Hardcasual

Due to a few technical issues—computer has a cough—I am unable to post part two and part three of my interview with Leigh Alexander until this weekend.

I hate to leave you all empty handed, so here are a few links to help soothe the long wait.

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Leigh Alexander’s “Microsoft: “Perception,” Not Us, is PC Gaming’s Big Problem” at Kotaku:
Microsoft’s duty (or lack there of) to the PC gamer.

N’Gai Croal announces Page 6, er… “Page 110” at LevelUp
Finally, gamers get a respectable celebrity column. Will it be a tabloid? Will there be juicy gossip? Or will it wind up like another Page 6?

David Jaffe on “Heartland” at The Escapist
“The player chases after the teenage son, beating him and dragging him down the stairs, and throwing him into the living room. The commanding officer orders the player to douse the family and the house with gasoline, and set it on fire. “It was meant to be, ‘Oh, my God, this is the worst thing in the world,’” says Jaffe.”

If you’re not reading Auntie Pixelante, Anna Anthropy’s pithy and intelligent round-up of the indie games scene, you’re missing out on one of the most unique and well-developed voices to be found in the gaming community. Like her fantastic journal, The Gamer’s Quarter, she exposes us to things we most likely would never see, with an insightful and intellectual approach that is rare at best.

In a recent post, she said of a recent Super Mario Bros. hack that:

it’s a fascinating exercise. in the same way that poets and playwrights repurpose older, widely-known stories and themes in order to create a kind of intertextuality, romhackers and game developers continuously return to super mario bros.: a known story with known mechanics, thematically resonant and wholly incorporated into the contemporary vocabulary of videogames. everyone who is making a platformer is having a dialogue with super mario bros.

Anna gets straight to the heart of what I was talking about in It Fit When I Was a Kid - and also adds a rub that I find interesting. More after the jump.

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This week’s login as guest flips roles: Hardcasual’s the guest at GameSetWatch.

How did this madness come to be, you might ask. Well, if you read our About page, you’ll notice our three best traits:

1.) Charming
2.) Witty
3.) Available for freelance

Simon Carless at GameSetWatch recently took me up on the last.

Now, if you’re not getting enough Hardcasual in your diet, you can check out GSW on Tuesday’s for my columnm, “Why We Play,” which will examine the titular statement - I’m a simple man.

My first post went live Thursday. It considers how we spiritually connect with our games, much like how gardeners spiritually connect with their Bonsai trees. Sounds a bit crazy and interesting? It’s definitely a bit of both. I also mention my Hardcasual article, Baby’s First Sword, about Ninja Gaiden as an educational device, and dig a little deeper into games as tools.

Quick, follow that hot link! – COLUMN: Why We Play - ‘In the Name of God’

I’ll still pull my weight at Hardcasual, just think of this GSW column as adding a whole-grain muffin to a well-balanced breakfast.

-Chris

You can now get your daily dose of HardCasual at HardCasual.net.

Of course, you can still find us at hardcasual.wordpress.com, but hardcasual.net sounds so bona fide!

Welcome to our weekly thanksgiving for all our supporters, temporarily dubbed ‘Turkey Sandwiches.’

Sexy Video Game Land: Leigh Alexander is not third, nor second, but first on our list. She’s a columnist for many established game websites (GameSetWatch and Variety, to name a couple), but calls SVGL home. If you haven’t already, check out her write-up on Super Smash Bros. Brawl that made a few fanboys second-guess their fresh Olimar tattoos. And when you’ve purged your bedroom of Captain N paraphernalia, check out her rebuttal. To herself.

LevelUp: N’Gai Croal is like our Soccer Mom: loyal, kind, and damn proud he helped make us who we are today. The man has linked us twice, which makes him our biggest fan. As he should be, since we ripped our blog’s title straight from his headlines. This week, he began a no-holds-barred match with another HardCasual favorite, Stephen Totilo. This bloodfest focuses on the PSP’s new game du jour, Patapon. HardCasual enjoys the game vicariously, since they have no money for such a lovely portable device (unless someone at Sony’s reading, then we would love some sweet swag—nudge, nudge).

But enough about us and our BFF’s. It’s time to pay It forward with links to our favorite articles this week.

A New Taxonomy of Gamers at Insult Swordfighting: I can’t believe I missed this article a couple months ago, but, lucky for me, I found this nugget buried in the comments at SVGL. Besides writing reviews for Paste magazine, Mitch Krapta finds time for a dissection of gamer types, including our namesake. He also likes sports.

On Being Gross at Save the Robot: Every week Kotaku posts a new ZeroPunctuation review, and every week their comments section fires up. Many readers hope to be the first to mark the day Ben Croshaw jumps the shark. Chris Dahlen doesn’t seem worried about Croshaw jumping the shark, but videogame reviews as a whole. Influenced by Croshaw’s gross-out gags, what will come of our future reviewers?

Call of Jihadi Interview at Eurogamer.net: What happens when someone re-skins a Pro-Iraq War game titled Quest for Saddam, and molds it into a virtual attack on George Bush? Night of Bush Capturing, that’s what. Chicago based artist, Wafaa Bilaal, famous for his website performance piece, ‘Shoot an Iraqi,’ recently digitized himself into NoBC, dubbing the mod of a mod Virtual Jihadi. He discusses his commentary and intentions with Eurogamer.

Have an awesome article we should read? Hit us up! Want to be our BFF? Link us!

-ctp

N’Gai Croal, my favorite video game journalist, recently posted a couple of articles on video games’ cultural validity, both relevant to our last class discussion.

Check them and his blog, Level Up, out.

Grid Wars 1 and 2 are based on the Geometry Wars series, which uses the simple shooter formula originated more than two decades ago in titles like Galaga, Missle Command, and most importantly Asteroids. Geometry Wars was originally packaged as a minigame in Project Gotham Racing 2 for the Xbox, but is best known for its downloadable sequal, Geometry Wars: Evovled. Evolved was released for download on the Xbox 360 during the system’s launch period. When early adopters of the 360 found themself with a $350 peice of hardware and few games to play, they stuck to Evolved’s old-school point grabbing and pick-up-and-play style like lice on mice.

Avid fans even developed their own versions of Geometry Wars, focusing on emulating the mechanics on the PC. Yet, Geometry Wars’ newfound popularity caught Bizarre (parent company) and Microsoft’s eye, causing the rip-offs to be squelched to make way for a spattering of new Geometry Wars releases on all home platforms.

Well, not all of the Geometry clones were squashed. Grid Wars has picked up an underground following. Though the designers are not allowed to host a download of the freeware, it still floats across the internet for gamers to play.

So, download the freeware, damn the man, save the empire, yada, yada, yada, give it a try. And don’t let the screenshot intimidate you; Grid Wars is intuitive and fun for everyone!

(Scroll to the the third paragraph and click Grid Wars 2 or Mac to download the game for your specific platform)