The so-called "metagame", as referred to by "competitive" gamers (which is to say by aspies), is merely a form of cheating. It consists of trawling FAQs, message boards and YouTube channels to learn of strategies which you are supposed to be DEVISING ON YOUR OWN BY PLAYING THE ACTUAL GAME.

Insomnia now has a YouTube channel featuring highlights from the latest hardcore digital exploits of The Cult.

Insomnia now has a Steam Curator page representing 100% Cutting-Edge Hardcore Gaming among a sea of "indie" and "quirky" abortion-peddling pseuds and casuals. Follow us and help us fight the good fight.

Insomnia now has a Twitch channel streaming the latest hardcore digital exploits of The Cult.

Insomnia now has a Steam group which all current and past subscribers are welcome to join.

The issue therefore is not so much that videogames are art, but that ART IS VIDEOGAMES. Hahahaha. Ebert must be turning furiously in his grave right about now. But, thankfully for us, no amount of turning in a grave can change reality.

It's a good thing therefore that the future envisioned by Johnson, wherein every critic has been replaced by "FAQ writers and Let's Players" (p.7) who lack all courage for even the simplest "Yes" or "No", is an impossibility...

And he wants YOU to join him.

We set goals that involve numbers only because they can be tracked and compared. It’s a manifestation of insecurity, of wanting to be important and better than someone else.

The male domination hierarchy drives not just how women respond to you sexually but also your self-image, other men’s reactions, and the type of entertainment you’ll pursue. Our identities are expressed through our consumption choices, our fashion choices, and how we spend our time. So let’s apply that to videogames.

Once this is tight, and you also have your head in the "sweetspot" for your screen size and FoV (field-of-view in the game), you can't even call it aiming anymore: you're simply looking at things ... and then shooting.

As of today, all of Insomnia's philosophy-related content and discussion has been moved to orgyofthewill.net, making this new website the world's number 1 philosophy destination — while Insomnia continues to reign supreme in the world of videogames and videogame culture.

The best selection is the cinematic scene, the musical note, the splotch of paint, the game mechanic or the written sentence that, out of all the other theoretically possible scenes, notes, splotches, mechanics or sentences "fits" the best. If that happens to be a still-shot of a character thinking, so be it.

The key difference between realism and internal consistency is this: Realism means "Could this happen in our world?" Internal consistency means "Could this happen in their world?"

The so-called metagame is anathema to videogames, but before you can be brought to understand this you must first understand the metagame's allure and the rationale for its creation. And no one explains it better than Michael Soracoe in this article.

Seven reasons why, when a publisher decides not to localize a game, it's usually a good idea, regardless of what the often irrational and, let's face it, practically braindead fanbase might say.

We ask for games with interesting and meaningful consequences. We ask for games to explore every subject, to leave no taboo uncovered. And yet, despite all the things games can say these days, there are two words few people will let them say.

Urgent notice to regular forum users: Start contributing news now, or lose your Insomnia account forever.

"Only the skilled may live — the rest will die"

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 philosophy 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.

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Anyone capable of looking at this game critically will know that praising it is a vote for games going further in the wrong direction.

Now is time to the 68000 heart on fire!

Rushed and poorly structured, Respawn's eagerly anticipated versus shooter is still fun for a short while... if you're into this sort of thing.

"Indie" newcomer Hitbox Team takes inspiration from speedrunners to deliver a platformer, not merely subverted by autism, but specifically built for it.

Utterly unintelligible chaos that's worth experiencing to realize the sheer ignorance and tastelessness that the entire "indie" scene is wallowing in.

Let's get this out of the way now: this isn't a proper Hitman game.

Seta's Prince of Persia-inspired effort is aesthetically outstanding, but mechanically flawed.

Survival Horror gets the "indie" treatment. (I.e. survival is automatic and there's no horror.)

Bandai closes the Gundam Musou series on PS3 with a cheap cash-in...

