Listen, I’ll be honest with you here: I didn’t start a blog because I care that you hear my opinion. I care more about your opinion. I know what you’re thinking: “Brilliam, you sure picked a weird format to use if you wanna hear other people’s opinions.” You’re right. but blogs do have comments, so there’s that.

I’ll cut straight to the chase, because you’re a busy person. I am running a poll to define, completely arbitrarily, the best video game ever released on the PS2. It’s with a website I frequent called ILX, but that’s beside the point. The point is GAMES, and LISTS, and POLLS. And GAMES. Did I say GAMES?

Firstly, I implore you: visit this website. There’s a list of nominated games there: this is part of the first step. Only games nominated can be voted for, to avoid vote splitting and confusion and such; however, nominating a game is as easy as commenting on this blog, or commenting on that blog, or emailing me (that’s magacid, by the way, at gmail). Nominations are due by March 14th.

After that, the fun part: BALLOTS. You would send to my email (not by comment, we wanna keep the results SECRET until the end) your list of favourite PS2 games: as few as 1, as many as 15, in order (ties are allowed!). Ideally (but optionally) one would also include small blurbs, frmo one sentence to one paragraph, explaining why it is an awesome game to you. The results would slowly leak out on the previously-mentioned blog, complete with delicious youtube links and pictures and blurbs from other voters (AND YOU!).

If you think your list will suck, FRET NOT. It’s easy and you should send one anyway. A lot of the people contributing are not “gamerzzzz” in the hardcore sense; in fact, our year-end lists often end up with free flash games and iPhone puzzle apps near the top of the list because, well, that’s how we roll.

THE PS2 IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE PS2.

One of the most interesting, enlightening and exciting games I played last year wasn’t even a video game. Insane, isn’t it? I mean, the way we played it, it might as well have been a video game: a computer-based program was used to resolve our actions, and the primary methods of communication were IM, Skype and e-mail. But, make no mistake: Diplomacy, in all of its available new-media dressings, is a true, dyed-in-the-wool board game. And it’s a gas.

Diplomacy is a game where you take control of a dawn-of-the-20th-century European superpower, and, through diplomacy and war, attempt to dismantle the continent, piece by piece, until it belongs to you. The rules are incredibly simple, and rightly so: they are not the centrepiece of this game. In essence, it is a game of two being stronger than one, and three being stronger than two, and so on. Without allies, you will lose. But, everyone playing wants to win in their own right. What results are a series of shaky pacts based on delivering a blow to the player/empire with whom you’ve just made another (obviously even shakier) pact.

What made it truly great is that I played with six other people who I consider to be among my best friends. We (almost) all went to high school together, hung out together virtually all the time (before half of us moved around the country) and know each other incredibly well. And, since this is a game of psychology, it made for an incredibly satisfying game. All of us were engaging in our first game of Diplomacy, and we all had pretty different ideas of how games work, and how we intended to win. If you’ll indulge me, I am going to try to explain the seven of us, and I’m sure you can see where the conflict might occur:

Austria: Matt. Unfortunately, Matt didn’t get a chance to leave his imprint on the game, having three handicaps going in: one, Austria is surrounded by three nations and a glut of resources, making him an easy target; two, a reputation for being very good at strategy games, which painted a bullseye on his back very early; and, three, his own brother in nearby Italy, meaning an alliance was incredibly likely (this didn’t exactly work out, though, as I’ll explain later). Matt was the first player to be eliminated.

France: Will (that’s me!). Somehow I was one of the two “winners” (not technically, though). One of my greatest strengths going into this game was that I am, as far as I know, a pretty agreeable person. I was constantly brokering deals, taking only what was mine, at first, waiting to see what aggressive actions other would take before deciding what I would do. My greatest weakness, this game has taught me, is my trust of other people. I had (what I thought were) unwavering alliances with three players over the course of the game who betrayed me at one stage or another. This nearly sank me; thankfully, a combination of good positioning (France is great for stalemating those who are trying to crush you) and infighting among my enemies allowed me to strike back and survive until the end.

