You and I both know that scores are largely pointless. They serve some function in that they can be internally consistent markers of quality for a publication but, I’m sure we’d agree that there’s no absolute, empirical scale by which all games are judged. No game is going to universally attract praise from all players – there is no perfect game just as there is no perfect book, film or album.
Ultimately, it comes down to what kind of message do you want to send out? What will a ten represent for your publication? There is no absolute empirical scale. You set the parameters with decisions like this. Rarely in videogames do you get a chance to point at a title and say: this is the best the medium has to offer. Thanks to editor Tom for not passing on that chance.
Snap the Rez design apart, lay the pieces out on the table and you’ve little more than a wireframe Panzer Dragoon.
Sure, it’s been named by Underworld, custom soundtracked by Adam Freeland, graphic designed in a lab by Tron nanobots and rolled out into the look-games-can-be-intellectual battleground plastered with Wassily Kandinsky posters. But behind the frippery sits Space Harrier chewing acid at a science-fiction fancy dress party. There’s no way to escape the fact that your character moves along a fixed path at a fixed speed, clicking on pop-up targets for points. At its heart, Rez is a good old-fashioned shooting gallery arcade game, albeit one stationed at a Butlins in Alpha Centuri.
But, even if you do ignore all the peripheral highbrow talk of Russian abstract painters and neurological foibles or the lowbrow hand-muffled giggling about a third-party sex toy peripheral and its rhythmic pulsing, the strong, assured core of this extraordinary game is somehow more than its constituent parts. Yes, you sit on an esoteric rollercoaster picking off line-art cubes as they streak by, but perform that kind of critical reduction and you’ll not only miss Rez’s destination but you’ll also ruin the journey. And in Rez, the journey is everything. And in Rez HD, the journey is filmed by a Heliglimbal gyro-stabilised camera borrowed from the BBC’s Planet Earth production team.
The orangey lines that delineate something from nothing, never too jagged or pixelly in the original, could now slice a cheese moon. Spread out across a widescreen canvas, the streaky pixel bomb explosions, circuit board backgrounds and ancient wireframe temples you fly through are finally brought into true focus, as if before we looked through a Dreamcast darkly but now we see in full (HD). The original version is included in the package but you can’t escape the feeling that it’s there less for completism’s sake than for rude showboating on Q Entertainment’s part.
Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the first patent approval for the Lego brick.
Lego has to be the greatest and most enduring of the mass-produced toys.
A construction set that is both iconic and infinitely flexible, these humble plastic, interlocking pieces have been used to recreate everything from the Chrysler Building to Yoda.
The Lego Group started out as a wooden toy manufacturer based in Denmark. Operating out of the workshop of one Ole Kirk Christiansen from 1932 onwards, the company only began calling itself “Lego” (literally, ‘Play Well’) two years later in 1934 before expanding to produce plastic toys in 1947. Despite a staggering variety of block subtypes and pieces that have emerged since, every single brick is compatible with the others.
The company’s not been one to rest on its laurels and is constantly at the forefront of design innovation. In Wired editor Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail, the company’s cited as being one of the most successful proponents of the concept thanks to its Lego Factory software, a program that allows anyone to design and build virtual creations, then upload them to the company to be made into kits.
To celebrate, here are some awesome Lego-themed links and some thoughts on the company’s recent successes in videogames.
First up, an awesome book by Ulrik Pilegaard and Mike Dooley, former employees of the Lego Mindstorm robotics division, entitled ‘Forbidden LEGO: Build the Models Your Parents Warned You Against‘. Inside you can get instructions and plans for how to build working models including a candy catapult, a gun that fires Lego plates, and a continuous-fire ping-pong ball launcher.
The Telegraph called the book “the Anarchist Cookbook of the nursery” while, with ugly tabloid pith, ThisIsLondon said, “Kids could make atomic bombs out of Lego, and just think what would happen if some Islamic terrorist get[s a copy].”
Um, they’d get really good at Ping Pong?
Secondly, to commemorate the patent anniversary, Boing Boing Gadgets has posted a useful and interesting Lego time line .pdf outlining the company’s evolution and various forays into sub-genres and collaborations over the years. Download the file here.
Next, here’s a three minute-long time lapse video of someone constructing a Lego Milenium Falcom – the largest Lego set ever produced. It took them four hours to finish.
