My latest GSW article is up right here. It’s the second part in a soon-to-be three part series of articles on sexuality in games, but specifically in the not-so-new Prince of Persia and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. This one serves as a bridge between the first and third articles (oddly enough) and focuses more generally on sex in games. For a lot of you readers, it may seem kind of unambitious and obvious, but it felt like it belonged in this series, so that’s that. Here is an excerpt from the article, as always, to entice those not already convinced of the article’s excellence by its Aladdin-based moniker. Enjoy:

Video game designers, PR companies, and gamers are deeply worried about sex.

Now hear me out: the average “mainstream” game is both obsessed with a peculiarly fragmented (but extremely popular in mainstream culture) version of hypersexuality, and deathly afraid of more realistic, meaningful sexual connection. There’s a reason our games are filled with snarling, emotionless (aside from their totally straight love for their buddies) bros and women being crushed under the weight of their hypersexualized characterization.

People are very worried about sex. The worry may vary in its shape, orientation, and direction, but it is still something that makes a lot of people very nervous. They’re very worried about thinking about sex. They’re worried that thinking about sex, or consuming certain representations of sex will show them to be any of a number of deviant, unpopular, stigmatized representations of sexuality (or worse, to be party to those sexualities themselves).

Video games culture (at its most “hardcore”) is, after all, already a shunned, de-masculinized (in the public eye) subset of white guy culture. White men who are dorks or gamers have struggled to build up some new brand of masculinity (which will never be as good, white, and manly as proper mainstream masculinity, and white guy geeks know this) around their deplored hobby, and, as always, once they solidified that identity, they needed a new Other, a new group to define as being less than and harmful to the grand, old tradition of white male gaming. In the kingdom of the white gamer, anyone obviously not white and/or male, or anyone professing to enjoy sexuality not strictly in line with white heterosexuality is both a worry and a threat.

Already I see things I wish I’d written differently or changed (for instance, “anyone professing to enjoy sexuality” should be “anyone professing to enjoy or regularly partake in,” or anyone who is suspected of enjoying and partaking in,” obviously), so forgive me if it fails in places. I am ever endeavoring to mend my ways. Until the next post.

I recently (this morning, that is) relocated (temporarily) to Santa Barbara. I’m here for 3 weeks to get as much (or as little) work done as possible. To help me out, SB had a crappy little rainstorm that made New Haven look welcoming by comparison. Excellent. As we speak, Left 4 Dead 2 is downloading to my MBP (an older version, which will, I suspect, necessitate super-low graphical settings. Sigh) at the blistering speed of 200 k/s. That might not sound that fast to you lot (especially anybody reading this from another country, where they don’t have draconian rules about bandwidth and how much you can draw down, grumble, grumble, grumble), but for a person struggling under the heel of perpetually erratic, 150 k/s if you’re lucky AT&T “service,” this shit is a godsend.

But I’m here to talk about Travel. I’d forgotten that many of the simple, amazing experiences in life can only be had when traveling. You forget about these little joys until a bout of travel inextricably pounds them back into your memory. This particular journey was especially memorable. So, in absolutely no discernible order, the great things about catching a 6:30 am flight from JFK to LAX (and connecting from there to SB):

The New York Subway System hating my face. Trying to catch the 1 downtown, after one stop (we only needed one more to switch over!) the guy comes on the PA and says due to obstructions, we are taking the express route and going all the way to Staten Island or some shit. Then we get off, and have to change trains 3 more times just to get back to the C (I think), just so we can get up to the E. Win! This is why I did not sleep, but instead spent the hours between 1230 and 330 AM fighting off my friend’s amorous cat while writing a King Arthur: The Role Playing Wargame (actually quite good) review. This is why I leave 3 hellish hours before my flight is supposed to leave. It’s all for you, MTA.

Horrible Red-faced Middle Aged White Business Guys. You know that new movie with George Clooney where he plays a charming, hi-larious racist consultant? If any of the business guys I have to travel with (every time I fly) were like him, the world would be slightly less bad. He would be a major improvement. He is (supposedly) funny. He does not breath heavily into your face, in some strange attempt to get you to load your backpack into the tiny overhead compartment faster. He does not, as they do, clip all 10 of his hilarious cell phone holsters to the seatback pocket, in case someone sends him an impossible fucking phone call. He does not, I would hope, fume and mutter, as his much luckier companions go ahead of him, thanks to their First-Class, Executive, Emperor, Platinum, or (of course) Latinum level flier status. [On a side note, I love the Emperor Class fliers. They take it to the limit every time, rushing to get to the spots they have already paid for, negating the need for the rush. Never change, Imperators]. It’s funny, because if his company were bigger, or he was a better salesguy (or refrigerator negotiator, or dog food research litigator, or whatever), he would be in the Admiral’s Club! Oh, the humanity.

