After Pressing Start: How Rocksmith Reinvented the Syllabus

We all know what a syllabus is, right? The syllabus is the content of that first class you started to attend. It’s probably all you are going to do during the first week of school (so feel free to extend your vacations): to read over the summary of topics some council of elders decided the class should cover. This is the day you’ll find out when the tests are, what the teacher thinks about the students’ presence and the book he will force students to read.

Sadly, many teachers are satisfied by merely reading the syllabus. It’s a pity, for anyone can read the syllabus on their own. No use wasting the teacher’s time with that. What students need, however, is a taste. They need to glimpse the potential that class is going to bring if they apply themselves. This is particularly important given the scarcity of information available about a new class. During my time in college, we had the course’s name, a two-line description and that was it.

Well, fuck that! Let’s have Rocksmith show them how it’s done!

Ten tips for a better Dragon's Dogma experience.

It may be hiding under a few rough edges, but Dragon’s Dogma is one of the best fantasy experiences money can buy. As someone who is favors the adventure, over-the-top action and mystery that fantasy role-playing games often promise in the form of CGI trailers only to drop you into spreadsheet land, DD has already become my favorite game of this year, perhaps for all time. So allow me to enlighten you on the game’s most enticing features and some simple ways to get around a few minor flaws that seem to be driving people away.

Owning Games Isn't What it Used to be, and That Needs to Change

Much of our lives are moving online. Last night, I ordered Chinese takeout through Grubhub in-between talking with friends over Gchat and Twitter, and then later played a few (fruitless) hours of Modern Warfare 3‘s multiplayer, before returning to my

Steamroll: Splice Shuggy

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Steamroll! Only 2 games for $10 or less were released this week, but both of them look like top-notch contenders. Which one will be the Best Steam Indie Game of the Week? Read

Resonance impresses with remarkable narrative, gameplay

In Resonance, developer Vince Twelve has created one of gaming’s more dazzling narratives. The game is a pleasure to play.

Resonance puts you in control of four characters thrown together in a science fiction setting to prevent world-wide disaster. A high-quality adventure game, Resonance has some of the best storytelling you’ll encounter on the PC. This is complemented by an interesting cast of characters, excellent 2D pixel work, great music and some unique game mechanics.

The new Amazing Spider-Man game is doing automated gameplay right.

We all hate quick time events. At least, we’re supposed to hate quick time events because, reasons? I never understood it myself. They can get overused like any other game mechanic, but well-integrated QTE’s let us do things that developers just haven’t quite figured out to turn into actual gameplay. I’d be happy to get rid of them once a sequence like the scorpion-water-horse-things fight in God of War 3 becomes feasible in real-time gameplay. Dragon’s Dogma has gotten pretty close since I can climb a hydra and sever one of its heads as I leap to the next one without a single “press x to not die” moment, but we still aren’t quite there. It’s all about at least having some control over your actions instead of being herded through a scripted sequence. Beenox seems to have gotten the right idea with its Web Rush system in The Amazing Spider-Man.

Blizzard and Bioware's MMOs: Telling Stories From Opposite Directions

There’s a lot of presumption out there that MMORPGs can’t or don’t tell stories like their single-player counterparts. Me, I think it’s nonsense. Maybe that was true in the past. It isn’t now.

In fact, I’ve been amazed at how much they’ve evolved from oldschool monster-clubbing. Somehow, some way, MMOs started telling stories. Final Fantasy XI has character-focused missions bound together into a grand narrative, Age of Conan has its early-game switches between single-player and multiplayer, and Guild Wars has its hub-and-instance structure. Dungeons and Dragons Online actually has a narrator. Storytelling’s gotten big, and storytelling choices has become key to differentiation within the genre.

Even World of Warcraft (WoW) has evolved into a story-focused game.

How do you Solve a Problem Like Max Payne?

The man is a high-functioning alcoholic. He spends his nights drinking himself into oblivion while the light of day finds him planting heavy metals deep into the flesh of his enemies with the biologically-ingrained certainty of a fifth generation lead

Soundscapes – The Future of Sound

Have we perfected sound yet? No, not by a long shot. We imagine that graphics will be “done” when we can create anything we can imagine without hitting a hardware limit. Whether it’s a perfect recreation of reality or whatever

The Campfire: A nightmare in Hyrule

The Campfire is a column where we regale you with tales of our video game adventures. This is a tale of a young boy and an overclocked imagination…. The wonderful thing about childhood is that moments of fear, surprise, and