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Enjoy ace-difference-noticer Aaron Shepherd's list o' differences after the jump.

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In an editorial titled "I'm Tired of Saving the World," Jason Lomberg at Joystiq writes about the trouble with video games:

Most games would rather task you with saving the world than with rocking a baby to sleep or patching up a failed relationship. This intransigence on the part of developers to create idiosyncratic stories that resonate with the individual is holding the medium back.

Why should gaming's prime inspiration be Michael Bay instead of David Lynch, David Mamet, Paul Thomas Anderson, or even Mel Brooks? An interactive medium like this has the potential to tell complex stories in ways that are sublime, irreverent, and evocative.

Gaming could explore the human condition by interfacing with the player like books, movies, and TV never could. Instead, we do battle with rogue Russian nationalists, storm Normandy for the 47th time, or fight off an alien invasion. I can't relate to any of this.

Outside of the occasional casual game (Jetpack Joyride currently owns my cortex) I don't play video games, partly because my hand-eye coordination is atrocious, and partly because I choose to read books instead, and I know that video games would swallow up all my spare time. I don't own a console—do they still call them consoles?—and while I try to keep up on what's popular in the gaming world, I basically don't know what I'm talking about.

But that's never stopped me before, so...

I don't think video games are quite at the point that Lomberg mentions here. Video games still seem, to me, to be very branch-oriented. You're given a binary choice of yes or no, and the game responds to that choice. I've played around with and enjoyed free-roaming games like Grand Theft Auto, but the first thing I do when I play those games is I try to figure out where the ends of the world are. I feel my way around the boundary and figure out what's possible and what's not possible. Soon enough, everything feels very small and closed-off. And games that I've played which are more story-oriented have long cut-scenes that basically take the choice out of the player's hands, reverting back to movies.

I have no doubt that video games are art. And I have no doubt that they are genuine narrative devices. But the thing that makes them a unique and exciting medium, to me, is that you are the protagonist of the story, and your choices affect the narrative. Maybe I want too much choice, and that would make the game cease to be a game? I want a Batman game where I can play a manic-depressive Bruce Wayne who just decides not to fight crime, or decides to reveal his secret identity to the world. Or a crime game where I can try to become a legitimate businessman on the earnings from a big bank heist.

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That what's ensuing now as the result of this sad tale about a couple of pre-ordered PS3 controllers and a theatrically douchebaggy retailer.

As Gabe says, "Trust me when I tell you that this is one wild ride. I’m serious, Mr. Toad would look at this ride and just give a slow clap while shaking his head." If you like Internet drama and harsh justice on the gamer frontier, check it out for yourself.

Early reviews of Skyrim were kind of suspect. Seeing as this is a game that takes a majillion hours to "complete" (note: it cannot actually be completed), how much could really be thoughtfully said so soon after its release¹?

With the gift of hindsight and a lot more play time, a handful of better assessments have come along—with the most nuanced and lovingly critical one coming from Tom Bissell (of the worthwhile Extra Lives). He says the one thing that's probably worth saying about Skyrim (and Oblivion), the fact that it's great *despite* its lame NPC interactions and exposition—and the inclusion of those interactions is "incompetent" in 2011:

Why make every character a walking lore dump when lore can be more effectively embodied in the world and environments? After all, the world and environments are already there in Skyrim; they're quite literally everywhere you look, gushing all manner of wonderfully implied lore. And they're beautiful. Like most who play Skyrim, I'm greatly drawn to these incredible environments because the act of exploring them becomes uniquely my experience. When I'm listening to and watching Skyrim's interminable characters, I'm skipping through the same dumb cartoon everyone else is. Video games can tell involving, interesting stories — but they can't do it like this. It's high time we start thinking about another way or ways.

GRTWT. Like Extra Lives, it involves some thoughtful meditating on the state of video game art. (And FWIW, when it comes to game exposition, we still haven't experienced better than the Andy Serkis-powered cut scenes of the sweet, short Enslaved: Odyssey to the West—which came out a little over a year ago, and which you can pick up new for $15.)

¹Um, we wrote the most recent STD post (before this one) the day before Skyrim was released. Coincidence? Sadly: no.

