The Gamer's Quarter

Mr. Mechanical · Friendly Stranger Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 1276

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/12/1812244&from=rss

The Escapist, eh? I look forward to reading it.

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

Hell...

Mr. Mechanical · Friendly Stranger Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 1276

It's actually quite good, now that I'm reading it. I still think we're doing something different enough, though what they're doing is on a whole other level of professionalism. It's good stuff, but worry not Shaper! There's always room for another zine or two. This just means we'll have to step up our approach and start writing better to keep up if we're going to be compared to them. Which ain't a bad thing, I don't think.

SuperWes · Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2005 3:10 pm Post subject:

Yeah, looks pretty incredible. I'm not sure where they're getting the money for such high profile freelancers, but if they can keep this up weekly it'll revolutionize shit in exactly the way we've been wanting.

But yeah, we're all soldiers in the same war and I say that the bigger the army, the easier it will be to cause a revolution.

-Wes

ALSO: Tycho References us (If you're the sort of person who would read a magazine solely distributed in Adobe's PDF format, chances are you know what I'm talking about./Let me tell you what I saw on MTV.)
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dessgeega · Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2005 3:39 pm Post subject:

snap and a half! kieron "new games journalism" gillen!

this should be an interesting read.
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Mr. Mechanical · Friendly Stranger Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 1276

Wheee just got done reading it all. Good columns all around. I especially enjoyed The Contrarian and the one's written by Gillen and Tycho from PA. At a weekly pace I can see this taking off nicely. I also like how they're subscription service works. Just enter an email and they'll send you a high res .pdf each week that it comes out. Best of luck to these chaps.

Mister Toups · Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2005 5:04 pm Post subject:

I read a few articles. Kind of fluffy but not bad. I don't see it competing with us, though. Gamer's Quarter is perhaps a little too in-depth for its own good but that's what I like about it.
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

SuperWes · Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2005 6:45 pm Post subject:

dhex · Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 8:02 am Post subject:

i like it.
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Lackey · . Joined: 11 Jul 2005 Posts: 1107 Location: Canada

You would.

Wait, I agree. For the most part it is succinct and insightful.

I found the Gamer Like Me article frustratingly strawmanish though, eg: "Some people would say a gamer is...", and it didn't seem to end up with much of a point other than 'gaming isn't an elite geek hobby anymore.'

The Culture Wargames one is my favourite, I think. It covers a lot of ground.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

dhex · Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 5:37 pm Post subject:

i skipped that one. "gamer" is a bad word, and puts me in mind of this minatures shop in chelsea across from where a friend's studio was. it was called "neutral ground."

afterwards every time a disagreement would arise, we'd tell people "we'll settle this on neutral ground" which still makes me laugh, even now.

it did, however, have a decent logo.
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dark steve · . Joined: 17 Jun 2005 Posts: 1110

The "nintendo is going to die" article struck me as not particularly well researched or informed.

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

Yea, ok I have read it all now. I want to say one thing really quick that is very negitive. This PDF reminds me why I decided not to put giant quotes in the articles. They are so hideous.

That aside: The Mainstream is Coming: It is Tycho's comic turned into an article. The halo 2 comic. So, it is good, but he has made most of the comments before so it was nothing new.

Gamer like me: I liked it at points, but then it got confused inside itself. It should have stayed more simple. Good message, sub-par delivery.

Culture Wargames: Very excellent. Mainly because of his grasp of how these USA bastards are ripping up the constitution (which Dhex has informed me of and made me re-think) ... being a british man. Anyways, tons of excellent points. The intro is grabbing, but I think it could have been better, it just feels like it is trying to grab.

dessgeega · Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 7:57 pm Post subject:

dark steve · . Joined: 17 Jun 2005 Posts: 1110

"The Contrarian" I think. It's just kind of dumb is all. It's written as if the company has been taking a beating for the last five years, when they have the highest profits of any console manufacturer in the industry.

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

Lackey · . Joined: 11 Jul 2005 Posts: 1107 Location: Canada

To be fair, the article isn't really about how Nintendo is doomed, but about how innovation is being killed by standardization. I guess its up to you to judge the quality of his argument based on the fact that he uses Nintendo as an example to support this proposition.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

Mister Toups · Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 8:25 pm Post subject:

dark steve · . Joined: 17 Jun 2005 Posts: 1110

Innovation (well, kinda) is making all the money, is all I'm saying. It just depends on how your business model works.

Lackey · . Joined: 11 Jul 2005 Posts: 1107 Location: Canada

dark steve · . Joined: 17 Jun 2005 Posts: 1110

WELL MAYBE I WILL

dhex · Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 9:08 pm Post subject:

all the talk of innovation - from everyone who has ever lived - makes me wonder just what, in particular the fuck, people are looking for in games anyway.

this shit's moving too fast for anyone to keep up with unless you're seven years old. those kids, let me tell you, this girl was playing a pokemon game on a gba and she explained to me the rules, or tried to. i'd had seven beers by that point and some very delicious jerk chicken but the tiny ins and outs of pokemon remained obscure. i think this pissed her off. tough cookies, kid.

it's not like games were this wellspring of unbridled genius, ever. really. i swear. nostalgia is lying to you; it's entirely a funciton of how old you are, what your emotional state is and whether or not you're getting laid at the time.
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Mr. Mechanical · Friendly Stranger Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 1276