Germany: Gavin. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite like Gavin. He’s a high school teacher with an almost Aspergerian obsession with game mechanics (or, at least, that’s what I screamed at him, replete with expletives, at least once in Skype conversation). I first started hanging out with Gavin years ago when I joined a D&D group. He was the one who had the combo wizard-priest that could win virtually any encounter alone, due to his exhaustive knowledge of third edition (and his blatant disregard for taste, as far as metagame exploitation went). It became evident after a few turns that he was probably the best player, game-wise, out of all of us. His ability to use logic to support his moves was virtually untouchable. However, he was the king of the backstab, and this led to his undoing (which, to this day, he states, never happened: in his mind, he was part of a three-way draw, as that’s what the rules state. Since “surrender” is not an in-game order, he maintains that he could not and did not surrender, and is one of the three “winners”).

Italy: Greg. Greg has been one of my closest friends throughout my life, but I still think the best way to describe him is as an enigma. He is a competitive gamer: at one point, he was a part of the semi-professional Counter-Strike circuit, and only quit because he was in high school and his parents wouldn’t let him fly to Texas to compete for a big cash prize. If there’s one thing he loves about games like this, it’s the ability for him to unleash his unpredictable nature and fuck with people. If you don’t believe me, ask his brother, Matt, who was out in four turns because his alliance with his brother ended just because Greg thought it’d be more interesting that way.

Russia: Angus. The token pacifist, Angus is the kind of guy who doesn’t want to fight with people, and only will if an ally asks him to. Where my philosophy is more of an isolationist, “wait and see” approach, his is much more Gandhi. While this is an awesome way to look at real life, it didn’t really translate to success in-game, as he never ended up taking a single territory from another player, and was the second player to lose. Still, gaining him as an ally was vital for two of the game’s major players, and he played a pretty big role in the Eastern theatre.

Turkey: Andy. A leader at heart, Andy has always been the one who convinces everyone to come out and do things when we all hung out in real life (before half of us moved halfway across the country). Andy’s pretty much an open book, and there are two things you can be sure of in any situation: he is as loyal as anyone comes, but if you cross him, he will never forget. In a game like Diplomacy, a reputation like that makes you incredibly powerful. You can be confident knowing that you will only be attacked by people who are sure that they can take you because if they can’t, you will chase them to the ends of the Earth (or Europe, I suppose). Out of the three people who survived, he’s the one I’ve written least about, and I think that speaks volumes about how he plays these games: it’s simple, but it’s powerful. He’s charismatic and clever.

United Kingdom: Travis. If there’s one word that describe’s Travis’s MO, it’s “diabolical.” He’s not a griefer, but he delights in crushing his enemies. Where Gavin can be almost robotic in his drive to win games, Travis brings a touch of evil to his playing. He doesn’t get anything out of simply winning– he believes that winning can be hollow, and losing can still be fun, sometimes. But he wants to compete, and as such, he can be mercenary. Finding the Achilles heel of his enemies is where he shines.

I will be posting more about the results of the game in the near future, but I realized that this article is already in “page down several times” territory, so I am going to split it up. I will do a series of articles on how the game unfolded, and a final article on my impressions.

And for my second small post that simply links somewhere else, I’d also like to draw your attention to Text Adventure.

Tiff Chow and I are curating what will hopefully be a totally dope and expansive repository of great examples of text in videogames. From unforgettable splash screens to thoughtfully-placed speech bubbles (ooh, that reminds me… Comix Zone), anything where the text makes you sit up and say “I like the way that looks” will be up there, a couple entries at a time.

But, then again, chances are you’ve already seen this at Offworld. Or Destructoid. Or Infovore. Or Waxy. Or Tiff’s blog. Oder Nerdcore. Ou Graphism.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m late to the party on linking to someithng I had a part in making. Still trying to figure out if that’s sad or awesome. If you’re not already, follow us on Tumblr (or make a Tumblr so you can), and we’ll transport you to…

…sorry. Lame joke.

Over at Every Game Ever the original plan was to write a little piece about every NA-released SNES game in alphabetical order. For about two weeks, I slogged through te games starting with numbers, and the games starting with A. After a while, though, I lost steam, and it sunk into unfinished obscurity. Two years later, my friends Mekki and Brian berated me until I resurrected it, in a new capacity: many writers, each doing one article every week (well, that was the original plan. Some people are two months behind, INCLUDING BRIAN WHO MADE ME START IT AGAIN). The only rules are:

1) 150-450 words, roughly, unless it’s a special case;
2) At least one screenshot;
3) No number scores (6/10, 85%, etc).

