Opinion

I have spent minutes upon hours in the PlayStation 4 share menu and other things like it trying to tap a perfect angle and timing for a screenshot in many of my own games. Maybe that's why it's weird to me that a feature like Final Fantasy XV's photography mechanic isn't a common feature in most, if not all, new games.

Imagine my trepidation when Legendary Entertainment announced plans to tackle Life is Strange, Dontnod Entertainment’s episodic exploration into teen life and time travel as a live-action series.

If I’m being honest, I couldn’t care less about Doom’s story. That’s not what drew me in. Instead, I loved Doom for its pitch-perfect controls, inspired level design and well of surprises I didn’t know I could expect from a first-person shooter.

As a game, Pokemon Go appeals to the public’s love of Pokemon, of adventure and conquering the fantastic. There’s no reason the subsequent elements of the game shouldn’t appeal to why we love Pokemon.

In an age when internet access has been deemed a utility as crucial to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as electricity, it’s tough to imagine a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One left unconnected to Al Gore’s pièce de résistance. It’s like gaming with the Amish.

After two years in existence, the newest PAX is still relatively small. There are few big-name publishers exhibiting on the show floor, with many of the biggest booths belonging to hardware companies like Intel, Alienware, and Astro. There aren’t as many prominent figures in gaming walking the halls of the Henry B. González Convention Center in downtown San Antonio, TX. And the expo floor certainly isn’t as big and sprawling as PAX’s counterparts in Boston and Seattle. PAX South is a low-key show, for sure, but that’s all part of its charm.

Morality is a gray matter, a deep entity, and a thing that doesn't stop at the surface. It's also a subject that video games have played with constantly. Whether it was the evil Dragonlord presenting the hero with a choice to join his side at the end of Dragon Warrior in 1986 or Geralt choosing to sacrifice or save a dear friend in the more recent Witcher 3, video games have been attempting to capture the complexity of moral dilemma as a flexible mechanic for decades. The degree to which a game will go to accomplish that widely varies, but even the highest caliber releases supposedly punctuated by a choice-driven environment face a problem. Have games made choices truly matter? Can games capture the full effect of emotional baggage without sacrificing what makes a game fun? I’m not so sure they have yet.

The “game over” screen has long been an experience that every gamer is familiar with. This dreaded ending to a gaming session is the most widely used example of a failure state.

I had planned to collect the entire Super Smash Bros. line before backing away and being more selective about my amiibo purchases. I had successfully avoided the NFC figure initiative until now because I'm a longtime Smash player and these are too cool to pass up. Notice I said I had planned to collect the entire Smash Bros. line. That goal is now in jeopardy, and not through any fault of my own.

When I read the first rumors about Hideo Kojima leaving Konami, I, probably like many others, dismissed it as absurd. In my mind, Konami without Hideo Kojima was an impossibility. If Konami was a body, Kojima has undoubtedly been the face.