Look for me in Indie Game: The Movie 2.

BioShock Infinite is a study in indecision. It’s part violent shooter, part fairy tale, part political commentary, part alternate history story, part parallel universe science fiction story, part meta commentary on the nature of choice in video games. It’s incredibly beautiful, thought-provoking on a number of levels, and a damn fun game, but its multiple personality disorder causes the whole to feel like less than the sum of its parts.

Overall, it’s an amazing game that can’t get out of its own way. Everyone should play it, but damn, we’ve got a long way to go.

Finally.

Love the new design.

Surprise surprise? Kim-Mai Cutler at Tech Crunch:

Zynga confirmed that it started laying off U.S.-based employees ahead of what is expected to be a weak third-quarter earnings report. In all, 5 percent of the company’s full-time workforce is being let go. As of the second quarter, the company had 3,200 employees so the final tally is probably close to 160 employees.

I don’t know about anyone else, but seeing that Zynga logo stamped on top of a game has meant “don’t bother” to me for a long time. Good luck to the newly unemployed.

It falls victim to some of the same traps Deus Ex did – guards who don’t act logically when they find a body, stumbling across alternate ingress routes on your way out of a building, and a massive propensity amongst the world’s population for leaving weapons and potions and books lying around. But the world is very interesting (when was the last time you played a stealth/melee first person game set in a plague-ridden steampunk city?) and the gameplay is excellent.

A lazy, condescending dismissal of some of the best games of the past year.

On Mass Effect 3:

The amount of violence was both staggering and curiously untroubling: it was bland and empty – just like the game itself. Boring, sci-fi tosh, I wrote in my notebook. Alien both literally and metaphorically.

Some good stuff in the comments, though. Apologies to all the moms who aren’t stuck up, book-obsessed windbags.

Speaking of Windows 8, Microsoft has started taking pre-orders for Surface tablets. Same price tiers as WiFi iPads, 32GB with or without the keyboard cover, or 64GB with. Shipping the 26th of this month.

Windows 8 doom and gloom and entitlement from Casey Muratori at Gamasutra:

However, it is clear from Microsoft’s publications on Windows 8 that in order to participate in the new user interface, you must distribute your application through the Windows Store. That means as of October, Microsoft itself will become the sole source of software for everything you run on a Windows machine that isn’t relegated to the older desktop ecosystem.

It’s every American’s God-given right to use Microsoft’s new APIs however they want!

He goes on to predict the future:

For any developer keen on creating the breakthrough software of the future, it should be abundantly clear that the closed nature of Windows 8’s new ecosystem will be catastrophic for the platform. There’s no question it should be opened. But developers aren’t the people in charge of the policies for Windows 8.

Abundantly clear!

The most insightful bit in the article comes from the first commenter, who wisely points out that this is much more likely to be a move toward pushing the Xbox as Microsoft’s games platform and Windows as its productivity platform. My own guess is that they’re feeling out a variety of paths right now. Digital distribution on both dedicated and general purpose platforms, Apple-like content control for tablet devices, and continued support for classic Windows game development on non-RT Win8 platforms. They’re hedging their bets while testing the waters.

One question for the “they can pry my gaming PC from my cold, dead hands” crowd – How much longer will PC gaming remain truly relevant? This past generation already saw a larger dip than normal in its relevancy, with only World of Warcraft and the occasional Steam sale keeping interest alive at all for several years. Windows has been regaining strength as a platform of late to be sure, but how much of this can be attributed to the extended console cycle this generation has seen? My current video card is two generations old, and rarely has trouble keeping up with new releases. I’m not claiming we’ll ever reach a point where a pimped out PC isn’t noticeably better than a console, but I do think we’re heading to a point, probably in the next generation or two, where people will stop caring.

Gaming Angels has a brief opinion piece on Nintendo’s latest ad campaign, which features various famous women (Gabrielle Douglas stars in one) proudly proclaiming “I’m not a gamer” while holding out their 3DS.

