The Friday Post: What is Happening!

Hey friends! It’s Friday! And you know what that means. No, it doesn’t mean that I’m trying to give you acute pharyngitis. It means we’ve got a fresh, slightly sticky batch of links, references, and even a random game announcement that you can, and should read about.

Doesn’t that sound fantastic? Let’s go!

-I usually lead off with something from our lovely selves, but this time, we’re going out into the open world. Because Ice-Pick Lodge, developers of fantastic art games The Void and Pathologic, announced a new game, Cargo. It’s a game about finding FUN (all caps) in the world, and using it to prevent things from floating off into space. By which we mean, it’s a subtle jab at people who criticize their games as artistic but not fun. Or not that subtle. I would have given it its own post, but it would have looked an awful lot like Rock Paper Shotgun’s on the same topic, so…I put it here!
-If you are on this website, it is statistically likely you are here because of Patricia’s fantastic series describing how to not suck quite so much at Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I can’t say a whole lot about it, because I didn’t get sucked into this multiplayer shooter thing, but I’ve been told its fantastic by little gnomes. Gnomes who are veterans of the Iraq War!
-Remember last week when I said there’d be a Deadly Premonition review? Well, I am not a liar, a crook, a communist, or a porn star, and I swear there’s one right there. It also tries to address the extreme disparity of review scores the game received, which is worth the price of admission by itself.
-I recently decided the JRPG sucked, and it needed fixing. Who better than me to do that? Well, you know, people who understand how to program, and write video games, and, you know, pretty much everyone. But if I’m the loudest, people will listen to me! That’s how the internet works!
-We’ve had a lot content relating to moral choices in video games, from this post on Kotaku (from ReadyUp, which I’d never heard of) and this post from Destructoid. They bring up different points, but it’s always interesting that the internet achieves some kind of independent Zeitgeist at times. Or maybe it’s just confirmation bias.
-Speaking of morals, and continuations of last week, RPS posted a further discussion of Mass Effect 2. Pretty fantastic stuff. Good for the bones, too.
-Experience Points posted some way to make Left 4 Dead a little more fun. With moral choices! This is moral choice week, apparently.
-Finally, posted extremely recently (while I was writing this!), apparently Bioware have decided that they really, really can’t let JRPG makers forget that they are cowardly and weak foreigners. With Jim Sterling, CHAMPION OF PROGRESS, saying the problem with JRPGs is that they peskily try to change, and that generic snooze-fest Lost Odyssey was the best game ever, instead of a good representation of everything wrong with modern JRPGs.

It’s time to take a nap. One day, I won’t be sick any more, and it will be a joyous day. My throat won’t feel like it is abdicating my body or nothing!