United Airlines, for being just plain awesome. I love that, after mysteriously delaying my first flight, they send me a phone message (which I cannot receive until after I land!) informing me that, thanks to their delay, I will miss my connection, and they have moved me to a flight that takes off 9 hours later. So when I arrive (1 minute after my flight is supposed to have left), I receive their “Rapid Flight Change Update Notification Message” (no fucking kidding) about the flight they just made me miss (except Owen and I sprinted for the plain and caught it, because we rock). I love you guys. Keep on filling your flights with the smell of desiccated, rotting alien flesh, an I’ll keep on flying with you (also, keep on selling “sandwich packs” that can kill with a look, for only $9)!

So I’ve been remiss in my Editorial duties. Forgive me, Internet, and people who work at my site. If you will.

So the place where I edit, Sleeper Hit, is having a Child’s Play Charity and Collection (here’s a link to the charity). You can donate money or games (or gaming accessories! Think how important new Guitar Hero guitars are… Right?), and you can do it here, at this link. I’ll let Ron and Melinda (the people behind our small branch of collections for this charity) explain what’s going on:

If you’ve not heard of Child’s Play, visit their site first. Then to see the effects of the charity,check this article out on Kotaku.

It’s not just gamers that can make a difference, it’s everyone. These kids didn’t ask to be sick and likely many are young enough to not really have gotten to experience life to the fullest. So giving them the gift of fun times seems like the smallest thing we can do. That being said, if helping sick kids wasn’t enough of a reason, we’re also trying to reward the generosity with some cool prizes.

So please, check out the Prize page to see the cool things you can win. Then head to the Donate page to send some money to a good charity and possibly win some cool stuff.

So there you have it. Donate some stuff. Cool stuff! Secret stuff. Donate it by going here! It’s a cool charity that gives to kids in crappy hospital-based situations who need a little help to make their situations less crappy. But if you have time/money/inclination please head over there and check it out. We’ll resume our regular broadcasting soon. Until then.

A lot of things to go over. So:

There’s a new Prince of Persia game coming in May 2010 (link).  It is not a sequel to PoP 2008. It is a continuation of the Sands of Time franchise. Let me just go make myself a stiff drink, and then we can discuss this. Right. I do not dislike Sands of Time. I kind of like Two Thrones. But I am not sure what they hope to accomplish by going back to this world. They are going to need to hire some great writers (and fire everyone who want s to make the combat include more combos and weapons) to bring this series back (sans the stink of WW). They might be able to pull it off. What gets me about all of this is that this announcement is tantamount to Ubisoft saying “so that PoP 2008… That was a mistake. We’ll be going back to our regular programming.”

Maybe this isn’t the case. Maybe the next game in Elika’s series will come out in a few years. Maybe they are preparing for a potentially unsuccessful 2008 sequel by releasing a (supposedly) surefire SoT continuation. But it looks like Ubisoft wasn’t as confidant in their new series as they said they were. I wish they’d stick with it (the way they did, to great success and acclaim, with Assassin’s Creed 2), and make a second game however they pleased. Screw us critics. Of course, AC 1 may have been a critical meh, but it also sold 1 million+ copies. I don’t think PoP 2008 did quite that well. So I will wait, and mumble under my breath about kid these days, and their difficulty.

After the break, what I’ve been playing and why I like it, oddly enough.

Right now I am reviewing about a million games, and playing a few for fun. Amazingly, those two categories even cross over (more than once!). Most importantly, AC1 and Dragon Age remain unfinished. I’ve no idea when I will return to them. Left 4 Dead 2 has an incredibly strong hold over me, as does Divinity 2: Ego Draconis. You all know what Left 4 Dead 2 is. It’s better than the first game, I’ve convinced my brother to play it, and Scavenge really is an amazing game mode. I think the why and how of this game’s excellency deserve a full post, so I’ll try to get working on that. Divinity 2 is the third title in the Divine Divinity (by Larian studios) trilogy. The first game was a mix between a complicated RPG (like Arcanum or BG 2) and Diablo. It was the kind of game where you could carry hay with you and make a bed out of it to sleep. I loved it, but it broke my computer in many, many ways. The new game is much different from its predecessors. It’s a 3rd person action RPG like console Dragon Age and Risen, but it retains Divine Divinity’s sense of peculiarity and obscurity. It’s the kind of game where you discover quests (and finish them) by accident. There aren’t landmarks everywhere. You discover important, crucial items and places by accident, because the game has no interest in helping you out.

Eventually you can turn into a dragon and fly around. I am not at that point yet, sadly. Now that I think about it, the game is exactly what Drakan should have been but never was: fun, fast, and possessed with an amazing sense of scale. The RPG elements work well with the game’s vast levels (the Broken Valley alone is humongous), and the absurdly entertaining (verging into soft rock territory) soundtrack works perfectly with each area and situation. The voice work is alright, considering this is a European port, and the world itself is beautiful and exciting to explore. I’ve played it for 10-15 hours (working on my Popmatters review), and so far I only have one complaint: the game is awfully optimized. Looking in the wrong direction (toward an open part of the map) causes hideous slowdowns, and the game’s framerate goes from smooth to slide show in seconds, for no apparent reason. It is still a beautiful game, but to enjoy it, you really have to prepare yourself for some strange, annoying issues.

There’s more. King Arthur (the Secret Strategy Game), among other games, nibble away at my time. Still, today has to be a work day. Difficult, I know.

I am still a bit embarrassed about that title. Oh well, I’m sure it pleases a small subsection of my audience.

So there is a new Game Set Watch article up (by me!). It’s about the new Prince of Persia, sexualization in games (but especially Prince of Persia), and it is the lead-in for two more articles, that will follow shortly in its wake. I do hope you will be entertained, at least, while reading it. Here, for you reading pleasure, is a bit from the article:

But that’s just the beginning of it, as shown in the above quote. People really don’t like the Prince because he’s a dude. Now, I don’t mean like The Dude. I don’t mean like Dude Where’s My Car. I mean he’s the kind of guy who (when he isn’t philosophizing with a princess or being chased by evil gods) wants nothing more than money, drink, and companionship of his preferred sex.

And this pisses off a lot of people. It doesn’t piss them off because the hero is a heteronormative jerk who spends the first few hours of the game mocking someone who saves his life at regular intervals. Likewise, no one speaks out about the game’s simplistically written, stereotypically plotted Concubine, a woman scorned, of course, who takes her revenge in the throatiest voice possible. Is this what a powerful woman in a game is, especially when compared to the far from reprehensible Elika?**

This last should not be taken as a statement that the Prince is not an attractive (potentially) character to some players. In fact, to simply say that the Prince is an ass, therefore he is not worthy of the story/Elika/our time is reductive and misleading. It may be a common, annoying trope that the asshole is really a Nice Guy (and stems from a problematic assumption about male relationships with perspective female partners), but that, again, is not what people find alarming.

So Tom and I were having an email exchange about the now-infamous (by design, of course) “No Russian” level from MW2.  I thought about writing a blog entry about it, but

a) I’m too lazy

c) I will never actually play this game, unless Tom buys  it and the whim strikes me, and it somehow seems wrong to devote, you know, a whole real blog post to something I don’t even care enough about to play

b) My thoughts are off the cuff and probably wrong, so why formalize them?

In light of all that, I figured I’d just post my semi-articulated thoughts as they appeared in our email argument.  I still think I’m right, basically, but am obviously an impoversihed debater about this for reasons b), c). The conversation commences after the break:

Quoth Tom:  “Alright fucker, here’s what I think, essentially: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/11/19/wot-i-think-about-that-level/

I agree with you that as an exercise in confronting the player with linearity, false choice, and the structured nature of a game narrative, the scene has some merit (although way less than Bioshock – which you won’t play because you are a snob – which did this much better). Other than that, it’s dumb people being dumb.”

Quoth me:  “I read that… I agree that it’s obviously a “tonal shift” from the action-adventure silliness that’s preceded it, and to that extent the game doesn’t quite “earn” its moment of cultural relevance, although “earn” is probably the wrong language.

I will say that it seems very silly and video-game nerd to critique at length how a terrorist attack would “really” look, as in, duh, everyone knows that cops would never attack you like that!  I think this guy misses what everyone who makes a big deal about it is picking up on–that it’s not just a portrayal of a morally dicey situation, or not even a “realistic” one necessarily, but one that models a kind of terrorist violence that’s aboslutely central to the cultural discourse right now, in a viscerally believable enough way to strike people as a) convincing in the moment if nothing else and b) alarming because it packages that sort of undeniably distressing cultural payload in the context of supposedly interactive game controls.  Much in the way that geeks like to put irrelevant “more gamer-ish than thou” details into their video game reviews (this game wasn’t hard enough!), I think that attacking the scene for being intragenericcally inappropriate (in terms of the levels that came before and come after) or somehow slightly deficient at the level of craft is to miss the “reading experience” that the level is intended to and probably does produce for most gamers–even those who think of themselves as too savvy to be affected by a gameplay experience that’s somehow less than 100% perfect.  It makes gameplay shocking, and I think that’s a) inescapable and b) worth something in its own right.”

He:  “I don’t like something about your argument, but I’m not sure what it is. I just don’t think that it makes that much of a difference. I don’t care that it’s culturally relevant, or whether it elicits a response: how do you know it makes gameplay “shocking” you know it has shocked other people. I don’t like thinking that way. Other people are often dumb. Just like Bioshock, I’ll need to play this before I believe/care.

It seems like what you are saying is that you (by some metric) value this scene more than the similar (in its themes of player agency/lack thereof) scene in Bioshock, because this scene depicts something that a bunch of “aware” people are very worried about right now. Bioshock’s scene was about free will/ how games trick you into believing in player choice, and this MW2 scene is about that in a more oblique way. I just don’t think you should be valuing it as you are. What do you mean that what it does is “inescapable?” do you mean that we can’t ignore that it has made gameplay shocking? I guess I think that Bioshock did this (shocked you by confronting you with the artificiality and lies behind the game experience) without being dumb and falsely “intelligent.” According to some interview, the MW2 writer thinks that Hollywood should be taking notes from him, because of how he mixes “relevancy” and “meaning.” I think he should be shot for being a moron.”

Me:  “a) Yes, it’s easy in one way to be a provocateur, and it’s also relatively easy to be proficiently provocative without having a particularly good or interesting theory of what it means to be provocative or why.

b) It may not be good qua game, but I’m prepared to say at least that it’s relevant and new–>thus interesting, as art.  What other game has made the experience of video game killing seem morally troubling, not just in the “you have come to care about these characters” kind of way, but by taking the spectacle of fantasy violence and making it seem real again?  Or at least remind us of real violence?

Taking video games and hooking them back into thoughts about real life, rather than an endless genre hall of mirrors where every game is the bastard child of three or four forms of pop culture, is very hard.  And I think one of the reasons people don’t get or particularly like video games outside of the sizable mainstream that plays them.

You should hear academics talk about them–many, for instance, can’t get over the fact that video games seem very obviously to play out fantasies of endless warfare, which on the one hand is true but on the other misses a whole series of points about the way that the thematic material of the medium has evolved to fit the ludic constraints–how to build representation onto a game mechanic.  Gamers get that this stuff is very far abstracted from real violence–i.e., counterstrike is about your l33t awp skillz and not about global conflict, but people used to other kinds of representational art don’t, and one of the problems that games have is that they haven’t yet found a good way of applying the special technical qualities of their structure to real human experience, in the way the, for instance, novels very obviously have.  Games don’t have anything more than their wallpaper to do with reality–their interest and innovation is largely in the gameplay itself–but outsiders can’t see that, and just see really bad thematic stuff, really childish stuff that’s actually just an epiphenomenon of what’s really interesting.

So even if it’s really “cheap,” a quick connection of a game experience to reality in a way that’s a little more serious than most can only be a good thing–it connects real gamers’ experience of the techniques of gaming directly to a represented world (or at least, contemporary media environment), and it shows non-gamers that video games can make kinds of reference to serious contemporary events that, while they might be exploitative, have a special weight & heft that comes just from their being video games.  So, no I don’t really have a problem with the fact that the guys at infinity ward are pretty obviously douches.”

[End Email Argument]

That last point about the areferentiality of games is probably wrong, but I’d stick to it in a milder form.  I think that many of the claims made by old-school lit critics (like James Wood) about the referentiality of forms like the novel are far too strong, on the other end of things, so I’m not quite sure what it is that I’m envisioning as a neo-realistic renaissance for video games, if “realism” has been more or less a critical term of false consciousness all along… I understand that Simon F writes about newsgames and could probably school me about all of this stuff anyway.

One more thought:  I think that one of my actual insights (as opposed to inaccuracies) is the observation about games and genre fiction.  The thematic/representational frame of most games comes from a sliver of the pop culture universe, and people are scared to leave it.  Maybe, for instance, that’s an explanation for Ubisoft’s packaging of a pretty thematically daring setting (in some ways) in two successive games (AC 1 and 2) in a drier-than-hell pseudo-scifi thematic “wrapper.”

That asshole isn’t pulling his weight around here, I think you’ll all agree. He and I are having an argument about No Russian, and I think he has a point that most people in the games press, in their peculiarly insular fashion, are completely ignoring. So maybe if you all say “I do believe in faeries,” he’ll poke his head out and write it. I will of course, continue my electronic harassment of him. How many kitten videos can I send him in 5 minutes?

It’s time for another round of “Tom pointlessly makes snide comments about reviews.” Because it’s a Tuesday, and it isn’t even 3:00 yet. Let’s get this party started.

1up has its Assassin’s Creed 2 review up [link]. I’ll let this bad boy speak for itself:

As for the limitations of the control interface? Ubisoft’s workaround was to create a game that’s almost preposterously easy. Constant in-game text prompts guide your actions from start to finish, generously placed checkpoints soften the blow of screwups, and Ezio can build up his health and healing items to the point where the prospect of losing in combat is unthinkable. It’s definitely the right approach, since failure in AC2 so often seems in no real correlation to player error, but it makes for a game you play to have a bit of carefree escapism rather than a challenge. The tricky Assassin’s Tomb platforming missions are a welcome change of pace, albeit few in number.

Those Ubisoft cats are making games that are too easy again! They have the temerity to include “generously placed checkpoints to soften the blow of screwups.” The author then does an about-face, saying that this is the “right” approach, “but it makes for a game you play to have a bit of carefree escapism rather than a challenge.”

Hmm. Let’s get this out of the way quickly: using checkpoints to punish players is the stupidest thing I can think of to use as a game mechanic. Maybe quicksaves “ruin the moment” or something. Maybe they make players feel too safe or confidant. Guess what developers? I would rather that, than lose minutes and minutes of careful play to an errant sword slash or badly timed jump. I would rather lose some of your vaunted “atmosphere” and “challenge” so that I can play a game free from the threat of sudden and vicious reprisal. If you make me replay a whole chunk of your damn game because I died/didn’t protect the hostage/you didn’t explain your game well enough, you are not “implementing good game design” or something to that effect. You have ill-prepared me for your game, and have decided to (as punishment, plain and simple, punishment designed to “challenge” me) reward my time and effort spent in your world with a slap in the face and the destruction of my progress.

When you take time I have invested and make it meaningless, it pisses me off. Games that are designed around intense, comprehensible difficulty and complicated, well-explained systems can make this kind of punishment part of their aesthetic, part of their feel. Weirdly, it feels right to die and start over weaker in Demon’s Souls, Left 4 Dead, or even in some of the more traditional Survival Horror games. These are games about death and fear. In a game like Uncharted, or Assassin’s Creed, or Red Faction Guerilla, it does no such thing. These games are not about instant, cruel death and a punishing world. They are about adventure, and fun, and outrageous feats of daring-do. They cease to be about these things when I am forced to replay 20 grueling minutes of tricky combat after A) I’m accidentally run over by my Rebel allies, or B) the camera gets stuck in a wall, or C) the game doesn’t inform me that I’m supposed to shoot the tiny silver supports holding the log piles together. Then, these excellent, fantastic (and fantastical) games become exercises in repetition and boredom. Dying and retrying do not equal “challenge,” or a “learning experience,” unless there are actually things being taught and learned. Death (and the deletion of progress) can be a worthwhile mechanic, but only in skilled hands, and only in worlds where such mechanics make sense.

So let me say this: when I’m playing a game that is essentially Grand Theft Italian Renaissance, and I am playing a guy stuck in a genetic time machine who is himself playing an Italian Noble Bad Boy Assassin Who Can Free Run Like Sebastien Foucan, I feel like the “carefree escapism” zone has already been fucking entered. Turn back, all ye who want “realistic” checkpoints.

