Friday Post: Go Go Power Rangers!

If you’re not singing the guitar part to the power rangers song, I pity you. And envy you, and your lack of madness.

Posts were made this week! Lots and lots and lots of posts! And here are some of them, in one handy, bite sized thing! So that you may conspicuously consume them!

-Our big thing from this week was one of our running features, Character Focus, being put out there. The characters aren’t the feature, but rather all of us, your lovely staff writers, writing about the same topic at the same time. Like a harmonic convergence, but making sense.
-I’m going to toot my own horn second (horror of horrors) and point out my two mildly related pieces on Heroism and Villains. I was a fan, but I did write them. This is my own horn, and I can toot it like so.

-Picture kind of related, Patricia wrote about morality in first person shooters that became a paean to developers integrating their single and multiplayer modes. Which makes sense. Both parts make sense, in fact.
-Slightly in the past, but Fern wrote a fascinating piece about Sony discovering Brazil. If it were made into a film, Ken Kutaragi as Vasco de Gama, and Chuck Norris as himself. That’d be a pretty good understated indie drama there. Quiet, focused, and depressing, with a hint of overwhelming sweetness and even a bit of sensuality when…well, let’s not go into the romance.
-Graham wrote about the western being an ignored demographic. As an aficionado of the film western (The Searchers, especially, is one of my favorite movies), I agree wholeheartedly. Not nearly enough badass cowboys in video games. There’s John Marston, there’s Flint from Mother 3, and then there’s Virginia from Wild Arms 3 who is about as far from badass as possible. Clearly, there is room for more John Wayne-isms.
-Big news this week I didn’t report on because everyone else already had by the time I heard was that Telltale is making games based on Jurassic Park and Back to the Future. Which prompted a universal reaction of, “The Christ? Okay.” I know that was my reaction. And the reaction of everyone I could project it onto.
-Experience Points writes about how Kratos from God of War is defined by violence, and how that can help make it approach art. I only skimmed it, because one day I will play God of War, but…it skimmed fantastically, and I like Experience Points, so…link!
-Fun additional announcement: those of you with functioning Personal Computers can presently buy Morrowind and Oblivion for less than the cost of a new copy of Braid 2 years ago on the good old Steam store. Or, for 15$. Fallout 3 GotY (with all the DLC, you know, that costs about 50$ by itself) is also available for 25$. I bought all three, even though I own all three, because I had no expansions or DLC for any of them. There goes 300 hours of my life. Lost to the wind, or to Bethesda. Damn you Bethesda.
-I missed this post entirely (it’s months old), but Magical Wasteland posted about the science of play. It’s a pretty fascinating article, and kind of damning stuff for the artistic state of the mainstream industry.
-More random blogs time! The Brainy Gamer, on tangentially, how video games can reach a bigger market artistically. Maybe it’s confirmation bias, but that’s how I took it: that people, when confronted with the truths about gaming, will look at them, but if not forced to, they will believe whatever they think is most convenient. But that’s another show.

Have a good weekend, kids. We’ll still be here. In fact, I’m writing another post AS I WRITE THIS BE AFRAID.