(excuse the typo: ‘arem’ –> ‘are,’)

I felt the same shock of cognitive dissonance upon first seeing EA’s marketing department’s choice of bundle naming, but I find the counter-arguments pretty compelling: arem for example, Braid and Fez to be excluded from the ‘indie’ side of the venn diagram because they were published by Microsoft?

Here’s a follow-up/clarification by Taylor Clark. I have to say I’m not convinced, and I suspect he’s got some fairly ironic blinders on: he acknowledges that not all games are dumb, but it looks like he hasn’t come to the realization that the ‘dumb’ games are the ones that he, himself, is compelled to play all [...]

Very charming. The last level took me a bunch of tries, most of them ill-conceived, but it felt like a satisfying lynchpin solution in the end.

This is a much better article than the pull-quote might suggest. I think it’s a bit silly to be talking about Kickstarter backers as though they were investors — the hypothetical 10k backer mentioned at the end of the article is really just donating money to receive some series of rewards, including, eventually, the game itself [...]

A couple nice pullquotes from the article stavros just linked to:

We assume people know what they’re doing. On Half-Life 2, one of the engineers made a bunch of really bad decisions. There was no monitoring system along the way so it took us about six months longer than it should have for us to catch [...]

Thinking about this further, I think there must be some negatives to the culture at Valve that aren’t apparent from the official rule-set, and I imagine they must have to do with certain aspects of the ingrained culture there. The tip off: Why did Kim Swift need to leave Valve to make Quantum Conundrum? Couldn’t [...]

I’m about 150% of the way through, I think (though don’t know for sure since I was using a guest account and the completion percentage is only visible on the inaccessible to me leaderboard screen. It’s an amazing game, and would be even if not for the central 2-d/3-d conceit. I can’t wait to find [...]

Oh no! This one is a lot more puzzle and a lot less reflex, in case it was the twitch-reflex parts that made you angry at VVVVVV, but there’s still a good chance you won’t like this if you didn’t like that. Personally, I think VVVVVV is such a great game. Now I’m curious what [...]

A version where the screen rotates to match the current gravity direction might make things a bit more intuitive. (As it is, the ‘stars’ in the background are always moving in the fall-direction). There were definitely a few spots I handled by trial and error, going through all possible move permutations until stumbling upon what [...]

This is such a good article. I’d like to read an infinity of articles about what Valve is like from the inside.

I ended up deciding this one might be general-interest enough to post over on MetaFilter, and was sort of surprised by the tame response. Likely I should have framed it better instead of letting the concept stand on its own. My inclination is to think that this may be an Important Project, however frivolous most [...]