PositivelyGreg

This is incredibly good news. The first CSD remains one of my favorite games... just one of those sorts of games that feels like it was designed to make my neurons all flare in pleasure. They did a lot post-launch to extend and enhance the game, and I'm really excited to see what they do in a follow-up.

@leejunfan83: Reviews can definitely be critiqued and reviewed - honestly, they should be! (Earnest) feedback helps everybody improve their craft. But a reviewer has no more obligation to change their review due to people disagreeing than a game maker should be expected to change their product due to the initial review.

For that matter, reviews of reviews could be reviewed. And that's the website I plan to make. critiqueofcritiqueofcritique.tumblr.com had better still be available.

As far as I know, Ken hasn't been with Sierra in some time... from what I recall he was edging himself out even before they were originally acquired by Vivendi, or by somebody who was then acquired by Vivendi, or however thing went.

But like many of us (and more than most of us!) I'm sure he's happy to see his baby re-animated. Ok, that sentence really didn't come out right, but you get the point.

Tip of the hat to a great guy, and deepest condolences to his family and co-workers.

That's a good point. If I'm doing this right, I think I may learn a few things about philanthropy along the way, which sounds pretty awesome.

So from what I can find in a quick bit of Google research, one of the big downsides of the ASPCA is that it's really a New York based organization and funds contributed to it do not go to local SPCA shelters (which would probably be a surprise to a lot of people who donate to them). CEO pay is definitely a source of some criticism, and while they do important (and not very well recognized) efforts generating best practices and guidelines for local shelters, maybe they aren't quite as rosy as I portrayed them.

Thanks a ton for the suggestion. I don't regret the donation, but it does give me reason to follow up with something more locally meaningful in the future.

Thanks for the suggestion! There are so many great gaming-philanthropy crossovers out there, and it's great to hear about more of 'em.

@egg: Honestly, it's probably moot, since my dearest hope is that as many of the games I buy in the coming year will be digital, and I don't think I've ever sold back a game. But I like the way you think.

I guess @fourwude would be right if my goal in this were to do marketing for Sony, but right now it looks like they're doing fine without any help from me.

One of the greatest frustrations I have is that the whole plastic rock craze came years after I was done with college and moved far away from all my friends. I still played the crap out of it, but only got a few glimpses of the full party potential of the game, and between my coworkers and my wife's friends the best we can get together are tame evenings where everybody just wants to play Bon Jovi songs and keep the difficulty on easy.

Nonetheless, there's a part of my brain that just lights up with pure joy when the abstraction of "video game" melts into the fun of flat-out performance - the part that threatened to make me pursue a career in music and that kind of wishes I had done so. For a weird all-too-brief period of time, the niche became a fad and bigger companies saw a trend.

As it turned out, no, it was a fad arising from novelty more than from some latent widespread unmet need. And so back into the niche I go, making every earnest attempt I can to truly enjoy Dance Central (and honestly I do like it to a point) and hoping that the Ion Drum rocker gets dusted off more frequently than my old DDR pad. And, to some degree, eager to find out whether the industry (and, very likely, Harmonix) can delight me once again in this next generation.

Thanks for the retrospective, Alex.

Internet. Explained.

Elective mode is great once you're in the swing of things, but I actually really liked being forced to try everything out and getting forced to use a fairly balanced build.