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

We're suckers for indie game developers, especially when they turn their attention toward dissecting what game play is all about. When they make that dissection fun, as in Damian Sommer's drily named A Game About Game Literacy, our hearts grow three sizes and we dive in deep. As with Impasse, the rules are mostly implicit and fairly easily to figure out as you proceed. Unlike Impasse, the art is blocky, inelegant, but still quite evocative. The characters are particularly compelling; we decided that the player character is a small, animated easy chair (we call him Chairio?), trying to rescue a sort of turkey-monster that could certainly be a princess of some sort in Turkeymonstervania. It was all put together in a day and a half, and it's plenty more ambitious than anything we've done in that length of time.

• This is you.

O hai: If strobes are problematic for you, skip this one. They're not used much, but they do come on quickly now and then.

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

We're huge fans of Enviro-Bear, an indie iPhone (and now Android!) game that's been called everything from "a game made by crazy people" to "part game, part joke, part art piece, and part game-design experiment... a Rorschach test for gamers." We're suprised and disappointed it didn't just get built into iOS 5.

Thanks to Slog tipper Reggie for passing on this new live-action parody/tribute/trailer/wtf:

The IndieCade 2011 awards were announced over the weekend, and Fez picked up both the Grand Jury and Story World Awards, despite not having been released yet (they're now looking at early 2012). It's an amazing 2-D/3-D mashup that pretty much makes older 3-D platformers obsolete, and we look forward to its eventual launch on Xbox LIVE Arcade.

Other winners include Deepak Fights Robots, The Swapper and The Depths to Which I Sink. The Trailblazers Award went to girl-game pioneer Megan Gaiser. Check out the Finalists list for a nice, long look at the state of indie games in 2011 (spoiler alert: it's awesome).

Something we did not know existed: the Kiss Controller. Button mashing! Tongue bowling!

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

I am attempting to put together a list of 21st Century Skills for Americans like myself.

1. Acronyms
2. Knowing that other countries exist

Others?

Indievania is a new games portal for independent developers that takes zero percent of sales off the top. This could be really big for the mushrooming indie games scene, which has been pretty well ghettoized by tiny marketing budgets and platforms that emphasize the major players. Megaplatform Steam is a great way to acquire and play games, but their indie selection is smallish and drowned out by those with cash to burn. Also, they take a cut from every sale, which hurts the indies quite a bit more than it does the big guys. Before now, if you wanted to support independent game designers, you had to either hunt them down or wait for recommendations from friends or lazy gaming writers. Indievania is well worth checking out and coming back to, as it gives the weird little games we love room to breathe.

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

We just finished the Gears of War 3 campaign tonight (it's short!), and—if you're a fan of the series, or meant to be but never got around to it—it's totally worth blowing off some work today if you can grab a copy. (Although judging from the lines in Times Square, you might have needed to pre-order.)

Gears has always been fairly ridiculous, what with the massively muscular bodies and tiny heads, a game world that is self-consciously gruff and gritty and in every way be-weaponed, and its almost parodic dialogue (it is no coincidence, we think, that same voice actor plays both thick-necked Marcus Fenix *and* Bender from Futurama), etc. But the series finale manages to get everything that's fun about Gears righter than ever—like the multiplayer, the blockbuster set pieces (which, like the rest of the game, look great), and the over-the-top bloody action—while alleviating some of the heavy-handedness and repetitive level tedium of earlier installments. If you crapped out on previous Gears, you might actually be inspired to finish this one.

The variety in Gears 3 is gratifying, including pre-apocalyptic flashbacks, many levels with vehicles and mechs (yes: you get to pretend you're a giant dude *inside* a giant robot, like a wish-fulfillment sandwich), and at least one bit of narrative trickery with two arcs told out of sequence. Clever for a AAA game! True to the series, the dialogue is still pretty ham-in-fist, especially in the game's "emotional" moments, but we laughed wayyy more than we thought we would—like maybe the writers actually had some fun wrapping up the series. Sergeant Fenix, may your weird little goatee rest in peace. (That is not a spoiler. He doesn't die. That is not a spoiler either. Maybe he dies. Or maybe just his goatee dies. Who can say?)

If you like exposition, you will love this opening cinematic.

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes. (And thanks to Shane for helping check out Gears!)

If you must produce a fake-rap promotional video for your beloved video game, please follow these guidelines:

• Substitute crazy nonverbal grunts and screams for words when possible.
  