It was a good idea, though. I brought it back and started recruiting friends to write for it. It started with myself, Scott, Angus, Brian, and Mekki. From there, it began to flourish. Monday through Friday, we’d bravely wade into the sports-game-infested waters of the SNES catalogue. I had (and still have) an ulterior motive, though: by forcing deadlines and topics, I got some of my most gifted writer friends motivated enough to actually write something. Looking at those previous blogs will show you how long it’s been since they even wrote something of their own accord.

And, despite my own shoddy writing on the site (my own official excuse is twofold: one, my focus is now on badgering people who are late to submit ASAP; and, secondively, I’m experimenting with copying other people’s writing styles or toying with my own on a weekly basis), it’s going fabulously. We’ve since doubled in authorship. Scotty joined the team, bolstering the ever-important “dick jokes” quota required for a modern website; Travis, too, was recruited for another quota: pretentious English Master’s student-style existential pontification. Adam found the site through my blog (I think) and expressed interest, so I hooked him up to help with the load. Alex showed interest, and contributed to the noise with his debut article on Chessmaster– in all-caps. Tiff Chow joined the team to round it out to a nice, even ten.

Since the site gets little traffic, aside from some very weird search engine results (my favorite at the moment is still last week’s “where can a condom get lost in vagina”), so I thought I’d highlight some of my favourite articles from the site over the past few months. I’ve included links that will allow you to read just that author’s works, as it’s a lot more enjoyable to read one author at a time and develop a sense of their style. These are in random order, except for the first two who I recommend above the rest of us (sorry, everyone, but Scott and Travis truly have this thing locked down — step up your game if you wann be at the top of the next roundup in a few months!).

TRAVIS makes you want to read from the get-go. From his review of the diabetes edutainment title, Captain Novolin: Captain Novolin is a brilliant metaphor for the struggle with obesity and diabetes, but also the simple yet unending fight against temptation that we all face as ultimately flawed human beings.

Also check out his Chrono Trigger review. It’s some of the best game-related writing I’ve seen on the Internet. It’s a crime he isn’t writing more about the games and the industry. But there is a difference between your standard unsophisticated video game story, upon which I now smirk from my ivory tower, and something like Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger is a fantasy/sci-fi genre epic translated from Japanese, and it wasn’t written by professionals in either language, I’m fairly sure. This is, generally, not a recipe for the most delicious of successes. But it’s something special. It has a rather intricate narrative of time travel and the alteration of the future through your actions; it has characters that, to some extent, come alive. It has a nasty, big-boss villain who you can even convince to come to your side, if you do it right. It has multiple endings and a terrifying final boss that destroys worlds and waits for you at the terminus of every timeline, like a living, breathing dark god of entropy.

SCOTT manages to turn many of his pieces into hilarious little bits of short fiction. From his review of Andre Agassi Tennis: I’m glad these 16-bit graphics don’t allow the detail necessary to see the disappointment on the faces of my family as they sit in the audience and hold back tears of shame and disgust. How did this spastic even find his way to the tennis court? I knew there was something wrong with him…spends his whole day watching Mr. Belvedere re-runs and eating Sun Chips out of a dirty wooden bowl.

Or, check out his write-up of California Games II: I hoped that once the drug testing was done, I’d be banned from the California Games forever. Too many dark memories, scattered fragments riding a wave of victory that took me through the silver-lined gutters of stardom. Once you’ve won a California Game, the ultimate test is detoxing from the heady fallout of athletic recognition. Party people. Opiates fell like candy from the sky into my open mouth and I twitched slightly and pulled the hair of a supermodel. She screamed in outrage, but there were others waiting to take her place.

WILL (that’s me!) misses the simpler times. From Brett Hull Hockey 95:Originally I was going to talk about the weird 3/4 perspective in this game, and the even weirder old guy with greasy hair who POINTS at your coaching resource allocations with his HAND, in effect being a living cursor, but what’s the point? You don’t care about that. I don’t care either. I do, however, care about a bygone era where kids had artifacts other than the ones you see in poorly-encoded Youtube videos.

