After three superb sequels, and one amazing spinoff (and no, we are not talking about Revolution, which we are in fact trying very hard to pretend does not even exist), the ultimate Grand Strategy series finally bites the dust.

I typed up these thoughts in June of 2010, right around the time of the E3 interviews surrounding Civ5. I held off on publishing them until now, because I did not want to unfairly influence readers about Civ5 with limited information until the game itself released. With the game long out and clearly an underwhelming result, I decided to go ahead and post these thoughts rather than let them languish forever.

So here's the problem with applying the free-roaming model to such a limited genre as the racing game: the end result ends up BORING, no matter how good your racing mechanics may be, because THE ENTIRE POINT of the free-roaming concept as developed by DMA Design in GTAIII hinges around the player being able to do MUCH MORE than JUST RACING, get it?

If there’s one thing that could be said about the original Burnout, it’s that it was fast. Eye-bleedingly fast, in fact. So fast, that one quick glance away from the screen could lead to your vehicle slamming into the side of a bus, or drifting out of control and into a wall.

There is something profound in a man that jumps for joy at the sight of a burning car.

In 2003, PC gaming was undergoing a significant evolution. Deus Ex: Invisible War was among the first titles to incorporate the Havok engine and utilise many of the features in DX9's canon.

Because Japanese gaming is dead.

Super Meat Boy is a game made entirely for our "modern" generation, the generation which has only played old games on emulators using savestates, infinite continues, and hq4x filters.

And that's how Meat Boy plays: whatever is not retardedly easy is basically a crap shoot, which you try, fail, repeat and rinse until you've "made" it, at which point the game autosaves and you are on to the next asinine little "challenge".

Canabalt was made in 5 days, for an amateur game development competition themed around "the bare minimum". It's probably the best a game made under those circumstances is going to get, but that doesn't make it a great game (or even a good one), and it certainly doesn't make it an "instaclassic" (Edge) or "perfect" (Action Button).‭

Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley is Microsoft's latest collaboration with the "independent" developer Twisted Pixel. The result is another excellent example of an abysmal original XBLA game.

Private military contractors Rios and‭ ‬Salem are back for another‭ ‬co-op‭ ‬cover-based third-person shooter,‭ ‬as is their amusingly ambiguous relationship.‭

The cliche way to put it would be to say that Serious Sam only does one thing, but does it very well.

After 14 years, Duke Nukem Forever is more than a mere game. It is an idea. It is a promise once made, now kept.

Duke Nukem Forever is forever.

Killzone 3 is a great set of player interface code and artwork in search of level designers who aren’t first year Full Sail dropouts. It’s the videogame equivalent of a girl with the face of a supermodel who would be an absolute bombshell if she only lost 85 pounds, except you know she never will. Killzone 3 is that kind of tragedy. It is the moderately fuckable fat chick game.

Still, despite working with what would seem like the base concept of C-grade science fiction, Dead Space manages to deliver a very solid action game, one rife with great visuals (or at least technically great, because artistically they are unfortunately merely passable...) and a combat system worthy of emulation.

We were really hoping, blindly, that Rage would be id Software's return to form. We liked Doom 3 even if it wasn't on par with their best games. But this... this is too much to bear. Calling Rage Xboxified would be an insult to good Xbox games. Rarely do we ever see so much wasted potential.

The fact that a game of this quality is competing for the same dollars as inane garbage like Bird Swipe and Farm Fuck ought to make the executives at these companies — executives who have gone on record as being interested in nothing but the bottom line, not even a little — fall on their swords.

Art, as I am in the process of explaining at length elsewhere, is "the craft of illusion" — if the thing you are creating is being made with the express goal of containing AS LITTLE ILLUSION AS POSSIBLE, I am sorry but it's not an artwork, and consequently, in my capacity of art critic, none of my fucking business.

The long and short of it is that L.A. Noire manages to combine all the rip-rollicking excitement of the now-dead adventure genre's pixel hunting with the new-age snorefest of walking around repetitive environments until you trigger the next event. It's shit, let's move on.

"Make your own difficulty" sounds great as a selling point to those rotten sons of bitches in marketing who insist that videogames ought to become mere commodities, able to be bested by any nitwit with two brain cells to rub together, but once again, we must remember that the devil is both a liar and a motherfuck.

I normally only review Cave shooters, but I decided to review 5pb's Bullet Soul because it's such a shameless copy of a Cave game, many Cave fans have shown interest in it, and it is one of the few region-free shooters on the 360. This review will be short, but definitely not sweet.

