Jim Guthrie has composed incredible soundtracks for the iOS classic Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP and documentary Indie Game: The Movie. For One of These Days I’ll Get It Right, Guthrie teamed up with producer Solid Mas to release a throwback hip-hop remix record of his work from both soundtracks. It is chock-full of themed movie quotes, turn-table scratches, and an insidious vibe. The most notable record in recent history I can compare it to is RJD2’s Deadringer.

One of These Days I’ll Get It Right is a brilliant album that is much more than just a collection of simple remixes. Like LEGOs, Guthrie and Solid Mas have torn down completed sets and reimagined them as something wholly original. A worthy purchase if you are a fan of Guthrie, hip-hop, film, or a sound from yesteryear.

iTunes | Bandcamp

Kinda Funny Games Patreon:

In September, you changed our lives. We launched a Patreon for Kinda Funny, and your response was beyond (BEYOND!) our wildest expectations. The support, the Tweets, the shares — it all showed that we really had built the community of best friends we’re always talking about. And, once we knew that, all we wanted to do was make more content for you.

Enter Kinda Funny Games. Now that we don’t work for IGN, we can talk about the stuff you’ve always wanted us to talk about on YouTube — games.

I was initially taken aback by this news. Four iconic personalities leaving IGN?! There must be bad blood. I was wrong. After 3+ decades of experience at one of the leading video game publications, backed by 1755 patrons at the time of this publication, and a deep desire to speak their mind at any given time, these guys are braving the unknown and entering into an excited new era of media.

I thoroughly enjoyed Keza MacDonald of Kotaku UK’s (ex-IGN) thoughts on the news:

What all this proves is a) god dammit, journalists and media personalities ARE worth money, and b) you can be funded by 5% of your audience

— Keza MacDonald (@kezamacdonald) January 5, 2015

This reminded me of some thoughts I posted in June 2014, derived from Griffin McElroy’s interview with The Indoor Kids:

Baseball diehards can tell you the subtleties in team dynamics. There can be diversity under the same umbrella. Many more sites need to embrace the privilege of instant and educated opinion. If the games community cannot foster intelligent conversation on its own, someone must lead the way.

As an employee of a large tech firm, I deeply understand the desire to freely speak about the industry you are a part of and the prohibitions instated. The benefit Kinda Funny Games has over other would-be media personalities is an established fanbase; however, that makes it no easier to cast aside benefits, workplace friendships, and security.

While I can’t say I am a fan of their humor, I do enjoy their critique of video games. Godspeed, Miller, Moriarty, Scarpino, and Gettys.

Teddy Wayne, The New York Times:

Pre-Internet, we accepted that media had a mayfly’s life span: Yesterday’s news was yesterday’s news, and that was it. If you were the creator of it, you made peace with the notion that people either saw it or didn’t when it appeared, and you moved on; there was no alternative.

If it lingered in the public consciousness, it was because of its durability, not repeated reminders. Content had finite endings and deaths, not asymptotic approaches and long-term vegetative states from which resuscitation is always an option.

Consumers had to make similar bargains: If you went out on a Thursday night during the 1990s, you missed NBC’s “Must See TV” schedule (unless you taped it) and understood that it would be a while before you could see it again. (It helped, too, that there was less media competition in previous decades and, in the case of TV, that dramatic series were generally less complex, so that missing an episode of “Dynasty” might not set you back as far as skipping one of “Breaking Bad.”)

Now, with just about every airing of a much greater number of shows obtainable at any moment, there is no excuse for missing one — and, therefore, a more urgent compulsion to catch up, in case you missed it.

I’ve linked to Ken Levine’s piece on Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor before, but now that I’ve begun to play the game, an observation struck me.

Levine’s piece revolves around choice in video games, explaining the genesis of the “Would you kindly” moment:

When it comes to story in video games, at best there’s an illusion of choice. At worst, there’s no choice at all. In our work, we tried to say, Well, pal, you really don’t have a choice. So let’s see if we can use that concept to mess with your head. And hence was born the “Would you kindly” moment in BioShock, a moment in video game history primarily remembered for reminding us that, when it comes to player choice in narrative, our medium is limited indeed.

This moment is an iconic take on agency in video games. When playing through Bioshock: Infinite, I took to sniffing out additional commentary on the medium: Does “Booker DeWitt” really mean “Booker, do it,” a nod to “Would you kindly?” Are infinite paths a commentary on respawning? I enjoy the idea of playing with a medium’s limitations rather than ignoring them. SHARP’s Quattron qual pixel technology was a gimmick, but I thoroughly enjoyed the marketing campaign.

In the case of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, the protagonist, Talion, is merged with the wraith of Elf Lord Celebrimbor, imbuing Talion with immortality. When killed, Talion respawns and the of Orc rankings are stirred, starting with the Orc who slain Talion last. This justifies respawning and retains a consequence for death.

Video games are inherently fantastic. Meta-rules to mask limitations are not necessary, but with increasingly realistic worlds, they certainly make the experience feel tighter.

Naughty Dog better have a good explanation for Nathan Drake’s resistance to bullets.

A very interesting read from Richard Leadbetter at Eurogamer:

Up until recently, both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 have reserved two entire CPU cores (out of eight available) in order to run the background operating system in parallel with games. Since October, Microsoft has allowed developers access to 50 to 80 per cent of a seventh processing core - which may partly explain why a small amount of multi-platform titles released during Q4 2014 may have possessed performance advantages over their PS4 counterparts in certain scenarios.

However, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and the additional CPU power comes with conditions and trades attached - however, there is the potential for many games to benefit. Firstly, developers need to give up custom, game-specific voice commands in order to access the seventh core at all, while Kinect’s infra-red and depth functionality is also disabled. Secondly, the amount of CPU time available to developers varies at any given moment - system-related voice commands (“Xbox record that”, “Xbox go to friends”) automatically see CPU usage for the seventh core rise to 50 per cent. At the moment, the operating system does not inform the developer how much CPU time is available, so scheduling tasks will be troublesome. This is quite important - voice commands during gameplay will be few and far between, meaning that 80 per cent of the core should be available most of the time. However, right now, developers won’t know if and when that allocation will drop. It’s a limitation recognised in the documentation, with Microsoft set to address that in a future SDK update.

The concessions Microsoft has been making to the Xbox One (revised DRM model, “dis-Kinect”, price-drop, bundles, and now opening the seventh processing core) are admirable, and considering the recent spike in sales, certainly make for an interesting future for the console war. However, these are just that — concessions. Sony has continued to stay the course with compelling hardware and a simple story. Not to mention this is another hit against Kinect and the original vision of Xbox One.