I'm sure you've all heard about the silliness going on about the N-control Avenger. That whole PR mess sucks for the people who make these things. At last PAX East, I got one to review. I'm sad to say it got tangled up in a larger article about assistive gaming technologies that has yet to get itself together. But with what has been sloshing around the larger internet, I thought maybe a few words about what the product actually is, and my reflections on it specifically might be helpful to some.

The Avenger is an add-on for your standard Xbox360 or PS3 controller (I assume it works with both the Sixaxis and the Dual-Shock 3 because of their similar chassis, but if that's a concern you might want to ask them before buying). It's designed to make it faster and easier for you to move between the buttons and triggers on the controller, with a support underneath to help you stabilize your grip. This is supposed to equate to better reaction time and performance in fast, reflex-based games like online FPS's.

I am not, nor will I ever be the kind of twitch gamer that their marketing seems to be aimed at. I honestly can't judge it on that basis. It did improve my game, but the biggest pluses for me had nothing to do with 'leetness. For those who have mobility problems with their hands, the N-control Avenger is something you may want to look into.

My first ever D&D session ended this past spring when the DM's campaign lost its focus and peoples' schedules began to conflict with our play time. My expat friends and I had used D&D as a way to pass the too-long winter here on Sado, and even though I had gotten bored of that particular campaign, I was still interested in giving PnP RPGs a little bit more time. But unlike our D&D DM, I didn't have the books and dice and extra stuff that seemed necessary to play D&D. What to do?

And how would this work out for an inexperienced tabletop player such as myself? I’d only just started playing D&D — I wasn’t really comfortable with its mechanics and pacing yet, and now I’m going to have to create a world, direct the action, and make decisions. My god, I'm totally going to screw this up!

As is so often the case, Gamers With Jobs came to the rescue. There was a podcast from the most recent Rabbitcon where a couple “smelly hippy” RPGs were discussed: Dread and Fiasco. Around the same time, I saw mention of a sci-fi based RPG called Diaspora. Upon checking out the Diaspora webpage, I was introduced to Hollowpoint. While Dread, Fiasco, and Diaspora sound awesome (especially Diaspora), Hollowpoint seemed a game that would be an easy first-step for an inexperienced P&P RPGer.

If there's any game that can be seen as a teacher of skills, it is Dark Souls. Built on the foundations of its predecessor, Demon's Souls, the game's central mechanic is death — specifically, the death of your avatar. And, more specifically, the death of your avatar every five minutes.

The key to deciphering Dark Souls' use of death is in what that death does and doesn't reset. The changes you make to the environment, such as unlocking a door, and the boss encounters, are fixed, one-time events. The only thing that resets each time are minions, and you. Yes, you. Right back to one of very few checkpoints you go.

This isn't because the game is designed to upset you, the paying customer. It's not because the game is too complex for those unused to "learning" levels to the degree a speed-runner knows the environs of Black Mesa. It's because the game wants you to generate a "perfect" narrative, an imagined contiguous chain of precise encounters broken up only by the inconvenience of becoming deceased. But this isn't for the hero's benefit — the hero, in Dark Souls is a shell. Here, you are the hero. You are the one who struggles towards the attainment of the perfect encounter.

My D&D group, now in its fourth year, is closing in on level 11. This campaign finds them at the Half League House, in our world a combination Prancing Pony and the roadhouse in From Dusk Till Dawn. The colorful retinue of Synergistic Enterprises LLC. includes a pyromaniac warlord, a Githyanki stat whore, and a particularly virile minotaur. In the past few encounters they’ve punched a pet pig, foiled an assassination attempt on a lesbian dwarf, and leapt down a well after a shapeshifter only to be attacked by a gelatinous scab. In December they’ll defend their impromptu stronghold from a siege by war trolls in a hex-based mini-game. Truth be told, I’m having more fun than I’ve ever had in D&D before. The reason is that after many years I’m truly beginning to trust my players.

After a dozen hours inside Skyrim’s town of Whiterun, I can see signs of Bethesda trusting me in much the same way. But do I trust them back?

When a video game publisher revives a derelict franchise and hands over the reins to a new crew to find out if there is any gas left in the tank, the usual result is a game inspired by its predecessor, but one that refuses to allow itself to be defined by the past. Sometimes the result is something spectacular, as in the case of Fallout 3, while other times the aftermath is best left forgotten in the sales bin, as recently happened with Dungeon Siege.

So, it would be no surprise to say that Deus Ex: Human Revolution is inspired by its roots with occasional nods to a now eleven-year-old game, but that it also rejects the inflexibility of the original game's purists and applies the lessons of more than a decade of video game advancement. That’s what you would normally expect, unless of course it were precisely those inflexible purists that were put in charge of the franchise. If that happened, what you might get is a game so obsessed with trying to be its predecessor that it never really becomes itself.

As it turns out, that’s exactly what Deus Ex: Human Revolution becomes; a rare reboot that desperately wants to fool you into believing you are playing its great grandfather.

Figures that Boston’s other annual gaming conference would be held in a building called NERD. Last Saturday morning, 150 programmers, designers, artists, testers, academics, and students gathered at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development center overlooking the Charles River for GameLoop Boston. Now in its fourth year, this “unconference” is masterminded by developers Darius Kazemi and Scott MacMillan. Fortunately, these gents were kind enough to let us lazy writers in too.

Here’s how GameLoop works. In the morning, everyone gathers in a big room, coffee in hand, and brainstorms topics for hour-long talks. Scribes hustle to record potential session titles as attendees throw out ideas: Embracing Failure In Game Narrative, Surviving As An Indie, Pitfalls In UI Design, Working With Execs Who Don’t Get Games. This year we voted for the sessions we most wanted to attend by placing stickers on their cards; the cards with the most stars made it to the Big Board. Whoever suggested each session is then charged with leading a roundtable discussion, although volunteer moderators were on hand this year to help keep things on track. At 6:00, after the last session, everyone gathers again in the briefing room to provide feedback on what could be improved for next year. Then we all go get beer.

Cambridge-based Goodjers Rob Zacny and J.P. Grant were on hand for GameLoop 2011. Here they share their conference takeaways on project management, mental health, and sex—with or without druids.

Atlus is one of the few companies that make games I always buy when they come out on the strength of their name alone. I trust their quality, and they're always thought provoking experiences. In a game-scape of sequels and re-treads, strangled with corporate shills looking only at the bottom line, they somehow thrive on doing things no other company would dare. But don't let the quirky cover fool you -- there's more to this game than the usual faux-anime fare.

All Atlus games have a signature style. Art, music, packaging, extras -- everything carries their imprimatur. Catherine is no exception. But when you start to play the game, you run out of boxes to check off and fall right down to the blank and bewildering half of the page.

What a delightfully weird game The Darkness is. There are so many strange things in it: friendly demons, full-length movies playing on the TV sets, first-person snuggling on a couch, a side-trip into a purgatory where WWI never ends and never will, and loading-screens where protagonist Jackie Estacado delivers monologues into the darkness, recalling happier times before he became a mob assassin.

I had always heard about The Darkness, mainly because you can watch the entirety of To Kill a Mockingbird while hanging out at your girlfriend's apartment. But after I played The Darkness II preview at PAX East (where I watched another writer shake his head slowly, with a faint smile on his lips, as one of the demonstrators pulled a mobster apart at the spine), I found myself wondering about what kind of world it took place in. Where, outside of a Tarantino film, do you find this kind of combination of staggering violence, sadism, and cruel humor?

I was unprepared for Starbreeze's original game. The action is still over-the-top, and one would never confuse The Darkness's world with our own. But for all the comic-book violence and excess, The Darkness presents more than a stage for power fantasies. Players inhabit Jackie Estacado's life, and see it as he sees it. He becomes real to us, and so does his world.

Scientists at New Mexico State University's nonprofit Chile Pepper Institute recently announced that they had successfully bred a brand new, medium spicy, extra large jalapeño, specially optimized for "increased cheese payload." -Nicola Twilley, Good.is

I've hit a wall. Where I used to lose myself in worlds of violence and peril for hours at a crack, I now tell more games that yes, I am sure I want to quit. The seamless experience of getting lost in a Dark Forces level, or of riding the river of action in Half-Life, rarely happens anymore. Most major games I play are comprised of shards of gameplay with jagged little edges that cut through the fabric of the fiction and give me a glimpse of something hollow at the core. Maybe it's me, discontented after twenty years of gaming and unable to take the same joy in its simplicity. Maybe it's the games themselves, increasingly delivering everything in bite-sized chunks: five-to-ten minutes of combat, followed by another ten minutes of semi-automatic platforming, and that followed by two or three minutes of talking or a cutscene.

Followed by my swift departure.

Lebanon tells the story of an Israeli tank crew on the first day of the 1982 invasion. The entire film takes place inside the tank, and our only glimpses of the outside world come through the gunner's optics. It's an interesting experiment in perspective, but one that is ultimately undone by the narrative requirements of a feature film and director Samuel Maoz's reluctance to fully embrace the confined perspective he adopts. Watching Lebanon, I could not help but think how much more natural this story would have seemed in a game. This is, after all, how games tell their most successful stories.

At its best, Lebanon is a film about trying to see. On the night before the invasion, the gunner is staring through a starlight scope at a dirt lane through a cornfield. Suddenly a ghostly figure detaches itself from the smudged sky. A few quick, agonizing seconds pass before the figure emerges from the night-vision's murk to reveal itself as an Israeli paratrooper. The next night, the gunner tries to follow a some Phalangist militia out of an ambush using the same murky night vision. The Phalangists' Mercedes swims in and out of view as the tank labors to keep up, and the entire world seems to narrow to the cross-hairs and the car's lone working tail-light. The best moment in the movie comes when a helicopter hovers overhead to recover a casualty from aboard the tank. Suddenly the interior's gloom is pierced by blades of stark white light stabbing through the open hatch. The rotor wash leaves the crew looking like they are lost in a cyclone as they watch the dead Israeli soldier ascend.