• Autotune the shit out of the few lyrics you do use.
  
• Keep it short!

PopCap does it right in this bit of nonsense in support of Plants Vs. Zombies:

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

As part of some sort of educational something or other, Valve is offering Portal 1 for free on Steam, for Mac or PC, until Tuesday. If you don't know what Portal is, what's wrong with you? It was an almost throwaway spatial-reasoning puzzle game added on to to 2007's Orange Box, which became a sleeper hit by virtue of being both funny and awesome. It's a great game, even if you're not a gamer.

We absolutely buy the notion that Portal is educational gold, making "physics, math, logic, spatial reasoning, probability, and problem-solving interesting, cool, and fun," and cheers to Valve for making it available for free—but this video is a little depressing when you realize that all the kids are $20K/year "highly capable" private schoolers who almost certainly don't need a leg up. (Then again, we finally got around to seeing Waiting for Superman last weekend, so maybe we're just bitter.)

It's not the first time they've done this, and it might not be the last, but you never know, right? Go get it now.

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

We're seeing more and more silly little games with Deep Issues embedded these days. Braid and Limbo helped lead the charge, and now Channel 4 (home of our darling Misfits and the earlier 1066 series and game) has busted out with another sweet semi-educational game in that vein: The End.

• This is you. Well, me, actually.

Theoretically for teens, but still pretty compelling for the rest of us, it's a semi-awkward mashup of platformer, puzzle battle, and social network tool. The graphics are loose and fun and reminiscent of old Nickelodeon stuff (if somewhat dark and cavernous). You find yourself prancing around the afterlife collecting stars and fighting bosses, just like in the Bible. The platform levels are well designed, if a little intimidating to those gamers who haven't cracked one in a while. The now-mandatory mechanical gimmick uses shadows to get past obstacles and places it on the smarter side of the spectrum. Between levels, you fight bosses using a funny little turn-based puzzle game that gets more fun the more you play, though it does take a few goes to pick up on basic strategy. After beating a level, you are faced with a stoner-philosophy question like "Do you want to live forever?" and placed on a thought matrix alongside Facebook friends and famous thinkers like Gandhi, Ayn Rand and Mary Shelley.

Even if you're fully settled into something that passes for a personal philosophy, the game is fun enough to keep you going. It could also be that The End starts you on a journey of self-discovery, or at least gets you started watching Misfits. Worse things could happen.

Thanks, Slog Tipper Jessie!

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

It's a good time to be a nerd. PAX Prime is over for now, but we're as invigorated as we are exhausted, and we know some folks who are already prepping their presentations or costumes for next year. We discovered hidden levels, saw a presentation that made us think about things (despite confirming our biases), and wallowed in our element for the last few hours of full-on nerd density. Here's what we learned, plus a poop joke:

• Skulls of the Shogun is a sweet, visually fun action/strategy game from local* developers Haunted Temple Studios. It features dead samurais fighting it out eternally in the afterlife, and it's coming out in January on XBLA, PC, and Windows Phone 7.
  
• We chatted with Jeff Ryan, author of Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America, and he was perfectly charming, if teetering on the verge of tour-exhaustion. We've barely cracked the book yet, but so far it's a fun, smart look at semi-local powerhouse Nintendo of America. We also learned that one of us is a mere one degree of separation removed from the Mario who gave the world's most beloved plumber his name. 1-UP!
  
• Friend of Slog Roman took this fine shot of the much-fun-having, super-cute Guitar Hero:
  

  • Roman Frillarte
  • Guitar Hero!

• Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Tyler Black told us all to calm the fuck down about violent games in the limply titled "Kids, Video Games, and Psychiatry II: Electric Boogaloo." He did put on a great show, in a low-key sort of way, and showed that violence (especially in the young people today) is on the decline from its peak about ten years ago, despite ever-more-violent-and-popular games. Better still, he delivered Skepticism 101 for non-scientists, showing how to ask the right questions of science and, more importantly, science journalists.
  
• Pico is the future. We geeked out a few weeks ago over the Apple patents for incorporating pico projectors into future iPhones, so we had to visit local pico pros MicroVision. This disruptive tech** is amazing and getting amazing-er, in both tininess and image quality. Sadly, this photo sucks (and it's actually from E3, not PAX), but you can start to imagine the Minority Report possibilities of having screens everywhere (especially as people start to figure out I/O workarounds to make them interactive):
  

  • This is a kid who is also a projection screen. THE FUTURE!

