Op-Ed

As game companies put more and more pressure on publications to only run positive reviews, Sean Sands suggests gamers should stop taking the review process so seriously.

Sean Sands examines the events that have driven the ESA into its current tailspin and wonders if the organization's fate is all but sealed.

Jordan Deam dabbles with the Xbox 360 demo for Civilization: Revolution, which he figures may as well be called Civ for Consoletards.

An examination of why so few MMOGs truly innovate, and why it doesn't really matter that they don't.

The intersection of "sports nut" and "PC gamer" has been rather bleak lately. Since the rise of the console, most action-oriented sports games (Madden and its equivalents) have migrated to the living room, leaving those of us who prefer the mouse and keyboard without a way to satisfy our simulation urges.

Jordan Deam travels 4,000 miles to party with Vikings, eat a $27 sandwich and check out Funcom's Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures.

Joe revisits his misspent youth while sampling Magic: The Gathering's latest expansion, Shadowmoor.

Some will care, some won't, and, to be perfectly fair, most will never even realize that anything controversial is happening. Still, the continued tightening of the noose around big-budget PC titles brings questions about the platform's long-term viability back into stark contrast against the comparatively hassle-free experience of consoles.

It's a Friday afternoon, and Scott Foe is in a hotel room, 27 floors above the streets of San Francisco. In two hours, he'll be unveiling his latest project to the press. It's billed as "the highest production value mobile title ever."

Today marks the retail release of Grand Theft Auto IV. If many analysts are to be believed, the latest installment in the lucrative but notorious franchise will sell as many as nine million copies. And if certain politicians and activists are correct, it will almost certainly lead to widespread youth depravity and violence. But if the authors of Grand Theft Childhood are right, parents actually have very little reason for concern.

I like open world games - in principle. Granted, the worlds are never really open; most max at around small-town size. But compared to the games in which you're stuck on a single stretch of road, where the colors change occasionally to signify you've moved to a new area, games like Grand Theft Auto feel like vast universes.

The videogame industry has an increasingly significant problem, and as a consumer you may not be happy about what game publishers have to do to solve it. In business speak, publishers need to expand their revenue streams and explore new avenues for monetizing their properties. In short, they need to find new ways to get money out of your pockets.

Piracy is a hard topic to discuss reasonably and rationally in a public forum. It is a polarizing issue, revealing deep divides between consumers of all media forms, and an even deeper divide between the public and the industries at large that find themselves under siege.

The potential of video games is limitless, and their value understated in a culture that is, at best, grudgingly accepting of their existence. ... And yet, like so many media-fueled discussions of the past decade, the debate over the place of gaming in Western society has been forfeited to the extremes on both sides.

Of all the things game journalism is, vacation-friendly it's not. Barring the special case and the odd mental health day, I typically manage the week between Christmas and New Year's. The majority of the industry goes dark then, so it makes sense for me to drop off the grid, too. And it's during that week that I get to be a gamer.