May Omnitopic Roundup

Hey friends and gentle readers! We’ve gone quite the places in this past month, from being a ragtag band of nobodies who write about games to a large ragtag band of nobodies who write about games, and nothing signifies this more than the results of our recent omnitopic. We had more posts for the omnitopic than we did the entire month of January, which is saying something about the places we’re going. Good places. Happy places, filled with more games than you can shake a stick at.

Tomorrow we’ll be announcing a new omnitopic, so stay tuned for that. For now, though, here were the articles we wrote this past month on May’s topic, Difficulty:

–Patricia offered our initial response, “Disembodied”, which talked about her difficulties adapting to the PC after years as a console gamer. What we in the PC universe would call a noble undertaking.

-Erstwhile Fern (one of the few who, like me, remember the lean years when the gaming crops didn’t grow on our fertile soil) strongly approved of the Super Guide and what it allowed for the games that used it to do.

-I apparently won the popularity contest by talking about my love for Final Fantasy VIII and the junction system. Apparently folks really love that game and just never told Square Enix.

-“The” curlyhairedboy gave us an elusive submission about Surviving hardcore mode in Dead Space. Which sounds like the most horrifying thing to ever put yourself through, but he quite appreciated it.

-Stefan “Samurai” Terry looked at the difference between hard games and frustrating ones, and brought us as close to that modern paragon of gaming difficulty, Demon’s Souls, as we got. I know. I’m shocked we could have a blog with seven writers and not one write about Demon’s Souls specifically. Anyway, his piece is better than anything we could have written about DS.

-Finally, Mark wrote about games that don’t have difficulty settings, as well as offering a designer’s viewpoint on how to give games higher difficulties about more than just doubling or tripling health numbers like some titles are wont to do. How it should be done, I agree.

As you can see, it was a fine productive month, though one soon to be eclipsed by next month, where we should be offering you even more games related goodness.