• Despite frequent hand-washing and sanitizer dousing all weekend, one of us got a tiny spit fleck in our eye from A FOREIGNER during a product demo. If there's a PAX flu this year (no word yet), we are now a vector.
  
• It's strangely fun and compelling to throw a couple Earths into Saturn just to see what happens. Universe Sandbox—from local indie developer Dan Dixon—gives you godly physics power, for just $10 on Steam.
  
• If you're a fan of Diablo-y games, Path of Exile is an upcoming free, online-only action RPG that looks, plays, and sounds impressive, with a gritty vibe and a crazy huge skill tree. Plus, the developers are taking the high road and limiting paid content to vanity items. Watch for the beta to open up soon.
  
• A dude in a black full-body cloak entered a stall in the men's room. Immediately thereafter, a happy sound effect from Zelda (let's hope it was a cell phone alert) chirped from within. Without missing a beat, he busted out with "I think I discovered something in the toilet!" (Credit would also have been awarded for "I just dropped some loot!")

* As local as can be with little indies, anyway; most of these folks collaborate online over thousands of miles, and HTS is no exception.
** Sorry, sometimes we have to use the language of our oppressors.

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

Yesterday, we spent most of our time on the main floor of PAX Prime; today, we pushed our way through to the back of the wardrobe, to find PAX's fabled Narnia, the sixth floor (heard more than once: "there's a sixth floor?"). If you're at PAX, it's worth the trip, for the old-school Meydenbauer vibe, plus the highly cute Digital Game Museum, and—most especially—the PAX 10. Here's what we learned, on the sixth floor and elsewhere:

• Fez is fucking awesome. A 2D person has woken up and discovered he/she lives a 3D world. Equal parts charming and clever, Fez has definitely earned its spot on the PAX 10. Big ups to its developer for 1) being French-Canadian (socialism was involved in the game's rocky road to funding) and 2) having excellent taste in teevee. At his panel, developer Phil Fish quoted The Wire w/r/t the need to Eat Shit, as learned by Tommy Carcetti and many other long-suffering People Who Give a Shit. Blessedly, Fez will be coming to Xbox Live this winter. We'll definitely post more about it as we learn more.

• Our other favorito out of the PAX 10 was Antichamber, a game created by an iconoclastic Australian madman with a raspberry-sherbet suit. An "exploration puzzle game set in a non-Euclidean geometry" that plays like a philosophical dream sequence, Antichamber is an experiment in fucking with your mind, but the results are hell of satisfying. Cheers to that.

• Here is an actual STD exclusive, earned over free booze: TinkerHouse now has release date for their upcoming super-cute kids game Monster Orchestra: September 30 on iOS.

• Magic always has the best party. We were at the Showbox for the BIG REVEAL (essentially, double-sided cards with no backs, see MTG Daily for details), but were otherwise feted to a great time along with (literally, approximately) a thousand other fellow nerds. The new expansion, Innistrad, is Magic's first Gothic-horror, wholly-impending-dread-inspired expansion, which draws on penny dreadfuls and movies like Nosferatu for inspiration. You'll see just about every goth horror trope there is, including Magic's first serious foray into werewolfdom.

• Spelunky is super-cool—a modern riff on Spelunker with cool-ass, randomly generated levels— and you should watch for it on Xbox Live.

• D&D Live lives up to its hype. Penny Arcade founders Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik played another session as "Acquisitions, Incorporated" with PVP's Scott Kurtz and nerd icon Wil Wheaton (all in costume!). While the sound was muddy on the periphery, what we heard was funny, funny shit. The dungeon was well and fully mastered by Wizard of the Coast's celebrity-DM Chris Perkins, who happens to have hypnotically perfect teeth. If you think watching D&D sounds like a uniquely horrible torture, you're at least half wrong. Check out the archives online (extremely NSFYW—these nerds are dirty dogs). This photo might not quite capture the madness of the line, which closed off Ninth Avenue for over an hour, but all these fans filled the Paramount:
  

  • Tom Marshall
  • So... the Paramount regularly sells out. How do they do that without closing a street?