After many months of waiting, a new game involving Shinji Mikami is out. Unfortunately, he didn't direct it, and neither did Suda for that matter; some guido who somehow managed to blag a position with Grasshopper did, and Shadows of the Damned happened.

Wherein contemporary subhumanity discovers, with some amazement, that computers can also be used for other things besides playing games.

For the act of simply building, of simply producing stuff, can only ever be one part of the whole story; for the cycle of seduction to be complete, production should always be followed by destruction.

The internet's definitive guide to the "independent" gaming scene.

What the bums are basically doing, then, is taking and clumsily remaking old-style games, all the while grafting on to them all the worst deficiencies of modern ones...

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As part of preparation for a new year every serious newsoutlet and video game website had best of 2011 lists. It is not only entertaining but IMPORTANT to remember the past. A history major life icycalm should know the value of metal gear solid: rememberincing (haha videogame joke).

... with your videogame.

If games had a finality, the only true player would be the cheater.

Everyone knows Konami, as long as we keep it on the console side. You immediately think of the Belmont clan, Solid Snake, the Snatchers, and tons of other games which are cool and whatnot. But not arcade games.

I'm not a holocaust denier myself. I think it's half-real. The camps are real, it's just a fictional world where there were gas chambers overlaid on top of that. We interact with this fictional world through the real rules relating to holocaust denial. See the writings of Jesper Juul as background reading.

But what is most offensive about all this fucking dribble is not really the IGNORANCE or the IDIOCY, but the SMARMISHNESS, the SELF-CONFIDENCE and the POMPOUSNESS with which the little subhuman prick tries to pass off his randomly stuck together junk-knowledge as profundity.

But while having superior execution often is enough to win, it alone doesn't make an expert on the game any more than winning a fist fight by being physically superior makes someone an expert on boxing. Freddie Roach isn't a reigning world champion, but he is an expert on boxing.

There has long been a need for a place where people can discuss Insomnia's views without fear of shunning/locking/banning, and this need was clearly not being fulfilled by Insomnia's own forums (and with good reason), and certainly not by anyone else's.

The Frat Boy loves podcasts, because they allow him an opportunity to sit around with his like-minded coworkers/frat bros and be obnoxious jerks on the company dime. "I'm not being a drunken idiot! I'm generating dynamic multimedia online content!"

Your profits, business jargon, and pretentious accolades are beneath the artform. They're most certainly beneath this site. Your game prints money? So what. Your game got press in Forbes? Eat a sack of dirt. Your game was recognized by the pitchfork rejects/new games journalists as "art 4 realz?" This is us not giving a shit.

icycalm is a cunt. But that's okay — if he is only interested in the truth: it's true Santa Claus isn't real, but telling little kids that makes you a cunt. Telling the truth is beyond good and evil.

But a person cannot be "evil" universally — only from the perspective of a group whose interests he threatens. Similarly, a developer cannot be "dependent" universally — only in relation to other members within the team in which he is operating.

If we got to see them, to be sure, even if only in passing, all these singular bigots and artificial saints, it would be the end of them — and it is precisely because I never read a word without seeing an attitude that I make an end of them...

Let us resolve this issue once and for all. The bums themselves have been farcically unable to provide us with an adequate definition of what they mean by "independence" — and they've had enough time! almost a decade! — so I think it's time someone stepped in and showed them how it's done.

It was time to jump onto the bandwagon. Insomnia is finally offering design tips specifically targeted to indiependent game auteurs.

It all comes down — to make a long story short, and to anticipate our conclusion, which is not fully elaborated in these essays, and with good reason (since it lies beyond the domain of game theory, cutting across all disciplines, to finally end up as the ultimate question of philosophy proper) — to the debacle of meaning.

Art criticism, art theory, philosophy.

Some birds are blinded so that they may sing more beautifully; I do not think the men of today sing more beautifully than their grandfathers, but I know that they have been blinded.

For power is not, as the people suppose, something that can be taken but something that must be given — power is suicidal —

The fundamentally nihilistic character of pseudo-criticism, then, reveals itself in this: that the values by which it judges, taken to their logical conclusions, deny the very foundations of the artform that they pretend to champion...

"Equality" for all works is a piece of gross vulgarity, gentlemen! If a Rembrandt or a Shakespeare, or any other genius, had at any time believed in your precious "equality", they'd never have managed to become anything — let alone immortal!

In other words the categories of "casual", "indie" and "art" games are, to put it simply, merely subcategories of what were formerly known as "bad games"...

And what he would have seen is precisely this: how the subhumans strike back — with their neuroses...

So: the words "pluralism" and "subjectivity" in the mouth of a subhuman bear no relation whatsoever to what these terms really mean — i.e. to what they mean in the mouths of the human philosophers who invented them.

