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Losing Your Edge

This is the lost post I referred to recently, which to my surprise suddenly popped up again in my draft folder, and so I’ve decided to share it as is, along with a little update at the end.

The Magaziner returns. Sorta.

In recent weeks, I’ve been feeling the itch to bring back The Magaziner in one form or another – and for those of you who have no idea what I’m referring to, it’s a site I ran that was dedicated to the love of magazines, with a slight focus on digital titles/editions. Problem is, earlier this year I let the original domain expire – I did check to see if it was still available, but it wasn’t.

Oh well.

But, I still feel like sounding off on magazines again, since my love for the medium is still strong, and so – for now – I’ll just do it here in the form of irregular posts.

Let’s talk about Edge magazine, and its new digital strategy as of its latest issue.

First off, Edge is what I would describe as the best and smartest magazine out there covering the world of games. It covers the medium in all seriousness, and is a publication that is read by many in the industry. It’s published in the UK through Future. I’ve been reading it for years – can’t quite remember what my first issue was – and although I used to buy it in print (at a ridiculous price from a shop in Tokyo’s Akihabara district), when they launched a proper iPad edition – and by this I mean a digital edition formatted for iPad, that they described as an “interactive” edition – that’s how I continued reading it. As of the latest issue, that “interactive” edition is no more.

What has happened is that what you get now is basically a glorified PDF version of the print edition, with a few highlighted links to look up a gallery of screenshots or to watch a video. On iPads designed for mortals (i.e. not the new iPad Pro), this means that you can’t read the text in regular page view, and so need to constantly zoom in and out of pages. Oh, and now it won’t even save your spot when you’re reading, so every time you come back to the issue, you’re at the front page, and need to manually find your spot again.

Why revert back to such a primitive edition? I’m sure it was a business decision, not wanting to absorb the cost of designing that iPad edition, but not only does it leave us with a fantastically unsatisfying reading experience, they haven’t even lowered the cost of the digital edition.

The content itself is still great – in the latest issue I really enjoyed the interview with Final Fantasy XV director Hajime Tabata, the profile of Square Enix’s new RPG Factory studio, and the piece on adventure game studio Revolution Software, but because of the awful reading experience, I found myself skimming over most of it.

I’ve already cancelled my digital subscription, and I don’t expect I’ll be buying the print edition as it’s not readily available here, and would cost import prices if I did find a copy. If I am still able to read some of it, it will be because the studio where I work subscribes to it.

Update: Since I wrote this, to my dismay, another one of my regular magazine reads has followed the same route, and it’s even worse than with Edge. As of its latest issue (with Star Wars on the cover), Rolling Stone has done the same thing, getting rid of its iPad-formatted interactive design and instead releasing a PDF-like replication of the print edition. But what’s worse is that it’s even more unreadable than Edge, because you can’t even zoom in on the pages, and so if you find the text to be too tiny to read, tough luck. I immediately cancelled my subscription, but really, I’m just shocked to see a backward trend like this of giving up on digital editions. I’m sure it’s all driven by sales and cost cutting (not wanting to invest in designing a separate edition), but it is having the effect of making me leave those titles, since I’m not interested in the print editions (I only like print magazines if they use nice paper, have a special format, etc.)

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Sparrow Racing League

There’s no denying that Destiny has played a huge role in my gaming life this year – it also has the distinction of being the game I’ve played the most, ever (total hours). Sometime in late October I did finally burn out on it – partly in frustration that I wasn’t managing to level up my gear at a good pace, and also that the people I had been mostly playing with where dropping out too – and so hadn’t played at all until last week, to check out the new “Sparrow Racing League” event. The first time I played Destiny, during the alpha test in 2014, the first thought I had was that I so wanted to race Sparrows. Well, that’s exactly what we got, and wow, is it ever fun. I’m unfortunately not completely sold on it yet. There are only 2 tracks, and I’ve already tired of racing on them. And I can’t seem to get better than a 3rd place finish, which I’m finding frustrating, in part because I’m not sure if I’m just not good at the racing part, or if it’s because I need a better Sparrow. And so far, I have not been getting good drops after the races. Verdict? I won’t say that I’ve already given up on it, but I definitely am not playing it as much as I thought I would. Also, so far, the pull of racing has still not made me want to get back into playing regular missions or the Crucible.

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Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China

I picked this up a while back during a PSN sale, but hadn’t gotten around to really spending time with it until recently. I gotta say, I’m having a really good time playing this. I absolutely love the stealth gameplay in 2D, and the art direction is really fantastic, deeply inspired by traditional Chinese art. Even if you’re burnt out on the main Assassin’s Creed games, don’t let that make you skip this, it really is its own thing. Also, I’m now very much looking forward to the next game in this series, which is going to be set in India.

