What to do with a work of editorial genius that doesn't quite fit any of our molds? ... What to do with the inspired oddball that's so juicy and de-lovely we can't figure out where to put it, but don't want to let go? What to do? What to do?
Each week we publish letters sent to us regarding previous issues and highlight particularly interesting forum posts. If you'd like to comment on an article directly, send your letter to editor@escapistmag.com.
"There was no denying that some games simply required a superhuman effort to finish. Take, for instance, the wicked enemy placement and numerous pits that litter most levels of the Ninja Gaiden series. ... Then there is Kid Icarus' killer level design, Mega Man's instant spike death and the one-hit-death syndrome in every old school shmup.
"One device forever changed the way I would play games ... the Game Genie. In the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, when game difficulty was brutal and cheap, the Game Genie was the ultimate ace in the hole. With it, I could tap every last bit of gameplay out of any game."
"Recently the Intelligent Community Forum rated Waterloo the 'top intelligent community of 2007.' It possesses an unusually high per-capita population of PhDs and a university known as 'the MIT of Canada' - the University of Waterloo - which in turn possesses the highest-ranked department of Leisure Studies in North America.
"And Waterloo's game museum, the Elliot Avedon Museum and Archive of Games, is the only museum in the world that focuses purely on games."
"'It's not hanging a urinal and calling it art,' Flores says. 'More like painting the urinal and still pissing in it everyday.' ... His future projects include an MMOG in which players are tasked with 'setting off on a quest, only to find out you were duped by some crazed homeless guy that you mistook for a wizard, and he sent you to Tulsa to get a can of beans,' Flores says. 'Or maybe you have to battle a huge group of tricycle-riding bears and clowns with nothing more than a herring.' Also on the brink is Atomic Combat, a game that operates similarly to Battleship but has a difficult time defining any clear winner."
"It was Earthrise over the moon. Blue, green and white, clear against the spill of the Milky Way. Breathtaking. Seeing the Earth from the moon in Mass Effect felt like hearing an American accent when someone speaks to me in a foreign language. I felt alien, mistaken for a foreigner. That's what terrified me: For a moment, I enjoyed not being myself."
"In addition to the reviews on Zero Punctuation, - which are viewed, on average, by about 1.5 million people - Croshaw also makes his own games, writes a monthly column at PC Gamer and has started doing contract work, theoretically a launching pad to making his own major-label games. 'Which is handy,' says Croshaw, 'because that's really what I want to do with my life.' All of which would never have happened without achieving fame on YouTube."
"In addition to the reviews on Zero Punctuation, - which are viewed, on average, by about 1.5 million people - Croshaw also makes his own games, writes a monthly column at PC Gamer and has started doing contract work, theoretically a launching pad to making his own major-label games. 'Which is handy,' says Croshaw, 'because that's really what I want to do with my life.' All of which would never have happened without achieving fame on YouTube."
