The Video Game Revue

Sites of Note

Yup, the ol' blog has been pretty slow this week. I haven't really been doing that much gaming either, although there was one glorious evening (Monday, I think) in which I played an hour of Digital Devil Saga, an hour of Disgaea, and two hours of Dragon Quest VIII. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. The rest of the week, I've been completely swamped with work and unable to do much of anything else, really.

So given the complete lack of new developments or left-over energy to come up with anything substatial to post about, I've decided that the easy way out is just to do up a quick post about what other sites out there on the net I use to keep up on gaming. Everyone knows about the usual Penny Arcade, IGN, GameSpot, and other biggies out there--so I'll stick to the more fringe ones. Mind you, this is kind of pointless: anybody who was able to find this blog could easily find these other sites. Bah.

The Escapist is an attempt at publishing a hardcore gaming mag in PDF form. It reminds me a little bit of the old Next Generation magazine, but more home-grown. (Nothing compares with the classic Next Gen, though; those guys broke stories about stuff like Net Yarouze and how the N64 was a sinking ship.)

RPGFan is a great site for news about RPG gaming, particularly for console RPGs. If The Escapist is like a loose web equivalent of the old Next Generation, then RPGFan is like a loose web equivalent of the old Diehard GameFan. Except that RPGFan only covers RPGs.

Joystiq is one of the larger newsfeed style gaming sites out there. They are notorious for lacking journalistic integrity (ie. posting lots of rumours and stuff from unreliable sources), but it's a fun site. Who doesn't like rumour mills?

Videogamey is another good place to pick up on misc gaming news bites.

Greg Costikyan's blog has legendary rants about the games industry and game design.

Lost Garden is an interesting collection of rants about game design.

Gaming Steve has a bit more of a personal soap box feel to it.

NetJak has a touch of the 32-bit old school.

Kid Fenris is an old school gamer/anime fan who only posts occasionally, unfortunately.

Games are Art! pretty much speaks for itself.

Anyway, that's just a handful. If you could get all of the writers from those sites together to collaborate on one super-duper game mag with all of the best content from each, then you'd have one awesome game mag, in my opinion. It depends on who wound up with editorial control over the whole enterprise, though.

posted by Parappa @ 10:17 AM