Innovation can't really be quantisized either. That, and it's usually something so unexpected that people don't really call it innovative until after the fact. Katamari? Yeah right, there's been tons of games with tank controls and ball rolling, however there weren't any like Katamari. At least not any that you could find comparisons to communism in.

dhex · Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 9:18 pm Post subject:

gaming is a nest of communist depravity. i can compare that to any game. but a game as cute as katamari damacy? shit. might as well paint the town red, if you know what i mean.

katamari is a mass murder simulator, pure and simple. it's the only thing jack thompson would ever be right about, but he'd never bring it up because he thinks of violence in the same terms that the larvae who wrote the box copy to far cry do.
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Mr. Mechanical · Friendly Stranger Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 1276

Now we're getting into the grey areas though. There's never any explicit mass murdering in KD. How aer we to know that being turned into a star is actually painful and fatal, as long as the Prince is at the helm? Perhaps the people stuck to his Katamari are screaming in surprise and joy.

Lackey · . Joined: 11 Jul 2005 Posts: 1107 Location: Canada

I'd argue that most games are ideologically capitalistic.

I mean, collecting items! Seriously.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

dark steve · . Joined: 17 Jun 2005 Posts: 1110

Ho, ho, ho..

dessgeega · Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 10:17 pm Post subject:

nICO · . Joined: 19 Feb 2005 Posts: 120 Location: WVUSA

I was really excited to check this mag out after reading the comments on this forum, but I was kinda dissapointed by the debut. This new mag certainly has promise. It's biggest asset is that it looks so professional...both the site and the issue. I can also see some good articles being written for it. Nothing in this issue caught my interest, however. I wouldn't say it was bad. Not at all. It's just that after I finished it, I wondered why I read it.

'm interested to see what an article about an actual game would be like... Hopefully we'll get that soon.

So far, this doesn't seem like a direct competitor to Gamers Quarter at all. You both are trying to do different things.
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Brauner: Damn you, humans... You selfishly start wars and despoil the earth. Perhaps justice wasn't on my side but I will never admit that it was on yours.

dhex · Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 7:13 am Post subject:

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/1/19

This is pretty good for the second half. It really feels like two slightly differernt articles.

dessgeega · Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 11:40 am Post subject:

i actually trust marx over physics.

but then, i have a little doll of him next to my monitor, and i wouldn't pick physics over him to his face.

EDIT: the piece i am writing for gamer's quarter totally starts with me playing bubble bobble with my mother.
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SuperWes · Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 1:42 pm Post subject:

I really liked that Mom Knows Best article. Lots of heart and great timing too. The other new article was blah.

-Wes
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Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

dhex · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 1:04 pm Post subject:

SuperWes · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 1:32 pm Post subject:

aderack · . Joined: 15 Jun 2005 Posts: 1105 Location: San Francisco

Sound cards came around about half a decade after the NES. That's also about the time that PC games got big and fancy enough to need to install them to your hard drive. And that hard drives got large enough to install anything to them. When the Apple ][ was king, running games was pretty easy.

Hardcore assholes are what's strangling videogames. Or. Well, they're one major thing. They're responsible for much of the genre-entrenchment. Street Fighter II was so much more interesting before it was a Fighting Game, for instance. Then the interesting things, intended to help the game appeal to a wider audience, got stripped away because Fighting Game Fans didn't care about them.

Same kind of thing happening everywhere. The only times I've ever seen videogames (or, fuck, anything) grow is when they open up and try to speak (not cater; actually speak) to people they haven't spoken to before. Super Mario Bros. The DS. Katamari Damacy. Pac-Man. All populist.

Russel T. Davies, producer and writer of the new series of Doctor Who, had a quote a while ago. He was discussing how he intended to make the new series for a new audience -- in particular women, as if you get women watching you're sold. They're the key demographic because they're typically more loyal and more interested than males. Although the new series was a continuation of the old, and he intended to respect the series history (since, heck, he was a fan himself), he saw no reason to cater to the fans. As he put it, if the fans didn't like the new series that just meant they'd only watch each episode ten times instead of twenty.

...

So. Yeah. Videogames?
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SuperWes · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 1:43 pm Post subject:

Hey, I didn't say they happened in chronological order!

-Wes
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aderack · . Joined: 15 Jun 2005 Posts: 1105 Location: San Francisco

I said more! Don't reply so fast!
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dhex · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 2:02 pm Post subject:

Mister Toups · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 2:05 pm Post subject:

Back when I was something of a Weezer fan, I remember reading an interview with Rivers Cuomo where, when asked about his fans, said: "They are annoying little bitches and I avoid them at all costs." Weezer fans of course freaked out. For me, reading that sentence was a revelation, because (as one who knew many Weezer fans), I realized just how true it was.

Re-immersing myself back into the world of online videogame discussion has reminded me just how much of a hassle fans really are.
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

SuperWes · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 2:32 pm Post subject:

Persona-sama · Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2005 12:46 am Post subject:

Mister Toups · Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2005 5:50 am Post subject:

That was half the reason I went to E3. To remind myself.
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

dhex · Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2005 7:12 am Post subject:

e3 seems like a commercial for a game shark from 1994 dipped in lsd and stretched out for 3 days.
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Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

Mister Toups · Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2005 3:10 pm Post subject: