Due to some technical difficulties and generalized stupidity on my part, I won't be able to post the riveting conclusion of my, er, essay on boredom today as I originally intended. I will, however, be able to post some thoughts on the Splinter Cell: Conviction X-Box live demo. So I will. I'm doing it. I'm doing it right now. 

IT'S HAPPENING. 

I realize I'm going to prove, once again, how very boring I am, but even in a game where you can literally punch a man's face through a sink, what I was struck most by was the elegance of SC:C's graphical user interface (GUI) design. Like all it's prequels, the game sticks you in the shoes of Sam Fisher, a Third Echelon (super NSA) covert operative voiced with grave aplomb by Micheal Ironside. Only this time, Sam isn't taking … Read More

Only the most serious art contains scenes of people being sad in the rain.

Click here to read part one of this essay. Or don’t. See if I care.

When I was a kid, I used to separate people into two categories, showing my affinity for pithy reductionism even at that early age: Lego kids and 3d puzzle kids. Lego kids would build awkward structures out of Lego and populate them with whatever characters they had laying around from a dozen different playsets — spacemen, ninjas, knights… other spacemen. Then they’d play with the things for hours, making laser sounds with their mouths, and finish up by smashing it all to bits, acting as the left hand of the plastic men’s God in some imagined apocalypse. 3d puzzle kids would buy a 3d puzzle of a Star … Read More

I am rarely wrong. That is, I rarely admit that I have been wrong, which is pretty much the same. Was it wrong to purchase a Korean manservant over the Internet? Matter of perspective. Was it wrong to place him in a series of underground MMA fights against his will? No more wrong, I’d argue, than his so-called “job placement organization” lying about his God damn glass jaw. Was it wrong to lie about his weight so he would be pitted against men three times his size, potentially inflating my payout? Ethically, but not morally. Learn the difference, hippies. 

But I’m going to admit that I was wrong now, which is even more out of character, because I’ve never publicly stated the opinion I’m about to contradict. It would be very easy for me to say that I … Read More

 Dear Canada,

Sometimes you're weird and boring. You're almost always too cold. You rarely get any of the movies I want to see in your theatres, and your politics irritate me. But just when I'm thinking I've had enough of you, Canada, you go and do something like this.

Oh, yeah, that link? Totally NSFW.

It leads to a flash game developed and hosted by the Middlesex-London Health Unit (that's London, Ontario), where you play as a ripped dude with -- and none of what follows is a joke -- penises for hands that fire shark-faced sperm at women while also bombarding players with questions about STIs. Yes. This is a real thing.

Working in a more-or-less respectable office environment, there is absolutely no way I can play this at the moment to report on the … Read More

Twenty years after the launch of the EvermoreGrandiga series, Richard P. Levieux still remains a household name among gamers, comics fans and anime junkies. While there remains, to this day, just two games in the EvermoreGrandiga Saga, the rich fiction has spawned countless cross-media spinoffs. Notoriously wary of giving interviews and spectacularly good at keeping information leaks plugged, little information about the latest game in the series, EvermoreGrandiga: Online since the famous 'postergate' scandal of 2006. After cornering him at a local bookfair, FFWD's intrepid boy reporter, Jeff Kubik, was given the rare opportunity to interview the genius behind the EvermoreGrandiga phenomenon.

FFWD: Thanks for taking … Read More

I started playing BioShock 2 last night, despite resisting pretty much all of the pre-release hype for months. In this I surprised even myself, as I was incredibly, profoundly, spend-an-entire-afternoon-writing-loveletters-to-Ken-Levine-only-to-burn-them-all-later nuts about the first game. Everyone has a special collection of books, films, music and other media that are important to them in a personal way. Before Bioshock, I only had one game on my list. Afterward, I had two.

And still, I resisted. The original designer/writer of the game (Ken Levine) had been replaced by one of the level designers (Jordan Thomas), albeit the one who designed the best area in the game -- Fort Frolic -- as well as Thief: Deadly Shadows’ most lauded … Read More

Interesting, short, well-observed article on the myth of meritocracy on Left Mouse Button. Be sure to berate her in the comments, though. We can't have doubletalk like this gaining traction. Next they'll be wanting equal wages.

Here's the quote that hooked me, from a seventeen year old guild leader on World of Warcraft:

“Girls just aren’t on the same level. Sometimes they’re okay as healers or whatever, and I’d rather have a girl than an empty raid slot, but they lack that primal aggression that a man needs. They don’t need the kill as bad."

It's telling, I think, that all I could think of while reading that was how badly my girlfriend kicks my ass at Puzzle Fighter whenever we play it. Or how bad Natalie, of the review crew, used to when we ran in the same … Read More

Because in addition to being incredible nerds, my girlfriend and I are also tremendous drunks, about a week ago we decided to go on a "date" that involved buying two bottles of wine and Heroes of Might and Magic III. We procured the former from the family-owned liquor store on the corner that only ever seems to play Bollywood soundtracks, and the latter from GoG, vendors of the finest classic PC games and serpent oils. But mostly PC games.

This, in turn, led to my registration with GoG's internal computerbrain, which emailed me yesterday to tell me that I could download Tex Murphy 1 and 2 for no money until December 24. What's more, they told me to forward the link to my friends, so that everyone could experience the joy that is Tex Murphy … Read More

A perplexing videogame press release showed up in my inbox this morning, full of proclamations so absurd and subtitles so nonsensical that I simply had to post about it, if only to reward Interwave Studios' chutzpah in some small way. 

The game is called Nuclear Dawn: Modern Combat Rising (once you've experienced a nuclear dawn, isn't it fair to say that modern combat has officially risen?). It's an FPS-RTS hybrid with a focus on squad gameplay in a post-apocalyptic environment. It's shameful how many of my buttons that pushes. Here's the trailer:

That contains what has to be my favourite game-trailer intertitle this year: "Boundaries between genres have been ANNIHILATED."

Not broken. Not challenged. Fucking ANNIHILATED. 

The boundary … Read More

During one of my embarrassingly customary dredges of Bioware's various websites for information on forthcoming products, I came across the above video showing off some of the nerd super-stars who will be providing voices for Mass Effect 2. Among them are Six from Battlestar Galactica, Tigh from Battlestar (and also from Clearcut and many other excellent Canadian films for a very different kind of nerd appeal), Trinity from the Matrix, Jayne from Firefly, Seth Green from All of Pop Culture and Martin Sheen from, uh, The West Wing.

Which is all well-and-good. In fact, I'm glad to see so many talented actors get so excited about a … Read More