Last year I interviewed a guy called David McNeely, a Lego hobbyist who took apart his Guitar hero controller and rebuilt it as a functioning Lego model. Gadgettastic has some images of his work. Perhaps even more impressive than that is this fully-working, fully-Lego PlayStation 2 that he worked up. Incredible. Check out his other works here.
Finally, this forum-made competition has challenged contestants to recreate any vehicle from the Star Wars universe in the steampunk style. The range and quality of these homespun designs is astonishing and, to anybody who still dreams that they might be an inventor when they properly grow up, is both exciting and inspiring. Scroll down the page to see some of the entries to the competition and work out how they did it.
Lego’s first triumph in videogames came in April 2005 when British developer Traveller’s Tales released the cross-platform title, Lego Star Wars. Based on the more recent trilogy of films the game oozes personality and solid, reliable design. Every scene, object and character is constructed from authentic Lego designs and there are few interactive moments as satisfying as hacking through a level, lightsabre in hand, a fountain of plastic pieces exploding from your every swipe.
One interesting thing about the Lego Star Wars games is how, in the UK at least, the games have been so lauded by videogame journalists, not just for their inherent goodness but also thanks to one particular member of staff on the team. Jonathan Smith is development director at the company. He’s a lovely, lovely man who is open, honest, never-condescending and an attentive and interested listener. He makes you feel important and valued by asking questions like: ‘What movie IP do you think would be suitable for us to look at in the future?’
2007 was a startling year for videogames. The near-incessant flow of quality titles made it difficult for hobbyist gamers to track, buy and play every notable release.
The sheer cost in both time and money required to work through this catalogue of important or interesting retail-released titles, perhaps for the first time, forced videogames’ most dedicated (and well-off) followers into picking and choosing which titles they were to invest in.
Gaming forums spawned threads where posters bemoaned publishers for not timing their release schedules more considerately, in such a way we might more easily stagger our purchases to sample everything on offer. This glut of good – or at very least interesting – content forced buyers who would normally blanket purchase all of the big titles in a month (the demographic who, at the moment at least, keep the market buoyant and rich – into more focused purchasing habits, primarily within their preferred niches.
This fracturing of the hardcore is one of the first real signs of an industry maturing – there must have come a similar point in the growth of the movie industry when dedicated film-goers could no longer afford to see everything showing at the cinema and had to settle upon those releases that particularly appealed over others.
Alongside the success the mainstream industry enjoyed last year, indie games also experienced the largest boom in over a decade.
Wired’s Chris Thompson has today posted a piece entitled Explosion of Indie Games Kills ‘Best of’ Column in which he bemoans the fact he can no longer reasonably compile a ‘best of indie games’ list because there are simply too many quality titles to choose between. And that’s not even counting those he’s not yet touched.
He likens this explosion of quality niche content to what the film and popular music industries experienced as they began to mature.
‘Back around 1900, movies began as tiny, indie affairs — hallucinogenic experiments maybe five minutes long. In a few decades, though, moviemaking became industrialized, turning films into two-hour narratives that cost millions (in today’s dollars) to make. The sheer expense of making a movie meant that producers had to stick to genres that were proven to work at the box office: westerns, romance, mysteries. Experimental film died out.
But eventually, genuine auteurs got so sick of seeing the same, dull genres over and over again that they decided to buck the big-money system. The first generation of inexpensive cameras let them make movies on the cheap; with no stakes, they could do weirder, genre-busting films. Thus were born the indie movies of the ’60s and ’70s — and that revolution helped rejuvenate all filmmaking, even big-budget stuff.
As we pointed out last week, the ubiquity of Flash and broadband is helping to billow the indie games scene upwards, in a way that many traditionally ‘hardcore’ gamers might have missed – especially those of a console persuasion.
But, of course, the games born in this sub-industry are increasingly impacting the mainstream videogames market in a way that is exciting and diversifying, be it in the form of Jonathan Mak’s excellent Everyday Shooter (available through the PlayStation 3′s PSN service) or 2D Boy’s World of Goo which will shortly make the jump from PC to Wii. Follow some of the links in Thompson’s post to see how the ubiquity and availability-to-all of these left field small-scale developments is the first fruits of an industry finally entering its (metaphorical) teenage years.
“I don’t trust a man who makes toys in a land where children are forbidden.”
