GSQ IV: Galactic pesticide

09 September 10 | 22:30 | Posted by:

Space Empires IV
I'm sorry to admit that I have very little stamina when it comes to extremely involved simulation games. Nevertheless, I'm endlessly fascinated by their intricacy and scope, so I find experiential pieces about the genre absolutely captivating. That means that this article -- yes, this one right here! -- is pretty much the most satisfying way I could ever possibly experience Space Empires IV.

category: gamespite | forums | one comment | §

GSQ4: Rail Love

07 September 10 | 10:24 | Posted by:

Panzer Dragoon: Rail Love
I haven't really played a lot of Panzer Dragoon games in my life -- mostly Saga, and only a little bit of that -- and based on this impassioned retrospective by Wesley Fenlon on the series' final (or at least most recent... but, yeah, probably final) entry, Orta, I feel like I've sadly missed out. I feel a powerful urge to call a mulligan on life after this one.

category: gamespite | forums | 17 comments | §

GSQ4: Tiny terrors

06 September 10 | 09:56 | Posted by:

Monster in My Pocket
This week is a perfect time to work my way through the backlog of older Quarterly content that remains to be posted before moving on with our "NES history" book. Today we have Monster in My Pocket, a game that hovered at the periphery of my awareness for years and confused the heck out of me when I started hearing about this crazy phenomenon called "Pocket Monsters" back in the mid '90s.

category: gamespite | forums | seven comments | §

A final, quick reminder

31 August 10 | 09:54 | Posted by:

Here is my final act of pimpage for GameSpite Quarterly 5. Today is the last day that Blurb is offering free shipping on books (coupon code SHIPPINGFREE), so if you were considering picking up a copy now would be the time to do it. Going by their typical patterns, it'll be a couple of months before they have another offer like this.

Of course, if you weren't planning to pick up a copy, that's totally fine and we won't take it personally. Money is a scarce resource these days. The book's contents will make their way online soon enough, because information wants to be free... and opinion is worth even less than that.

category: gamespite | forums | eleven comments | §

Something happened on the way to heaven

28 August 10 | 18:20 | Posted by:

Hey folks, just a quick bit of janitorial work regarding GameSpite Quarterly 5. Unfortunately, it looks like there's a pretty noticeable goof on page 70: The text is skewed 12 degrees clockwise. All of the text. You can see what it's supposed to look like here, but the actual printed version doesn't look quite right. What with the text being skewed 12 degrees and all.

The really infuriating is that it wasn't this way in the proof version -- this is a problem that crept in during the corrections process. For some really annoying reason, Adobe InDesign doesn't play nicely with MacBook trackpads. As I laid out this issue, I was constantly correcting objects that suddenly rotated themselves for no good reason. The problem is that Apple trackpads have been tweaked to work like iPhone/iPad interfaces, offering the same drag, pinch, and twist gesture commands as their mobile touch devices. Unfortunately, in my experience, those gestures are horrible in an indirect touch context -- the only place the rotating motion ever actually seems to work is with layout objects in InDesign, and only when I'm not trying to make use of it. When I try to rotate things with the trackpad, nothing happens. When I'm simply trying to scroll the screen to the next page, though, half the time my swiping motion is mistaken for a twist.

Evidently that's what happened in my final rounds of proofing, and somehow I failed to notice it when I scanned over the final PDF, probably because page 70 is the single least interesting page layout in the entire book. I don't think this is a crisis worth of a refund, and also I'd like to be able to pay my rent next month, but I would like to offer an apology for this error. I'm really meticulous about proofing and feel terrible that this slipped past my notice. The page will be reprinted correctly in issue 6, for whatever that's worth. You can also right-click to download the corrected version as a PDF that can be read more easily (and, I suppose, printed and slipped into your copy of the book, if you like).

Hopefully that will be the only problem with the book that comes to light. Otherwise, I'll... I dunno, eat my skull in despair or something.

(Well, there's also the matter of the three articles that I overlooked when laying out the book; they'll be printed in GSQ6 as well. And this is precisely why we will never do another maximum-page-count monstrosity ever again.)

On the plus side, this did prompt me to do some research and discover that those stupid trackpad gestures can be turned off, so this error will never happen again. There's room for plenty of other errors, of course! But not this one. So, in summary: mea culpa, my apologies, and corrections have been put forth.

category: gamespite | forums | sixteen comments | §

GSQ5: The secret best Retro Game Challenge article

27 August 10 | 09:53 | Posted by:

Kid Culture on the NES
OK! So with this posting, I've done a pretty good job of carpet-bombing the site with a spread of GameSpite Quarterly 5 content. I think now you have a pretty good picture of what's inside the issue now: Short game retrospectives, lengthier game retrospectives, bite-sized gallery retrospectives, and articles like this, which are game retrospectives masquerading as something else.

Anyway, you get the picture. It sounds like people who shelled out for rush shipping are beginning to receive their copies of GSQ5 already, which is nice. They also seem not to hate it, which is even nicer. I spend so much time with these things that I lose all objective perspective on their quality by the end of the production cycle and honestly can't tell if they're awesome or wretched. So far we seem to be trending toward the former rather than the latter.

Meanwhile, I have already immersed myself in the next issue, because I'm stupid like that. As it happens, I need one more contributor to round out the ranks for GSQ6! Specifically, I need someone who (1) wants to write, (2) writes well, and (3) wants to write well about Panzer Dragoon Saga. If this sounds like you, I think it would be pretty great for you to drop me an email sometime today to express your interest. I mean, you're certainly under no obligation to do so, of course. I'm merely putting it out there as a suggestion. You know. If that's something you'd be into.

category: gamespite | forums | 29 comments | §

GSQ5: Obligatory joke about sucking

26 August 10 | 10:02 | Posted by:

Kirby's Adventure
I know that every joke about Kirby has been made, including "lol this game sucks geddit" and various oblique references to Jack Kirby. So I won't bother. But man, wouldn't a game about Kirby's Fourth World be amazing? Sure, it would probably end up being a minigame collection for Wii ("Can you outrace the Black Racer?"), but a man can dream. Of course, this game is pretty great, too.

category: gamespite | forums | thirteen comments | §