SCOTTY hates rudders, even though the word sounds sort of dirty. I hate flying games. Flying games are way too complicated and there’s usually no pay off. It’s like trying to sleep with girls that listen to NPR and check Pitchfork every 5 minutes. I just don’t have time to devote to something that won’t end in burgers or orgasms, or if I’m lucky, both, in any order I see fit.

MEKKI gets why Battletoads included two modes. From Battlemaniacs: The game is full of great times for two players. You can select between two modes. In one mode, you can hit your teammate. In the other mode, you can’t it each other. The first is great for trash talking. The second is great for actually making it anywhere in the game.

BRIAN managed to truncate every story ever quite succinctly, with Art of Fighting: (the) Art of Fighting’s plot is simple enough. Ryo’s sister gets kidnapped. Ryo and his friend Antonio Banderas go save her. Along the way you uppercut some dudes. The end.

ANGUS has been MIA for a while (finals tend to do that), but he’s coming back with a vengeance. From his recent article on Beavis and Butthead: It would be a beat-em-up if there was any sort of combat system. It would be a platformer if it had platforms. It would be a puzzle-platformer if it had any puzzles. It plays a little bit like A Boy and His Blob. Except the blob doesn’t do anything. And you can slap it. Repeatedly.

ALEX hasn’t been with us long, but his first review, of Chessmaster, is a lot of fun:
THIS AIN’T YOUR GRANDMA’S CHESS VIDEO GAME, FUCKERS! THIS IS ON SOME REAL, STREET-LEVEL SHIT. TOP OF THE LINE MOTHERFUCKING CHESS GRAPHICS! INSANE MOVES! WHITE KNUCKLE ACTION! THIS IS THE BAD BOYS 2 OF CHESS VIDEO GAMES FOR THE SUPER NINTENDO!

ADAM, as well, is new to the site. He has two reviews up (should be three later today!) and he was lucky enough to start with everyone’s archnemesis: the snackfood tie-in. But maybe I’ve been asking all the wrong questions. Would it sell a pack of Cheetos? Probably it would!
“Screw this, Cheetos are heaps better than this game. Wanna get some Cheetos?”
“HELL YES.”

Please check it out. While they can’t all be hits (I turn beet-red when I think about how bad some of my articles were. My Axelay acrostic poetry stands out as one of the most embarrassingly pathetic jokes I’ve ever commited to a computer), there are gems worth looking to as great pieces on games you (and, usually, the author) have no interest in.

And if you’re interested in writing, let me know. We may add a couple more in a month or so.

Hi, Internet!

It’s been a while, I know. Just letting you know I’m alive and that, while I haven’t had anything particularly good to say since December, I’m still around. Here’s some of the stuff that’s been keeping me busy:

1. Every Game Ever

I have restarted the Every Game Ever blog with multiple writers. Now, instead of just me writing about seven SNES games a week (exhausting), I write about one a week and four others do the same. Oh, and I edit their work, too (also exhausting). For those unaware, it’s an exhaustive (ha) blog attempting to “review” (to comic effect) every SNES game ever.

2. My Sucky Job

My job has been in crisis mode for the past while, and they recently turned it up to 11 with a “we’re probably going to lay you off unless the impossible happens” demand. I’ve been spending a lot of time learning about employment insurance, and budgeting whether or not I’ll be able to subsist on what amounts to very little money per month. I think I can do it, which is a relief, but now it looks like they might not even layme off, which is confusing. They still haven’t given me written two weeks’, so that’s… I can’t decide if it’s good or bad. I’d love an excuse to not work here anymore…

3. “A Fistful Of Tokens” Podcast

I’ve also been editting the first episode of a podcast that was worked on by myself, Scott, Angus, and Travis (who has no web presence… in 2009. And he’s an English Master’s graduate. Someone please tell him the face of writing today so he can catch up with the world). It exists now in its editted form. All I need to do is sort out the hosting and the RSS and all of the stuff I can’t be bothered to sort out. The show exists as a sort of videogame-related version of the BBC5 panel show Fighting Talk, where questions of the industry are asked and the pundits get points for witty, insightful or downright hilarious responses. There’s also a lot of noise in the recording, particularly on my end, so I’m going to try to find a solution to that too.