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s Childcatcher expresses his distrust of RockStar’s Sam Houser following the news that the next, 18-rated Grand Theft Auto will be released on 29th April 2008.
Bioware’s space sci-fi RPG, Mass Effect, has in recent weeks been attacked for supposedly allowing gamers to engage in interactive sexually explicit acts.
One sensationalist columnist writing for a hard-right US website actually claimed the game offered (and preemptive apologies for disappointing those coming through via a google search) ‘customisable sodomy’.
In reality, the game is a poor candidate for anti-videogame critics and commentators. The sex scene is but a stitch in a 30 hour tapestry that shows nothing you wouldn’t see in a lingerie shop window. Indeed, it’s part of a side-quest that most players probably never even saw.
The story, its backlash from the gaming community and the original writer’s subsequent apology played out over a week ago, but Fox News has only just seized upon it for the item below (which actually shows the full extent of the ‘smut’ on air, while leaving the false implication that there’s a WHOLE lot more).
It’s the same old centimetre-deep discussion that goes on in these things, each side blurting their ‘facts’ and perspectives at the other in the two minutes available without listening or engaging. The news item is being used by both sides as a soapbox to preach to reassure viewers of the veracity of their claims. This is absolutely not a field of debate.
However, the truth is that M or 18-rated games should never be marketed to minors (as often does happen either through magazine cover exclusives or web advertising on gamefaqs and so on) so, yes, there is a good point nestling in Fox’s report, struggling to break free of the tangle of lies, misinformation and misrepresentation surrounding it.
But this is certainly not the game to make the subject of such a debate, carrying as it does the fully disclosed warning: ‘Blood. Violence. Sexual Themes. Partial Nudity. Language.’ (Actually, do games have to declare if they contain ‘language’ these days? It’s political correctness gone mad etc.)
But let’s zoom out for a second and remember something: Fox Entertainment owns IGN, one of the largest videogame-related websites in the world.
In both places (Fox News and IGN) the company is simply providing content to the prejudices and viewpoints of their various audiences for profit. There’s no absolute ideology or ethic the company’s adhering to.
‘Over here we hire idiot right-wing sensationalists to slam videogames and keep the core demographic of viewers morally indignant and happy; over here we hire nerdish writers with slim salary expectations and ambitions to review those same videogames.’
If the readership of each outlet hates the other then so much the better: company profits multiply in division.
It’s not a big water slide but, when you’re two-years old, even the staircase to your bedroom’s an Everest.
The best thing about this slide, for bigger kids at least, is that there’s a large black and red digital clock suspended above the exit hole.
As you whizz into daylight, all flailing arms and white wash, you can check to see a readout of your maximum speed coming down, and how it compares to the day’s top score.
This simple addition to the ride makes all the difference. Suddenly how you slide is as important as why you slide. Lock arms to sides and lie your head hard against the tube, staring upwards as the ceiling flicks by? Or arch your back so there’s as little flesh friction as possible? Perhaps only wear Speedos? Technique becomes everything where before it meant nothing. And when you emerge: if you’ve tipped over 13 mph you’re doing very well. Yeah, it’s not a big water slide.
More of life should have statistical read-outs and high-score tables built into it. Libraries with a leaderboard showing who’s read the most books this month; cats with GPRS trackers to show WHERE they went and WHAT they did last night; urinals that let you know who peed the longest that night; cinema screen reports on who ate the most popcorn during the picture; office jobs with achievement points.
Anyway, Chewing Pixels is waist deep in water, cajoling its daughter – she’s the two year old gazing upwards in fear as the camera zooms directly up into the rafters – to go down the water slide. The rules on the board state: ‘Children must be two-years or over to ride this flume’ so it seemed as good a first time as any to get get her name to the top of a leaderboard. Perhaps videogame journalists make the most pushy parents when it comes to this kind of thing. Would now be a good time to admit we took into consideration what her three initials would look like on an arcade leaderboard when naming her?
So we’re there, in the pool gazing upwards at this winding blue tube with a huddle of be-goggled kids at the summit, and I’m reasoning with her. Well, as much as one can reason with the two-year-old mind. ‘It’s perfectly safe’; ‘It’ll be fun’; ‘I’ll hold your hand on the way up’; ‘You can watch me go down it first’; ‘I’ll be there to catch you at the bottom’: all the angles covered.