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Game of Thrones

During last week’s PSN holiday sale I picked up telltale’s Game of Thrones for a steal (as well as Tales of the Borderlands), and started playing episode 2 last night on PS4 (I played episode 1 on iPad when it first released last year). I quite enjoyed the first episode, story-wise, and what I’ve played so far of episode 2 seems to be good as well, but the one thing that bothers me is that I find the game to be ugly. I quite like the comic book esthetic that Telltale has used on The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, but here, the game looks really muddy and dirty, with character models that look like they’ve come out of early Telltale games – which were fine back then, but you expect things to look better now, especially on PS4. I’m sure I’ll continue to play through all of the episodes since I want to experience the story, but I wish they would have used a more interesting look for the game, even if it was just a retread of the Walking Dead model.

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Southern Bastards

This is one of those comic series that I missed jumping on when it launched, and then kept hearing tons of good things about it from friends, but was too lazy (or just forgot) to check it out. With the year-end “best of” lists popping up, I was reminded that I should finally get around to it, and so I did by reading the first volume, which compiles the first 4 issues. Wow. This suddenly shot up to what is possibly my favorite series of the year. I’m quickly catching up – I already read the fantastic second volume as well – and am already sad that I’ll soon be getting to a point where I’ll have to wait like everyone else for a new issue to come out. It’s just amazing how these characters are built up, then leading to unexpected results – and it’s amazing how the series made me care (or sympathized) for a character I would normally find wretched. I’m just so in love with this series right now.

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Head Lopper

It’s a comic about a dude with a sword who lops off heads, while carrying a talking witch’s head in a bag. It’s awesome. The art is fantastic and super dynamic. The first issue came out in September, and it’s a quarterly, and so the next issue should be out this month. Each issue is maxi-sized, so you get to really take in a lot – and it gives the creator the space to build the fantastic action pieces. I really like this.

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Episodes 1-3

Well, what to say, I happily watched Episodes 4-6 a few weeks ago, in preparation for the release of The Force Awakens, and the plan was to then watch 1-3, but I kinda chickened out. But having gotten all caught up on Star Wars Rebels, I wanted to watch more Star Wars stuff, and so decided to bite the bullet and revisit these “things.” Last night I watched Episodes 1 and 2 back-to-back, and yes, I lived to tell the tale (and I’ll probably watch 3 tonight). The third film is actually the one I’m most looking forward to watching again, because I think it’s possibly sorta OK (overall). I don’t think it even bares mentioning or bringing up again what’s wrong with this trilogy. I do still like segments here and there (in the first film I do like the pod racing and the final 3-way battle with Darth Maul, and in the second one I like what happens once all the Jedi show up on Geonosis), but yeah, here’s hoping The Force Awakens lives up to those trailers we’ve seen so far, that makes it feel more original trilogy than prequels.

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Freedom Wars

I’d always been interested in Freedom Wars because I liked what I saw of the esthetic of the game, but not enough to pick it up – doesn’t help that I’ve tried playing stuff like God Eater, but didn’t really get into it (and I’m sure that’s because I didn’t have anyone to play with). Well, with it popping up as a PS+ free offering for Vita, I was happy to give it a try. Having put 1-2 hours in it, I can say that it’s definitely an interesting setting for a game. I don’t know if I’ll manage to stick with it for a long time – and all the systems I need to deal with are a bit intimidating, so thinking I’m not going to play that much doesn’t make me want to learn them. But I do indeed like the look of it, the way it’s setup story-wise (you need to burn off time on your incarceration, through some sort of totalitarian regime), and the combat is neat. 

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A Very Murray Christmas

Really didn’t know what to expect from this thing, other than I was going in thinking it was one hell of a weird thing for Netflix to produce – and I’m not very Christmas-y, or into Christmas specials. But hey, I like Murray, I like weird things, and when I learned that it was directed by Sofia Coppola, I thought that made it worth checking out. And guess what, I really had a good time watching this. Yup, it’s incredibly weird, I loved the guests, and it simply had a nice Coppola vibe to it. Definitely worth a watch. Also, it sure made me miss seeing Jason Schwartzman regularly on the screen (long live Bored to Death).

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Legend of Dungeon: Masters

The other day I got a link to this article about the Twitch integration an indie dev (Robot Loves Kitty) was using for a game called Legend of Dungeon, by way of a separate free client that you can download (from Steam), called Legend of Dungeon: Masters. I was curious, and so immediately gave it a try, and was completely sucked into the simple experience of chatting with other watchers, having the player we were watching interact with us, and then contributing to the game by sending items or creatures his way. I’m not a big Twitch watcher at all, and so wasn’t expecting to get drawn in like I did, but I found myself really enjoying it. It was also fun when one of the devs popped into the chat, and answered questions we had about what was going on – most of us in the chat seemed to be experiencing it for the first time. If you’ve been curious about what Twitch viewer integration can be like, and where the fun lies, give this a try.