I think this would be a good time to commend the games that take an admirable approach to death and the ways they deal with player “failure.” First off, I don’t think this is a bad time at all to link to Steve Gaynor’s “Play” article [link]. Game’s that take away from my pleasurable experience by punishing me are pretty bad at aiding me in my Play. Just a little thought.

Back to what I was saying. Far Cry 2, Prince of Persia, and Torchlight all take fun, interesting approaches to death. Torchlight, in a move that goes against years of Action RPG Loot Collecting tradition, gives you three options for respawn after death. You can respawn in camp for no penalty whatsoever, you can respawn at the beginning of the level for a small XP and money fee, or you can respawn instantly on the spot for a larger sum. While I don’t like dying in these kinds of games (I hate, hate, hate corps runs), I love that they let me pick from a variety of options. So that’s another point for the friendly, excellent Runic games. Good for them.

Prince of Persia (every time I mention that game on this blog, I resist the urge to cackle, as I inflict my love for it upon you, yet again!) features what is essentially a glorified, extremely forgiving checkpoint system. When you die during acrobatics, you return to the last solid platform your feet touched. Even at the game’s later, harder sections, this only results in a loss of a minute, maybe two, of play. I approve. While I feel like this approach is strengthened by its increasing integration with the game’s central plot and relationship, I won’t praise it too much. It is “just” a good quicksave feature that you can’t control.

Finally, we come Far Cry 2. In keeping with the game’s blend of gritty seriousness and peculiar, morally repugnant cast, your buddies will save you after you die, pulling you to safety and reviving you. I feel like this is a great mix of the Torchlight and Prince of Persia mechanics. It plops you right back in the action (which should always be what a game does, if possible), and it does it by reinforcing your connection to your buddies, and to the world around you. You start to respect those countless goons a lot more when they kill you and/or your buddy. And they don’t even make you replay the last battle… You can just keep on fighting! How terribly novel. It lets you forgive your buddies for talking like Mercenary versions of the Gilmore Girls.

Let’s finish this up with a snide, parting shot. It’s been that kind of day: if you want “preposterous,” 1up, try this one on for size: Assassin’s Creed 2 is the least preposterous open-world game I have yet to play, and it is precisely because, unlike GTA IV, Red Faction: Guerilla, Infamous, and the original Assassin’s Creed, it lets me play without much hindrance, and it doesn’t punish me for deciding to play that game in a less than Perfect Fashion. It is absolutely “preposterous” that this is the first game of this kind that has allowed me such unhindered, flowing, worry-free experiences. It’s just as preposterous that a company that encourages such fun, non-frustrating play is resoundingly censured for such design decisions.

[Forthcoming: a post on the press' discussion just how "brave" this second AC is]

Oh, Geralt. You and your ponytail. Killing Krakens. What will you get up to next [Youtube link]? Maybe you’ll get rid of those childishly stupid “collection” cards with pictures of kind of naked women with whom you have had sex? For me? It doesn’t seem like too much to ask. The above video is apparently a leaked one, although now CD Projekt is moving to turn this “mistake” into a good thing. I’m sure that I’m ignorant when it comes to these kinds of things, but is this really that hard to spin this well? Let me try: our game, which isn’t coming out for a year, looks fucking amazing. Despite the fact that a diagonally slanted camera phone was used to leak this video, the village, people, and environments (especially that grassy field) all look quite beautiful. Also, Geralt, the easiest Witcher in all the land, fights a giant Earth Kraken, drops a giant building on its many-tentacled head, and then kills it in an awesome little sequence. The end.

See? Great press.

I have added a load of new articles to the Articles section of the blog (how proper of me), most of which are reviews for Sleeper Hit, where I edit and write. Some are good, some aren’t If you’re looking (still) for reviews of Borderlands, Tropico 3, or other exciting titles, you might want to check the reviews out. My oft-delayed Prince of Persia/Among Thieves/Sexualization article will be appearing (heavily edited) in three parts on Game Set Watch, soon. Rest assured, I will let you know, in a self-deprecating way, when the first one goes up. The first article will be about PoP and sexualization (a word that WordPress flatly refuses to learn). Prepare to be excited.

Also, the Eurogamer Assassin’s Creed 2 article is up at this link. It says what most people have said: nice open-world game, better than first, etc. It also manages to get in some digs at PoP. Is there a document posted on the board at Eurogamer HQ that necessitates at least one mocking PoP comment per article? Bah.