Critique is not a re-action of re-sentiment but the active expression of an active mode of existence; attack and not revenge, the natural aggression of a way of being, the divine wickedness without which perfection could not be imagined.

Higher versus Lower Tastes Means: Higher versus Lower Men.

Only the great writers succeed in painting these mechanisms faithfully, without falsifying them: we have here a system of relationships that paradoxically, or rather not paradoxically at all, has less variability the greater a writer is.

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A selection of excerpts from Alex Kierkegaard's work in progress Understanding the Exterminating Angel, due out in 2012.

Sample chapter from Alex Kierkegaard's work in progress Understanding the Anti-Christ, due out in 2012.

Are [the hippies] an "anti-society", ultimately capable of overturning the whole social order, or are they merely a decadent outgrowth of that order ...? Are they not ultimately, from a sociological point of view, merely a luxury product of rich societies?

Under normal conditions one laughs at this; only in those exceptional instances when a community lives absolutely outside the necessity of waging war for its existence does one lend an ear to such things.

Simulation is, as he puts it elsewhere, the replacement of the world with a kind of substitute universe, a counter-world of signs. What is alien to it — and essential to the symbolic order — is la réversibilité...

They will be harsher than humane people would like and investigate things to the point of cruelty. But, again, these are not experiments designed just to discover truth, but to help create new values that go "beyond" good and evil.

One does not escape meaning by dissociation, disconnection or deterritorialization. One escapes meaning by replacing it with a more radical simulacrum, a still more conventional order — like the alphabetical order for Barthes, or the rules of a game...

And this nothing/secret, this, the seduction's unsignified moves beneath the words and their meaning, and moves faster than their meaning. It is what touches you first, before the sentences arrive, in the time it takes for them to fade away.

Moreover, the soldier went to meet death because he gave meaning to a meaningless gesture which did not even concern him. He took personally something that was not addressed to him...

All appearances conspire to combat and root out meaning (whether intentional or otherwise), and turn it into a game, into another of the game's rules, a more arbitrary rule...

It is the stillest words which bring the storm. Thoughts that come on doves' feet guide the world.

All great things are the cause of their own destruction, through an act of self-cancellation...

It has been said that "Even God cannot declare war on Himself". Well, He can. The West, in the position of God (divine omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy), has become suicidal, and declared war on itself.

You thirst to become sacrifices and gifts yourselves; and that is why you thirst to heap up all riches in your soul.

In the meantime, the question itself remains unanswered whether one is of more use to another by immediately leaping to his side and helping him ... or by creating something out of oneself that the other can behold with pleasure...

But my words are poor, despised, halting words... Yet with them I can still — tell the truth to hypocrites!

We negate and must negate because something in us wants to live and affirm...

That is exactly what we have seen over the course of the modernist era... each particular kind of charlatanry arises, has its day in the sun, and fades into obscurity as it fails to accomplish its expressive goal.

While museums display realist art of the past centuries, living realists are blackballed and shunned and ignored nearly everywhere, while countless numbers of "gimmick-of-the-week" charlatans are given endless space...

Stare at them long enough you might even convince yourself that there is something meaningful in them, like a Rorschach ink blot test. But neither a blob of paint nor a Rorschach test is a work of art, and neither are they truly meaningful.

These critics like to say Bouguereau's work is really only derivative, harking back to earlier artists. Only in the 20th century has such a thing ever been scorned.

In other words, by defining non-art as art, the logical conclusion is that art is non-art.

Such "artspeak" as it has come to be known is ... a form of contrivance which uses self-consciously complex and convoluted babble to impress, mesmerize and ultimately to silence the human instinct...

Without the knowledge of the past we are doomed to everlasting primitivism... Nobody can accomplish anything of merit if they are in fact not derivative.

In order to exist at all, slave morality from the outset always needs an opposing, outer world; in physiological terms, it needs external stimuli in order to act — its action is fundamentally reaction.

The difference in the origin does not appear at the origin — except perhaps to a particularly practised eye, the eye which sees from afar, the eye of the far-sighted, the eye of the genealogist.

The Prince presents a situation and is written in tone similar to the first sections of the Genealogy of Morals. The goal in these two works is not to promote the happiness of subjects, it is to show how power imposes itself and creates for itself a morality and a politics.

We have the hierarchy that we deserve, we who are essentially reactive, we who take the triumphs of reaction for a transformation of action and slaves for new masters — we who only recognize hierarchy back to front.

The slave does not stop being a slave by being triumphant; when the weak triumph it is not by forming a greater force but by separating force from what it can do.

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