I partly agree with GA’s take on the ads, that they’re dismissive of gamer culture and somewhat imply that a successful woman would never self-identify as a gamer. But I also see what they’re going for, and who they’re marketing to, and I’m not convinced that inclusiveness is a bad thing. Why are these things only for Gamers-with-a-capital-G? Are movies only for Film Buffs? Are novels the sole domain of Bookworms? Ultimately, this sort of abandonment of the hardcore is a necessary step in gaming’s transition from niche interest to legitimate artistic medium. There will always be room for dedicated aficionados to argue about the finer points of troop placement in XCOM, but that doesn’t mean we should be offended when someone makes something for Someone Who Is Not Us, or even makes an ad implying that those terrifying Others might like to dip their toe in the pool.

Eric Caoili:

Against strong competition like Nintendo’s 3DS and the flourishing mobile market, PS Vita has sold only 2.2 million units worldwide as of June. While Sony has been hesitant to share monthly sales data for the system in the West, it’s getting trounced in Japan not just by 3DS but by PSP, its seven-year-old predecessor. That’s been the case for the most part since the portable’s launch there last December.

The Vita is my handheld of choice this generation. The screen is beautiful, the hardware feels solid, and it’s capable of much more than the 3DS. Buying Sound Shapes or Retro City Rampage on the handheld and getting the PS3 version along with it is a wonderful, super consumer-friendly innovation. I think Sony made a mistake with the gimmicky back touch panel and the 3G models, but it would be a real shame to see the platform fail for want of new content.

The Verge’s Alexa Ray Correia got a chance to sit down with one of my favorite artists, Yoshitaka Amano, at New York Comic Con this weekend:

“When people look at the 16-bit characters and earlier iterations of these games, we know they don’t look like real, engaging, compelling characters,” Amano said. “But my artwork came with the box and showed this characters in great detail. Even though they play with 16-bit characters, inside their head players see these beautiful characters like the ones I draw.”

The whole interview is a great read.

A great collection of Pile of Shame confessions from some major players in the games industry. My own Pile might be taken as a sign of mental illness if it were ever to come up in a court of law.

Kyle Orland:

This one issue causes a somewhat comical amount of frustration for a small segment of vocal gamers. They fill up comment threads and messages boards with outrage at the injustice of it all. Kotaku commenter TreyTable summed up the level of vitriol nicely when he described his reaction to on-disc DLC, “The best way to fight this trend is to put a company out of business, even Capcom. That’s how one can fight this bullshit.” Another commenter MarkoPolos put it more bluntly, “How about fuck Capcom?” But the most common complaints about on-disc DLC start to break down once you take a closer look at them.

I basically agree with his reasoning, but I think he misses the bigger point – DLC is how publishers have managed to raise game prices without creating a giant backlash. It’s a good thing for everyone. Developers who might otherwise be laid off have the opportunity to justify their continued paycheck. Consumers who don’t want the extra content aren’t forced to pay for it, and continue to pay the same retail prices they’ve been paying for the past three decades. The studios and publishers are able to appeal to a wider portion of the gamer spectrum by providing a way for those who love their game and are willing to pay more to see more of it to send them money, not to mention letting them tap into the used market to some extent. I’m not aware of any data on how DLC has affected the average total price paid by consumers for games this generation, but I suspect the model’s success is reflected in the enormous budgets companies have been investing in development.

Just wanted to say that.

Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade fame is working on a card game with Cryptozoic.

In Thornwatch enemies deal wound cards that get shuffled into your deck and since they cannot be discarded begin to build up in your hand. When a vampire picked a wound card from a player the vampire was healed and the wound card went back to the player. They could also smell blood so I let them teleport to any player who had a wound in their hand. When a player hit a vampire they could choose to either deal damage or strip off one of the vampire’s buff cards. It made for some fun choices and I could not have been happier with the way they worked.

Color me intrigued.