Best Games - Virtua Fighter If you walked into an arcade in the early 90’s you would have seen a solid wall of cabinets all containing one game, Street Fighter 2. There might even have been many different versions of Street Fighter 2. Street Fighter 2: The World Warrior, the game that kicked off a new era in fighting games. Street Fighter 2: Champion Edition let you play as the boss characters from the first version and introduced mirror matches that let two players fight as palette swapped copies of the same character. Street Fighter 2 Turbo: Hyper Fighting sped up the game, added new character moves, and rebalanced the whole shebang for better competitive play. Street Fighter 2: Rainbow Edition was a hacked bootleg of one of the previous games that could have any number of tweaks and twists that made the fighting flat out goofy and unpredictable. There may have even been Super Street Fighter 2, a game with new characters, completely redone graphics and sound, and new sets of moves for the entire roster. It wouldn’t even be uncommon for there to be a couple copies of each game. Not only could there be a solid dozen cabinets all sporting Street Fighter 2, but odds were good that they would all be in use. That was an arcade in the early 90’s. All hadoukens, all the time.

It’s E3 time again. I frickin’ love E3 and I have no idea why. I get excited for the conferences and the trailers and the reveals and the gaffs and the press reactions and everything from the show floor. It makes no sense. I’m currently playing a game that is 5 years old, and after that I’ll probably play a game that is only two or three years old. My urge to be up to date on the goings on in the game industry is not in lock step with how up to date I am on actual games. I used to think that meant I was out of touch. Now I think it’s great.

I stopped reading a book this week. Not finished, just stopped. This book had come to me well recommended, and it was in a genre that I enjoy but hadn’t read in quite some time, so I was interested. I really wanted to like it. I was rooting for this book, but I just can’t find it in myself to read one more leaden passage.

We don’t celebrate our heroes. The people who make games, we don’t celebrate them. Not in the way that we should. Oh we celebrate the games well enough. You would be hard pressed to dredge up a human that doesn’t know who Mario is. Hum a few bars of Super Mario Bros. theme music among strangers, and someone will probably start humming along with you. At the very least you will have put that song in their head for the rest of the day. Games, at least those particular games, have permeated popular culture to that point. Now ask that same person who wrote that music, and they probably won’t know. Now ask the same person who Kurt Cobain is. Ask them who Paul McCartney is. Kurt Cobain wrote some good songs, but nothing that will stick with you like a Koji Kondo tune. Paul McCartney wrote some of the most instantly recognizable music from the last couple hundred years. The exact same can be said of Koji Kondo. The music from Legend of Zelda can evoke four emotions from you simultaneously while you gladly listen to it for six hours straight. Koji Kondo is an artist to celebrate, yet to the majority of the public, he is invisible.

Dark Souls ​Walk, fight, fail, repeat That’s all we ever do here ​at garbage Hogwarts

I’ve been playing a lot of Dark Souls recently. Not the new one. No 2 or 3, just plain old Dark Souls. I could write about why I am really enjoying it, or why I think that other people should play it, but that would be just add to the cacophony of hyperbole and fanboy love for this game. Exactly the sort of stuff that makes people not want to play a game. The sort of stuff that made me avoid it for this long.

Best Games Worst Game - Sonic Shuffle When I started writing these best games bits, I said that I wouldn’t try to do any snarky takedowns of awful games. While being clever and humorous might be difficult, hating on things is easy and not interesting. Pretending to hate things to prove your ‘cred’ is one of the more terrible aspects of human nature, so I made a conscious effort to avoid doing that. That said, there is some value in defining the bounds of the scale. Sonic Shuffle is the worst game I have ever played.

My favorite superhero is Spider-Man. It may have been the late 60s cartoon series or the late 70s comic books, but either way, I was very young when I was first introduced to Spider-Man. Something about the character has always appealed to me. It took me a very long time put my finger on exactly what.

Shortly after the release of the Nintendo 64, I rented one and brought it home. I told anyone that would listen that this dark grey, swooped rectangle represented the most powerful graphics processing machine that you could sensibly buy for your living room. There were PC graphics cards, and specialty high end workstation components, of course, that would run shaded polygonal rings around the N64, but they ranged in price from several hundred to several thousand dollars. Here was a machine that was purpose built for drawing triangles to a screen as fast as possible, and it cost around $200.

Two of the batch of VR headsets that are coming out have made their Debut. If you haven’t read any of my other thoughts on VR, I’ll fill you in. Good consumer virtual reality, with interesting content can’t come fast enough for me. I have wanted to play games in VR since I had any idea what it was, or could be. So a couple of the headsets are out, and what’s the verdict?

How long do you think you’re going to live? Seriously. Think about it. Me, I plan on living a damn long time, but barring the as yet unreleased Google immortality initiative, I know that I won’t live forever. I hope that you will, really I do, but the odds are against all of us. Knowing that, what will you do with the time that you have.

Best Games - Deus Ex The first time I tried to play Deus Ex, I played it like a shooter. Running from place to place, trying to clear out all the enemies. I thought it was bland, clunky, overly difficult, and directionless. I put it down.

You nudge a thumbstick here and something shifts to the right up there on the screen. You press a button and a small cartoon figure leaps into the air. The screens are accustomed to passively watching respond to your intent. This is why I want to make games. This is why I have always wanted to make games.

I’ve been creating a game. As you would expect, that has made me think about poetry. Obviously. One of my favorite poems is I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries by Leonard Cohen. It’s not my favorite poem. My favorite poem is The Cremation of Sam McGee, but that’s not what I’m writing about right now. I think that the first time I read I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries I was either in high school, or maybe I was in the first year of university. Whenever it was, the poem stuck with me. It did what the best poems do. It wrapped up complex and often conflicting feelings, and delivered them in a few well chosen words ready to be unpacked.

The Room ​Twist turn slide reveal The appearance of puzzles. Much more. Mysteries