So, Pridefest happened at last. I heard this today from my friend Bryce, who was engaging the "oh goodness, do I play this?" internal argument. I then had the same internal argument before deciding: yeah, I should see what is going on with this. And so I picked it up, since the game is free-to-play microtransaction mobile… Continue reading Fest Be Not Proud
Please Leave
Hey, remember Mortal Kombat X? The series reboot by NetherRealm? Came out early last year. I remember it, because in April I wrote the game's subtle deployment of the first canon gay character in the MK series, Kung Jin, for Paste Magazine's games section. In said article I was pleased with the way they handled the character's… Continue reading Please Leave
Whole Hog
This is a short post. But I am cranky. Like many people in the gaming culture/press/business/what-have-you, I have spent many a moment over the past couple days looking at my Battle.net client longingly, hoping I too will suddenly receive a beta invite for Blizzard’s upcoming TF2-alike, Overwatch. To kill some time, I decided to look… Continue reading Whole Hog
Paradoryxical
Where to begin. Although the information has been floating around gaming's social media spheres and message boards for a few weeks now, yesterday Polygon ran an op-ed by Laura K. Dale about Oryx, the titular king of Destiny's recent The Taken King expansion, being transgender. As a cis-though-not-as-cis-as-they-thought-they-were-for-30-years person, I struggled a lot with whether it was even… Continue reading Paradoryxical
Touch Me
Where do I start. On Thursday, Robert Yang put out a game called Rinse and Repeat. It is a game that is part of Robert's growing body of work on making... well, gay sex games. However, these are not games about gay sex in the "want to watch some folks with cocks do it" way; rather, they're about… Continue reading Touch Me
Teachable Moment
Right. By now I'm sure many of you have heard about Michael Thomsen's WaPo review of Super Mario Maker. Suffice it to say that I found it really freaking obnoxious. Others did, too. I didn't see many people defending it, and I can imagine some reasonable ones; Tom Auxier at least had a couple reasonable explanations for… Continue reading Teachable Moment
Apropos of Nothing
It's, uh... it's been a heck of a couple weeks, hasn't it. A lot of stuff has happened. For a few glorious hours last Monday, many of us in the Twittersphere indulged in a bit of saucy appreciation of Street Fighter V's bearded alt-costume "Hot Ryu" and how in many ways our desire to either have… Continue reading Apropos of Nothing
Dismissed
Hi, Twitter. So I made this tweet earlier tonight, around dinner time-ish: https://twitter.com/laevantine/status/618580256325283840 I've got thoughts about both of these topics, obviously, but I've been skirting writing about them for various reasons. Some of them more professional, some silly (FF14 has eaten up a lot of my life lately), and some personal (I am scared… Continue reading Dismissed
Not Safe For Work (Or Anywhere Else)
So, let's talk about Cobra Club, the dick pic simulator by Robert Yang, for a little bit. Because the content of the game is NSFW -- and because I'm going to spoil some of the game's stuff -- you can find the rest of this post under the fold. I'm always in a weird place… Continue reading Not Safe For Work (Or Anywhere Else)
Please Don’t Touch Me
So: Dragon's Crown. It's come back into my life recently, as I have been playing it on my Vita (it's a surprisingly good fit for that system). Also spoilers, despite all its art style problems I thoroughly enjoy Dragon's Crown, as it's an exceedingly well-crafted and satisfying brawler. It also came up in this editorial about an… Continue reading Please Don’t Touch Me