And one second she’s nodding feverishly in expectation and semi-understanding. The next, having seen the symphony of splash one of the boys just made at the bottom of the slide, she’s shaking her head, bottom lip trembling, eyes full of deep worry. Things she doesn’t understand about things she doesn’t understand and only me there to say what, why and that it’ll definitely be OK in the end.
Then she makes a snap decision, dashing out of the pool as fast as her legs can go.
And as she’s running towards the corkscrew staircase that leads up to the slide, she’s crying. In fact, she’s near hysterical. But she’s still running, and towards, not away from her fear.
It’s the clearest outward demonstration of that complex tussle of human emotions I’ve ever seen: running towards the thing that’s making you cry; compelled to do something terrifying because it’ll be fun, because it’ll be important, because that’s what other people expect, because that’s how you grow up.
I’m not sure if I’m more proud of her or ashamed of myself. And then I realise, twenty days late, in her example I’ve found my New Year’s resolution.
Yesterday, John Walker, Private Eye’s blogger-de-jour, sends over a link to a Youtube video with the comment: “The Christian videogame we’ve all been waiting for”.
It’s an eight minute montage of jaw-dropping footage from a game called ‘Zoo Race’ from independent ‘Christian’ developer Cougar Interactive.
At its heart the game is a straightforward animal racing game that, rickety visuals aside, reminds me a bit of recent Xbox 360 title, Viva Piñata Party Animals. What marks the indie title out though is the bonkers premise which imagines this race is what happened when Noah gathered the animals together, two by two before the flood… or something.
In an excruciating introductory cut scene we see a librarian who doubts God’s ability to do the impossible get turned into a racehorse; we watch farm animals sprint through fields and streams while wearing bowler hats and we marvel at a minigame where all of the animals dance at a disco lit by a fountain of neon colour emanating, apparently, from the Ark of the Covenant itself.
Oh, and God (and we know it’s God because he speaks veeery slooowly because he’s soooo biiiiig) commentates on the race, interspersing his progress reports with scriptural quotations.
Throughout the day the video spread like wildfire across the internet, attracting derision and incredulity from the gaming community. The ridicule is, of course, well-deserved. The game is technically a mess with disastrous 3D modelling, patchwork animation, drab colouring, unforgivable texture pop-in and ruinous voice acting. This is not a kid sitting at home learning how to code but rather a bona fide, commercial project and as such it deserves all of the pitying criticism it’s received.
Zoo Race would have hung unnoticed from the coattails of subculture, dismissed as the output of a rank, disturbed or misguided amateur, unworthy of comment were it not for the fact that it’s being marketed by Cougar as a ‘Christian’ game.
The word Christian is, in the strict sense, a noun. It literally means somebody who follows the teachings of Jesus Christ. People get themselves in all manner of trouble when they turn the noun into an adjective to describe their work, community, bookshop, painting, tee-shirt, videogame or song. A book or song cannot ‘follow Christ’. As an adjective the word is mostly vacuous other than targeting a product specifically at Christian people, in essence, a term of marketing.
Problematically people ascribe deeper, ideological significance to an object when it is prefixed by the adjective ‘Christian’. They might quite reasonably expect that, for example, a Christian book promotes the teachings, moral stance or ethical position of Christ. However, in many of cases this is simply not true or, at least, the book promotes only a very narrow reading of those teachings. A ‘Christian Book’ is instead a book that is being marketed to a particular demographic. ‘Christian’ as an adjective is a label of marketing dressed up as a label of message, identity or instruction.
The problem is exacerbated when the Christian adjective is ascribed to more abstract, aesthetic and non-instructional things such as music, art or videogames. Rob Bell in his excellent book Velvet Elvis explains it like so:
‘Something can be labeled “Christian” and not be true or good. . . It is possible for music to be labeled Christian and be terrible music. It could lack creativity and inspiration. The lyrics could be recycled clichés. That “Christian” band could actually be giving Jesus a bad name because they aren’t a great band. It is possible for a movie to be a “Christian” movie and to be a terrible movie. It may actually desecrate the art form in its quality and storytelling and craft. Just because it is a Christian book by a Christian author and it was purchased in a Christian bookstore doesn’t mean it is all true or good or beautiful. A Christian political group puts me in an awkward position: What if I disagree with them? Am I less of a Christian? What if I’m convinced the “Christian” thing to do is to vote the exact opposite?
Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective.’
This problem is not peculiar to Christianity. ‘Gay’ is a noun in the strict sense signifying a homosexual person. However, it’s increasingly used as an adjective in order to sell product to that specific niche, again a kind of marketing malapropism. So we have gay bars, gay car insurance companies and gay holidays etc . Some Christians, like some gays, for all of their insistence they be accepted and integrated in seamlessly into society, still want to feel distinct and part of a subculture. And there’s always money to be made in providing content that explicitly appeals to that subculture with a simple and mostly meaningless marketing label.
When religions engage in this kind of spin it always feels a little insidious. Indeed, the following text, used at the end of the Zoo Race shareware demo, demonstrates just this:
“Buy the fun game that the big name publishers refused to finance or even show you. Why wait? You can do it, because you are a fun loving creation of god.”
Post Passion of the Christ, big name publishers are only too happy to publish and promote ‘Christian’-targeted content if there enough money to be made. In the case of Zoo Race big name publishers refuse to finance it not on ideological grounds but simply because it’s awful. As Kieron Gillen points out over at RPS: ‘Fucking big name publishers. We hate those guys too. Clearly, it couldn’t have anything to do with the glitchy animation, complete lack of physics, my-first-quake-level geometry and the fact the whole thing is completely batshit insane.’
Indeed, anybody who knows anything about videogames or aesthetics can see how bad it is and so the game is being sold on the strength of its label rather than it’s inherent worth. This practice happens all the time in PR and marketing, but it feels especially wrong when practiced by Christians, people who should surely aspire to not lie or sell things under false pretense.
Christians should not be demanding videogames prefixed with a faith label, as if that cheap and easy classification provides some kind of invisible moral safety net for their and their children’s media consumption. Rather, believers should simply be demanding good and beautiful games that delight in creativity, make people happy, present or explore the world in interesting ways and maybe, just maybe enable someone to catch a glimpse of their God, from whom all good things are claimed to flow.
Contrary what David Jaffe claimed on his blog last week, I prefer reading text or listening to podcasts to watching videos when it comes to digesting criticism and commentary.
Those ubiquitous to-camera Youtube videos, with their inevitable follow-up responses and rebuttals hold literally no interest for me. But this series of video-casts, or whatever they’re called, entitled ‘Reel Geezers’ is a delightful exception to what is possibly an unnecessarily snooty rule on my part.
In each episode two Hollywood veterans discuss the latest theatrical releases in a chatty and informal but insightful style. Lorezno Semple is the screenwriter responsible for the screenplay to Flash Gordan as well as over sixty episodes of the televised Batman series while Marcia Nasatir is a still-prolific producer.
While you might expect their approach to dick-flick Superbad or the super-violent, post-modern Cohen cowboy tale No Country For Old Men to be one of generational confusion, disgust and ‘this would never have happened in my day’ attitude, in reality the pair are witty, knowing and, thanks to their experience and wisdom, able to effortlessly cut through spin and hype. To be honest, it’s just refreshing to hear a some open-minded, accessible, honest and informed movie discussion that’s not coming from late-twenties nerds.
That the couple frequently disagree on the effectiveness of particular narrative techniques, quality of story elements and whether the use of the word ‘penis’ is acceptable or not gives the videos a lovely tension. Judging by Youtube’s view statistics the Superbad episode (a film that Nasatir rates as being ‘one penis up and one penis down’) below has been very popular but the rest of their output has only raked in a few thousand views a piece. You should hop on before the bandwagon departs.
Sadly, we’ll likely have to wait another thirty to forty years before we have some knowledgeable octogenarian game designers who can unpick videogames in a similar way.
My first commission for The Escapist feels a little, um, tardy? Focusing on the race to win the UK videogame chart Christmas Number 1 it features interviews with Dorian Bloch, Director of Chart Track and Sharon McHugh, the lady in charge of sorting out the betting odds at Paddy Power. She reveals that the largest payout the company has made on a Christmas videogame bet was £2,400 ($4,744) for the man who correctly guessed Fifa 07 would top the festive chart in 2006. Hope you find it interesting and, even though we’re now in January, it’s nice to be an ‘Editor’s Choice’.
It would be easy to dismiss the videogame Christmas No. 1 as the choice of the lowest common denominator, a game propelled to stardom thanks to uneducated parents buying for children swayed by whichever publisher with the most money.