4. Books!

I’ve also got an unread book pile that is menacing over me from my shelf. I am convinced that, despite my attempts to tame it of late, it will consume me. I’m curently reading Lawrence Lessig’s Remix, which is a thoughtful look into the success of “hybrid economies” on the Internet (which, boiled down to the barest terms, is a commercial site that fosters a sharing community among its members, like craigslist) as well as the music/film/television/etc industry’s backwards-facing stance on copyright (for a hilarious dose of irony, check out Lessig’s blog right now: he has a CC license on a segment he shot with Stephen Colbert, and asked his readers to “remix” the segment: the segment was taken down due to a “copyright violation,” claimed by Viacom. THAT is too funny). I’m also reading Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid On Earth which is a fantastic book. A fantastic book with pictures. I don’t want to call it a graphic novel because I think the author himself, Chris Ware, recoils from the term (or so the little cartoon on the back of the book would imply), and rightly so; I’ve never seen a graphic novel deliver this level of richness of character, bleakness of setting, or realness of conversational flow. I’ve also got about six books on my “borrowed books that I feel guilty about not having read yet” pile, and another six on my “books I bought but haven’t read because there are still books in the other pile” pile.

5. Procrastinating on playing games to play… other games!

Gamewise, my attempts to sit down with Far Cry 2 and Dead Space and Fallout 3 (all of which I intend to actually let soak in at some point; they’re still borign to me, but I’ve barely otuched them. I need to immerse) have been stymied by the release of Crayon Physics Deluxe (post upcoming, surely), Steam’s $4.99 sale of the entire X-Com catalogue (now, sadly, back to $14.99 but still a great deal — post ALSO upcoming, surely), and the release of the 9.2.0 patch of Football Manager 2009 which actually makes the game playable (if you’re going to flame me on playing an excel-sheet-game, stay tuned because SURPRISE! POST INCOMING!).

6. Making a game!

Cikro is also “hard at work” (that term is subjective, right?) on its first videogame. The tentative title is Malmö. Brush up on your Swedish, because due to a coworker of mine who speaks the language, parts of the game will be presented in the tongue of ABBA and Mats Sundin.

7. Secret blog!

There’s also another somewhat comedic blog that I’ve started and will be contributing to in the near future but I’m keeping that one under my hat. The only hint I’ll give is that it’s related to both breasts and eggs. But not chickens. Well, not really.

8. Cover band?

I’m signed up to be the lead singer in a cover band next month. I don’t know if that’s happening, but if it is, I don’t ANY of the songs I’m supposed to cover. Hmm.

9. The Wire & True Blood

I’m also staring at The Wire (the TV series), trying to will myself to watch it. I’m on season 2, and it’s VERRRRY difficult, but I can’t watch the (apparently amazing) seasons 3-5 without enduring 2. I watched True Blood, though, which was schlocky (not s1ocki, unfortunately) and fun enough.

10. P&P RPGs

Been playing D&D at my buddy Angus’s (different Angus than above — yes, I know and hang out with TWO Anguses). He might run Vampire The Masquerade. I am conflicted because I think vampires are dumb, but I think acting like an ass with your friends is the best thing ever.

11. Catching up on blogs superior to my own

I’m trying to catch up on the past year of all of the blogs listed here. This might take a while.

I didn’t intend for this to be such a long piece; really, I just wanted to round up everything I’m doing at the moment. Apparently I’m doing A LOT.

My Uncle’s Box of Pirated Games is a series on old, obscure games for the Commodore Amiga. I received an Amiga from my uncle in the mid-1990s, when I still had nothing but an Atari 2600 and a Game Boy. Included were two boxes of pirated (then called by the much less dysphemistic “bootlegged”) games that I played to death. While some are well known, others are less so. I hope to bring to light those that I liked and, perhaps, figure out how to play them again (I’ve never had luck with an Amiga emulator, sadly).

