worlds, each with its own distinctive visual and audio palate. Gooey confections bounce and melt across a tea-party wonderland while mosquitos and bees hum about the entrance to a tropical psych-ward and tiny robots mount a revolution in a Soviet propaganda-tinged factory. One level, set within a dark cave lit only by wandering fireflies, is one of the most abjectly lovely things I’ve seen in recent memory—flickering shadows, silently glowing flames and ghostly, reverberating music.”

As I played the game I was reminded of Michael Abbott’s post “Plush Tech,” in which he marveled at how so many current games are using their big-time budgets and talented developers to make humble-looking, handmade things. I think there’s something to that, and I loved LittleBigPlanet 2‘s miniaturized Muppets-by-way-of-Michel-Gondry vibe.

It’s a lovely game and a testament to what happens when creative people creatively foster creativity in others. If you own a PS3, I heartily recommend it.

-Read LittleBigPlanet 2 Review at Paste Magazine-

Because there are so many people making hamburgers. They don’t need me to make another hamburger. I want to find things people need and to make them. I think that’s the best way to contribute.

I think there’s value [in my games], so I don’t really worry about commercial success. Because I think if it’s really valuable, people will pay for it.

-Flower creator and thatgamecompany creative director
Jenova Chen speaking with 1UP’s Chris Plante
about his upcoming game Journey

As I’ve announced elsewhere, I have accepted the position of Games Editor at Paste Magazine. It’s a super exciting turn of events, and I’ve been having a blast getting things up and running over there over the past few weeks. I’ll spare you the whole schpeil here, but suffice to say I’ll be doing a whole lotta games-related writing over there, and it is going to be pretty awesome.

Whenever I’ve got something that’s a bit too random, personal or errant for Paste, I’ll post it here. I’ll also use this space as a place to organize and share my work over there. You can always check the “Around The Web” tab in the sidebar for my writing there and elsewhere, and I’ve also got a directory over at Paste with everything I’ve written for them. I’ll do my best to put together posts here every week or two rounding up what we’ve been up to. Speaking of which…

I did a few reviews over the last couple of weeks, including one for the superbly terrifying Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It was a fun review to write, and I think it hits an interesting blend between the experiential stuff that I am into and a more formal critique and review. The game is awesome, so if you own a computer (Mac or PC), you should get it. And, happily, its developer Frictional games has seen sales of the game explode and have surpassed their desired profit margins for the first time ever.

I also reviewed the fun sword-slashing iOS game Infinity Blade, and if anyone has a better term for “game available on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch” than “iOS”, I’m all ears. Lastly I wrote up the first chapter of Scarlett and the Spark of Life, a supremely charming and witty point-and-click adventure game.

I’ve been running the odd news item and feature as well, with help from our awesome intern Bo Moore. I did a roundup of the best Downloadable Content from 2020, and was happy to be a part of Kill Screen Magazine’s Best of 2010 poll, and I also shared a really neat newsgame by Molleindustria that takes the Wikileaks scenario and makes it playable. Games can illustrate and demonstrate systems in a way that other mediums cannot, and so they are particularly useful for imparting current events.

Lastly, I’m always down to contribute stuff to the other sections of the site, particularly the “Awesome of the Day” blog. Anytime someone sends me something particularly awesome, I write it up—my first two entries were for an iPhone-controlled Flying Drone and the Shark Boat, a submersible boat that leaps out of the water like a shark. And also has a shark-mouth. I believe that there is a reason that YouTube comments are turned off for this thing, and that reason is that it is as flatly ridiculous a vessel as I’ve ever seen.

Paste will be making some announcements regarding the mag and the site very soon, so stay tuned for that. Right around the same time, I’ll be starting up a weekly videogame column, which should also be pretty entertaining to write.

In the meantime, games to review, music to play, kids to teach and Mines to craft. All in a day’s work, dontcha know.

Do you enjoy listening to people talk about videogames? Are you interested in hearing me go on at (great) length about the year in gaming, games writing, internet commenting, games journalism and criticism in general?

You say you do? You are? Well then you, my friend, are in luck.

Last week I made a guest-appearance on Critical Distance’s year-end Critical Distance Confab podcast alongside esteemed guests Ben Abraham, Ian Miles Cheong, Denis Farr and host Eric Swain. We talked at length about a wide range of topics, and I had a really good time.

I’ve put links below, with a short summary of what we talked about in each part. Props to Eric for tackling the monster job of editing this mess into something that’s actually listenable.

Part One

Topics: The year in games writing, whether or not a game in alpha/beta is a finished game, Tom Bissell’s book Extra Lives, the importance of metaphor in games criticism, the games-as-art debate, Jesse Schell’s gamification talks, the Blizzard RealID controversy, Michael Abbott getting Portal onto the booklist at Wabash College, the rise of indie games, PAX and games conventions, and the demise of a few very good gaming blogs.

Part Two

Topics: Critiquing games journalism, AJ Glasser’s “No Cheering in the Press Box,” the danger of ascribing too much value to internet comments (go to the 8:00 mark for my mini-rant about this), the games of 2010, starting in January with Bayonetta and going up through Heavy Rain.

Part Three

Topics: The rest of the year in gaming: Splinter Cell: Conviction‘s hilariously awful enemy barks, How Alan Wake is more Koontz than King, Alpha Protocol, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands,  Starcraft II, how Deathspank is similar to Arrested Development, Metroid: Other M, why I thought Halo: Reach was great, the dumbness of Medal of Honor, Fallout: New Vegas, and a bunch of other games until we finally ran out of gas.

Thanks for having me, guys.