• Baconcat sighting! Or actually, he sighted us (and initiated a perfectly lovely impromptu Slog meetup), demonstrating his elite detective skills. Hey, let's make this Slog nerdup happen. Schmader and Traverse? Dinosaurs must be involved.

• Weirdly, several publishers thought it would be clever to promote their games with personality tests. We felt like we were being groomed for financial extraction by Scientologists, but it all worked out in the end. Or...did it?

• We heard a rumor that the supposedly dead game series Penny Arcade: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness was coming back to life, powered by the 16-bit geniuses behind Cthulhu Saves the World, but confirmation is tantalizingly just out of reach.
  

PAX Prime 2011 powered up this morning, as anyone who's navigated the mobs of joyous gamer nerds downtown could tell you. We haven't seen the final numbers yet, but last year saw 67,000 attendees (neck and neck with the population of Auburn), and it feels just as dense this time around. The Exhibition Halls are suitably alarming and hypnotic and the Free Play rooms are packed with blissfully focused players, but the negative space on the map is where the freaks flow freely, like a conveniently located, climate-controlled Burning Man. We saw the happiest dude in the world prancing around in a handmade Pikachu costume (pics if we see him again and our cameras are working). He looked so happy and at home in his Pika-skin that we feel bad that one day he has to go back to live in the world of people who wear clothes. The halls of PAX are filled with his (i.e., our) people. Here's what we learned:

• Twisted Pixel showed off its upcoming Kinect game The Gunstringer, which makes interesting use of the controller: Players control their cartoony cowboys using virtual marionette strings. It sounds ridiculous, but it works better than many other Kinect games, plus: PUPPETS! They also showcased the nutty-looking Ms. Splosion Man, a sequel to the silly/awesome platformer Splosion Man. It looks 10x prettier than its damn pretty predecessor, but we couldn’t see enough to figure out its gender politics, or if it has any. (It has a "Two Girls, One Controller" mode, so there's that.)
  
• Uber Entertainment had a booth babe. This made us sad.
  
• Good Old Games featured booth grandmas passing out cookies. This made us happy! They were promoting classic PC games available for free or cheap, and they were delightful.
  
  

  • This is sweet.
  
  
• The super-awesome local game developers at The Behemoth put on a good show, as usual. The geniuses behind Castle Crashers have been working on Battleblock Theater for a long time (they teased it at last year's PAX), and it's available to play in their lovely arcade-style machines here, if not yet on the Xbox Live Arcade. It should be out soon, letting us frolic in a world of comic misery, but not soon enough. They also have awesome merch for people who like things that are cute.
  
• World of Tanks lived up to its name.
  
• Borderlands 2 looks a hell of a lot like Borderlands 1—but hey, that's not all bad. Also, the devs have apparently done a good bit of work under the hood ("we didn't want to throw some levels on then slap a '2' on the box"), especially with the enemy AIs and making combat more tactical. We saw wounded enemies retreat and return to "run plays" with healthier enemies, and damaged bots would call in repair-bots for healing—so you have to make more choices beyond "kill dude closest to me."
  
• In breaking Mass Effect news: Jennifer Hale, the Meryl Streep of video-game voice actors, is here, woot! Also, we got to play some ME3, which feels way more Gears-y now, with a rolling, leaping, cover-hugging Shepard—but who punches holes in people with an "omni-blade" (for a Soldier) in place of a chainsaw bayonet. The time-honored branching morality system is still around, but ME3 will offer many more game-affecting choices (and game endings), as you decide who you will help and who you will fuck over in the face of the impending Reaper holocaust that ended ME2 (who = entire planets and races, so you know we've got your back, Salarians).
  
• Use the bathrooms at the Hyatt. This is how you will pee in heaven.
  
• 3D Shadow of the Colossus (out on the PS3 in a "collection" with ICO on Sept. 27) looks lovely. We're sad we only had time to kill one colossus. Lowly (but fun!) Colossus II, fwiw.
  
• Turn off 3G on your phone.
  
• Facebook game design is still a nascent science (at least in terms of creating Facebook games that satisfy actual gamers), but indies like Dungeon Overlord are definitely a step in the right direction. This "hardcore Facebook game" doesn't require you to spam your friends, doesn't have "friend walls" (points where you can't progress without inviting more friends), and generally makes smart (i.e., not selfish) use of Facebook dynamics to create a cool, browser-based PVP experience.

  The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.