Pandora is a game that perhaps suffers for its generic name. Indeed, it took a long time before I was able to find any relevant information throguh Google dark arts, but I did. It turns out the Amiga is a system whose every piece of relevant information is archived in a way that would make even the most astute universities and governments jealous; every page of every Amiga-related magazine, for example, is scanned and placed up for public consumption.

As I recall, I had a disk that was a four-pack of Meganoid (an Arkanoid clone), Pandora, and two other games whose names I forget (no amount of Googling is helping, sadly– this may have been a “bootleg” collection). Being young in a time before the Internet, in a tiny village with absolutely no Amiga-related resources, I was virtually in a vacuum. I was a perfect, if not a bit young, control group for these games. In fact, a recent obsession of mine is this now-impossible vacuum; I’ll be talking more about it in the future. But, for now, I’ll attempt to quit digressing so much. I’m here to talk about Pandora, not the videogame-playing tendencies of a sleepy, rural Lake Huron hamlet.

Let me be bold for a moment: Pandora deserves to be incredibly important. It delivers what might be the best version of a mystery narrative within a game I’ve ever seen. In a nutshell, the game drops you inside a sentient, evil starship bent on destroying Earth. You are the only person onboard who can stop it; others are dead, unaware of the threat, turned evil by the ship, or simply jerks. There’s a catch, however; you have a time limit. The game starts with you dying a few times and starting over, to be honest. Soon enough, though, you find the traps that are set for you, both physically and socially, and start picking apart the world that’s set up for you. Each playthrough shows you a new hazard, and puts you back to its start (there may have actually been a save function, but I don’t particularly remember using it). So, the game takes two stages: the first, where you learn how to stop the disaster, and the second, where you learn how to do it before the disaster happens.

The obstacles are pretty standard fare for an adventure game; a diabetic needs a syringe, and will give you a valuable item in exchange; a punk will kick your ass if you’re not armed when you approach him; a security guard will give you a hard time if you’re poking around without a keycard and/or disguise (it’s been a while and it’s getting fuzzy, that last one might be made up). However, the graphics, the subject matter, the time-trial aspect, the insane expansiveness of the ship you’re exploring– it’s all ahead of its time.

Thanks to the twin magics of MobyGames and Google I managed to track down information on the developers to see what they’ve been up to since they worked on this game. Shahid Ahmad apparently worked on the music for many games over the past few years, in addition to the C64 port of Jet Set Willy (a favourite of many of my more British pals) and is in the “special thanks” section for many more. He now keeps a pretty interesting blog that keeps an eye on Muslim rights and issues in England and abroad. David Eastman is a bit less prolific from a games standpoint (only appearing as a part of the games I’m about to talk about below), but has plenty of info up about himself on his website. Terry Greer, all but unsearchable due to a football player with the same name, but, he either has continued to work in games or has a doppleganger with the same name running around designing Warhammer-related games.

There are two more games that both Ahmad and Eastman worked on together: Floor 13 and Conflict. While I haven’t played these games, my attention was caught; the former is a game focussing on scandal within the British government, and the latter is a simulator where you assume control of Israel during the tumultuous mid-90s (as opposed to, oh, the tumultuous any other time in the Middle East). Needless to say, while writing this blog article I became more and more intrigued with the work of these two developers, and less and less interested due to the original reason I wrote this (a nostalgic, wishy-washy, ephemeral vision of a game once played).

On Eastman’s site, he states: “Conflict was written in the 1990s, while game genres were still fluid and expectations for graphics were still relatively modest. A team of two or three people could quite reasonably produce a game [...] The early success of the software games industry ensured the interest of big business and the decline of small scale development. So Conflict is both a product of the period, and probably irreproducible in a modern commercial environment.” Indeed, that is how the indstry started turning out. Like the birth of the modern music industry, the games industry ramped up and more money and people moved into production. At some point, though, punk happened to games, too: gaggles of young, loud kids bit a chunk out of the industry. This has only happened recently, but already the giants are scrambling to keep their share during this time of upheaval; independent developers are getting snapped up into Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony exclusivity deals, or are jut producing their games on PC themselves. Here’s hoping talented, opinionated people like these two take note: the waters are warm again and we’d love to have you back.