Indeed, past winners give some weight to this viewpoint: Activison won the title in 2007 with Call of Duty 4 while publishing behemoth Electronic Arts took home the accolade four years on the trot before that (FIFA Soccer 2007 in 2006, Need For Speed Most Wanted in 2005, Need For Speed Underground 2 in 2004 and Medal of Honor: Rising Sun in 2003). But is there any science behind winning the accolade?
“If I had that answer, I’d keep it to myself or sell the formula to publishers for a huge amount of money!” Bloch laughs. “In 2006 the eventual Christmas No. 1 (FIFA 07) had been out for 12 weeks by the time the Christmas chart rolled around. If there was an average for when it’s best to release your game if you’re gunning for the top slot, I’d have to say anywhere between two and six weeks prior to the Christmas week – from around the second week of November onwards.
“Having a recognized brand is key, and it helps if your game has garnered rave reviews. Lots of gift purchasing occurs in the weeks prior to Christmas and that … familiar franchises always do well. Most winners follow that rule. While EA has won the title in the past four years, Take 2 took the title in 2002 with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. That game still holds the record for highest sales in the Christmas chart week, on around 170,000 copies.”
Languishing in Chewing Pixels’s draft folder is a post about a coder who managed to get Quake running in Flash (fast forward to 5:00 for the reveal).
In it I half-heartedly point out that the internet’s most popular plug-in is a competent contender for a future single gaming platform. I never got round to posting it because it’s, well, perhaps a little boring as well as being the kind of ridiculous speculation that makes gamers drop roll eyes smileys everywhere.
The discussion about a single platform future has always been background noise for gamers (that is, the idea that console manufacturers might agree to release hardware based upon single format technology where games would freely run on different machines in much the same way that a DVD plays on different brand DVD players).
Even this week industry bigwigs have been postulating over its drawbacks and benefits but, as always, they’re envisioning a future where traditional hardware players Sony and Microsoft come together to create that single format. Despite the inescapable advance of digital distribution and the ubiquity of the internet, rarely do hobbyist gamers or industry spokespeople approach the issue with an online plug-in in mind.
Videogame players usually view the Flash platform with trepidation, and for good reason. Flash games (that is, games that run within Adobe’s Flash Player seamlessly in your Internet browser) are, in the main, art-led projects that crowbar game mechanics into impressive visual frameworks to make good-looking but poor-playing games.
Alternatively, those homebrew projects that are built upon an interesting mechanic are usually technically basic – more like proof of concept demos than legitimate full-scale titles.
Nevertheless, Adobe’s statistics for Flash penetration are staggering. Something like 93-98% of computer owners have Flash installed and, as each iteration of the plug-in adds greater functionality, closing the technological gap with dedicated consoles, the idea that it might one day emerge as the most significant gaming platform becomes more and more reasonable.
It’s a fascinating read (and easily digestible) and Koster creates a compelling case for Flash while ably demonstrating the myriad ways in which the traditional videogame market is missing opportunities and losing ground. You should read it now. Any thoughts?
Snap the Rez design apart, lay the pieces out on the table and you’ve little more than a wireframe Panzer Dragoon. 
Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the first patent approval for the Lego brick. 
The Telegraph called the book “the Anarchist Cookbook of the nursery” while, with ugly tabloid pith, ThisIsLondon said, “Kids could make atomic bombs out of Lego, and just think what would happen if some Islamic terrorist get[s a copy].” 
2007 was a startling year for videogames. The near-incessant flow of quality titles made it difficult for hobbyist gamers to track, buy and play every notable release. 
Bioware’s space sci-fi RPG, Mass Effect, has in recent weeks been attacked for supposedly allowing gamers to engage in interactive sexually explicit acts. 
It’s not a big water slide but, when you’re two-years old, even the staircase to your bedroom’s an Everest. 
Yesterday, John Walker, 
Contrary what David Jaffe claimed on his blog last week, I prefer reading text or listening to podcasts to watching videos when it comes to digesting criticism and commentary. 
It would be easy to dismiss the videogame Christmas No. 1 as the choice of the lowest common denominator, a game propelled to stardom thanks to uneducated parents buying for children swayed by whichever publisher with the most money. 
Languishing in Chewing Pixels’s draft folder is a post about a coder who managed to get 
