After a long wait, we’ve finally gotten enough together to present to you Tidal, GGW’s official community.

We intend to make it a resource for aspiring games writers and otherwise just a chillin’ place. Sounds good, right? It’s a forum now, but it will expand and change with your input.

I hope you’ll check it out. We even brought in AWESOMEoutof10’s rad Communications Director Darik Kirschman to help us out. AWESOME.

Here’s the announcement post: http://tidalis.com/index.php?threads/welcome-to-tidal-heres-whats-coming-more.75/#post-346

This is very good stuff.

I say stuff as it’s not quite anything. It is, effectively, an overly long lead-in for an interview. And yet it’s fascinating, exploring the real world of EVE.

So long as he retains his good name and benevolent reputation, Chribba has discovered a secret currency. One more valuable than ISK, more valuable than Really Big Ships. More valuable, even, than precious Veldspar.

Trust.

Everybody trusts Chribba.

Does Caldwell find Chribba? Yes. How he does that is for you to find out—while hearing about an exotic locale and debates around EVE—with the interview a separate read altogether. Get to it.

Today’s hot topic has been Nintendo slapping ads on top of Youtube content featuring Nintendo games. Jenn Frank has the best, most comprehensive take on the situation (including background on fair use), that’s definitely worth reading.

[Let’s Plays] provide commentary and critique and, of course, yelling and cursing and giggling. In no way does the content of a Let’s Play video represent the ideals of, say, Nintendo. Why would Nintendo want to slap their name onto such a video, indeed.

Spot on.

Who is Sean Smith?

Stephen Totilo’s thoughtful and thorough eulogy to Sean Smith answers this question, highlighting Smith’s role as a husband and friend first, mostly through showcasing the man’s love of Eve.

It’s a beautifully written piece about life and not death.

“Games use magic less as a cosmological system to be manipulated and more as an excuse for attacks and stat boosts. Modern gaming is full of magic, but the act itself is basically meaningless.”

Such an argument is an interesting one, which Rath asserts through examples of “magic” humans have evoked in the past…and no, humans haven’t been shooting fireballs from their hands, or even trying to.

What do developers do, then, if they want to use magic? For one, they can add in mantras, or other similar gestures or incantations. More importantly, symbolism must be evoked. That’s magic, and Rath gets it right.

Charlie Hall, writing for Polygon, interviews the guys behind Kentucky Route Zero, telling their story through the mundane and the surreal; it’s magic realism at its finest, a discussion in the article itself.

 [T]hey dropped platforming altogether. They didn’t want to force the player through a process of trial and error, to make them backtrack from a locked door when instead they should be mulling over a bit of dialogue, relating to a character or a situation. The story they wanted to tell just flowed, with the player pushing things along as it moved, irrevocably, forward.

This feature further delves into the game’s development, lingering on the relationship between the friends that made the game and their work, but it’s wholly worth reading. 

Joystiq has one of our favourite Harmoknight reviews because of how simply it explains the premise. It also draws the right comparisons (Runner 2) and treats the release both on its own merits and on the merits of being a GameFreak game.

Plus, it’s Harmoknight, and it’s a game worth discussing, if for no other reason to see an eShop release from Nintendo. That’s refreshing after the recent drought.

Andrew Groen, StarCraft journalist extraordinaire (among other things), writes about the fear and trepidations professional StarCraft II players possess about its expansion, Heart of the Swarm. Groen explains it as such:

For e-sports players, it can be something analogous to what Tiger Woods would have to deal with if the PGA suddenly decided that all the fairways on their golf courses were too long. Golfers who had gained an advantage in the past by having a long drive would lose that edge, and players with great putting and chipping skills would gain the upper hand.

That would likely never happen in golf, but for pro gamers it happens all the time. The courses they play on do change, and they’ll have to learn to use new types of clubs. Not everyone will be able to adapt.

It’s an interesting situation to be in.

Groen, Andrew. “For Pro StarCraft Players, Heart of the Swarm Means Fear of Failure” (Game|Life: March 12, 2013) <http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/03/heart-of-the-swarm/>.

We’ve seen loads of articles about Mario potentially being a bad guy of his world, but Jason Rice’s humorous take on the matter is that Mario has been had. So who’s the big bad, then?

None other than Princess Peach.

Hmm.