Better than 2... but nowhere near as good as 1.

Once again, then, Treasure have tried to conceal flawed mechanics by constantly dazzling us with new gimmicks and aspects of secondary importance...

Strider's turned into a metroidvania, with predictably middling results.

343 Industries has not made a true Halo game.

An unexpected return to form for Ubisoft's seminal stealth series.

It achieves perfectly what it has set out to achieve. Too bad what it has set out to achieve is stupid.

Worst game I played all year.

Were the setting and story "grounded", compared to the typical game, as has been abundantly claimed? Sure they were. Only becoming ungrounded for a while is precisely the reason we play games in the first place.

So this is Suda 51's new brawler. Its style is very reminiscent of Killer 7 in its look and serious tone. I was hoping it'd be better than last year's pretty weak Lollipop Chainsaw, and it is, but not by much.

Rob banks. For cash... and stuff.

Just compare the attack animations of these games to what Capcom, Konami, Sega et al. would later come up with — no other punch (and kick, and knee and headbutt) compares to an early Technos punch.

Brace yourselves. The Uwe Boll of gaming is back.

Crackdown was a huge disappointment for me and a classic case of some serious bungling of the free-roaming genre.

Don't believe the anti-hype. This is a decent game.

Yo. So I decided to re-replay this game again along with some friends who had never played it before (one of them Shepton). That's why I'm reviewing it. Yes, I know the game is old, but fuck you, there are some things that need to be said. And I'm saying them right here and now for the sake of justice.

The first half of the game is bad and the second half is OK.

The days of pumping bullets into foes with the only response being a momentary flinch are truly over. Put simply, it's really awesome to kill stuff in this game.

A game best forgotten.

Genji is one of my picks for the most beautiful PS2 games. It's in my top three. The graphics are AMAZING. Lush forests, rose bushes blooming in front of snow-covered mountain temples, lily pads on a reflecting pool in the courtyard of a huge palace. Aside from that... it's pretty much a button-masher.

It's everything that the SF2 games were NOT — slow, defensive, tactically degenerate and just ugly enough to make your eyes bleed.

May 2011. It was just barely a month since Super Robot Wars Z2 Hakai Hen had been released, and many people were still playing the game. Then Famitsu drops the bomb — Original Generations 2 announced. For PS3.

As for the plot and writing, maybe they'd be a lot funnier if every single insufferable videogame blog and forum wasn’t littered with quotes from the game ad nauseam. Which isn’t really Portal’s fault, but you have to wonder about the merits of a game that attracts so many cretins.

God of War is a depressing slog of a 3D brawler with boring, button-mashing combat and awful art direction. So of course it had massive "critical" and commercial success, no doubt due to the efforts of Sony’s marketing division.

A few years ago, a well-known company in the business of benchmark software decided to take things to the next level and move into game development.

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A series of first-person shooters that eschews the narrative, scripting and free-roaming advances introduced to the genre by such titles as Half-Life (1998), Medal of Honor (1999), Deus Ex (2000), Halo (2001), and the Call of Duty and Far Cry series, and carries on the tradition of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom of 100% pure, unadulterated, balls-to-the-wall in-your-face shooting action.

It was while "studying" for one of those fluff "interactive media" pseudo-degrees that universities are increasingly peddling to dumbass middle-class losers these days, that Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago met and conceived their masterful scam...

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.

Definition: Subgenre of the on-rails shooting genre in which the player fires his avatar's weapon by pointing at the screen an input device typically modeled on a ballistic weapon.

Definition: Subgenre of the turn-based tactics genre in which the player controls, among perhaps other units, several unique characters who persist and level throughout the game.

HFD says: Don't throw away games if you're losing.

Because dying is good.

Compiled by Alex "icycalm" Kierkegaard with help from the members of the Shoryuken forums community.

Compiled by Craig "BulletMagnet" Gabrielsen with help from the members of the Shmups forums community.

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