Last Wednesday Kotaku republished (with permission, of course) my review of Modern Warfare 3′s single player campaign. A review in which I described it as an “un-game with a core of nastiness”. This caught the attention of Kill Screen’s Brendan Keogh, who wrote a riposte to my piece on the Australian K, in which he called me, in the nicest possible way, an “un-player”, and detailed why he believed my article was incorrect. He perhaps slightly misunderstood, so here is my reply.>

Dear Brendan,

Indeed, I don’t think we’ve talked, but I’m sure you’re super-lovely. High five! Also, I agree that I’m endlessly awesome! But let’s not get distracted. To the matter in hand. I’m not sure you really noticed what I wrote in my review, and thus have missed why I am criticising Modern Warfare 3. Let me explain again exactly what is wrong with the un-game.

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If your only exposure to Size Five’s size five Privates is through this esteemed periodical, you may believe that it is little more more than a flimsy excuse for us to make jokes about willies. Not true. Last night, at the British Academy Children’s Awards, Privates won in the ‘Learning – Secondary’ category. This involved beating off competition from the likes of erstwhile Naked Chef and Turkey Twizzler basher Jamie Oliver. You can see footage of Dan Marshall’s acceptance speech and a brief interview by selecting the category on the right here.

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Hooray! A Batman game that won’t use the word ‘bitch’ every five seconds, though God only knows what all the cutsey, wordless Lego-dude chuntering really >means. “Oh great Satan, dark lord of my heart, let me worship you, let me consume the souls of the innocent and strangle kittens in your honour” – that’s what Lego Commissioner Gordon’s really saying, I bet.

So, Lego Batman 2: DC Superheroes has maybe> been outed, at least if this oddly stark image on Bricktuts.com is to believed. (Uncropped full version of the above pic with more stuff here). If it is accurate, it also means Batman’s bringing all his special friends to the build’n'smash party – which no doubt would mean even more open, joyful silliness than the first game. Lego Superman – i.e. invincible flying man who can destroy any object – must be be a conceptual nightmare, mind.

Footage of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning makes it clear that the fateless hero will spend a great deal of time ending the destinies of almost everything he comes across. As Alec’s hands-on experience taught him, having an open world doesn’t mean an RPG has to be about exploring and collecting vegetables. It can also be mostly about killing things, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. To that end, here’s a video showing a variety of things being killed in a variety of ways. It doesn’t make me care a jot about the no doubt lore-laden terminology describing elaborate special attacks, but it does make me want to try them out.

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Edit – this isn’t the> IF awards, but rather a specific one for short IF. Sorry for the confusion.

Interactive fiction – or text adventures to the 80s-raised layman – quietly continues to thrive in its own brainy corner of the internet. But where to start? Well, the annual Interactive Fiction Competition conveniently rounds up the best of the best for lazy people like me. The 2011 results are now in.

Taking the main gong this year is Taco Fiction by Ryan Veeder, which is an agreeably wry and downbeat tale of a feckless gunman attempting to rob a dirty fast food joint.

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Given the choice between being a Jedi Knight (nahyt) n.> a mounted soldier serving under a feudal superior in the Middle Ages, and a Jedi Consular (kon-suhl) n.> an official appointed by the government of one country to look after its commercial interests and the welfare of its citizens in another country, it seems hard to imagine why anyone would choose boring Mr. Government for Star Wars: The Old Republic. But the video below attempts to show you why melee lightsabre combat might be something worth avoiding in favour of making people dangle in the air like twits. And the sneaky-sneaky.

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We’ve decided that it’s time for the hivemind to turn its unblinking gaze on the world of e-sports, and to do that we’ve recruited our chums over at ESFI World to give us a weekly taste of what’s happening on the various competitive and pro-gaming circuits around the world. Introducing this new column is the story of the recent MLG finals in Providence. E-sports drama, it turns out, can be years in the making…> [Photos in this article by Zhang Jingna.] (more…)

Increpare’s brain-jammin’ 3D puzzle game, English Country Tune, has been released. The game plays with a bunch of spatial puzzle ideas to create some ingenious challenges. It’s had me going a bit hypnotoad with concentration trying to get through the puzzles. There’s a demo for PC and Mac on the site. You should play it. You really should.

Sundays. Sundays are for dreaming of another world. Or perhaps Another World, depending on what sort of dreams you have. It is also for skimming across a week of internet links and wondering how all this could happen – why doesn’t everyone just sit down and have a rest? Eh? It makes little sense to me.

• I wanted to link to this post by Jeff Vogel (which I got to from this follow up), but actually it’s worth checking out a lot of the stuff on his blog. Vogel makes turn-based RPGs in a fairly traditional way, and makes a living from that, and as such his insights on what it means to be indie have a depth that other, less experienced indies perhaps do not: “The 10000 Hour Rule is about crushing dreams. It’s about understanding that there are limits to what you can do in the all-too-short period of time we spend on this Earth. It’s about giving people who have achieved mastery the respect they deserve. It’s about, before taking on a new task, honestly evaluating whether we can afford to give what it takes to complete it. And it’s about forgiving yourself for not being able to play the guitar like Hendrix.”

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I’m running a little late today, sorry about that. My brain is still gradually untwisting itself after the mammoth task of chronicalling all the many discounted video games there are, over at SavyGamer.co.uk, during the week. Things are starting to get busy, as everyone across the industry is discounting to help bump up those end of year financials. The bargain bucket has you covered for all the best value PC downloads on this fine weekend, so delve in to see what’s on offer: (more…)