The first time I saw Space Giraffe, I didn’t realize it was an excellent game. Jeff Minter was showing it off at the Game Developer’s Conference, and it looked just like Tempest, except you could push guys off the top of the web sometimes. And Jeff kept saying it wasn’t Tempest. But he was not sufficiently able to communicate to the audience why the game was interesting (which I verified, through several conversations, after his lecture. People pretty much thought it was just Tempest with some psychedelic stuff).

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This preview came from Stephen Totilo’s play-through of a preview version of the game, and a subsequent email interview he conducted with me.

I find his column to be very thoughtful, and the interview questions were very interesting to try and answer. (And I’m not just saying that because of his positive portrayal in the preview).

The full text of this interview has now been made available as well.

Short on the heels of Kotaku’s thing, it looks like The Escapist is starting a game club too. Their first game is Psychonauts.

I kind of loathe The Escapist but this is potentially a good step. However, the intent of the discussion here doesn’t seem as high-minded as Kotaku’s — here the goal just seems to be to talk about stuff, rather than important stuff. Well, we will see how it goes. It will probably take a while for either or both of these clubs to mature into a steady state (if they don’t die out prematurely!)

Brian Crecente over at Kotaku has started a Game Club. The idea is to provide a place for intelligent discussion about games, in the manner of a book club.

As Brian explains:

I’m a strong believer that people and by extension their work tend to rise to meet their expectations. If we as gamers start to look more critically at games, at their plots, the nuance of control, the deeper meaning found within a title, I think developers will feel more appreciated and, more importantly, will be more willing to spend time working on those things rather than on better graphics.

Of course I’m also painfully naive.

They’ve chosen Moonpod’s Mr. Robot as the first game to play, in a test run of sorts. I’m not exactly sure that Mr. Robot is a deeper meaning kind of game, but it is an interesting indie game that tries to do something a little different, and represents a good choice.

Here’s the original post announcing the Game Club.

Here’s a kick-off post with some additoinal detail.

Here are the rules, and how you’d go about participating.

 

I’ve discussed the goodness of ActionButton.net in an earlier posting. But I only recently noticed that they have a podcast.

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This post is about ActionButton.net; I will encourage you to go there and read the reviews and support the site with your presence. But first, I’m going to talk about Old Man Murray.

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