It’s important to recognize the festivities surrounding our 7 out of 10 week are bold and warm natured salutes to mediocrity in all its forms. The contributions of gaming alone have made fantastic strides to rarely raise the bar and present us with passable drudgery time after time. ...

E3 is hard. The grip of monotonous press conferences, overlapping appointments, games to play, people to talk to, and drinks to drink quickly transformed us from skeptical but eager journos into bags of dehydrated flesh and tangled wires.

After considerably little thought, our response to the whole thing was, "To hell with it, why should we try to think of interesting things to say about avatars, REM, and make-believe saxophones when ...

Let’s be honest. You don’t need a certified games “journalist” to explain why Grand Theft Auto IV is awesome or that the Dirty Dancing videogame is shit. You’re intelligent. You know what kinds of games you love and which ones you despise. ...

1. All in all - A code phrase signifying the start of the final paragraph of a review, wherein the writer will sum up the meat of his opinion in a few brief sentences. If you see this at the end of a review, it's a clear sign that the last paragraph is the only one you actually needed to read.

2. Immersive - So fascinating and realistic, it almost makes you forget that you're actually sitting on a couch, twitching your thumbs ...

E3 2008 was on the whole a rather lame affair. But there is a great big hope on the horizon, and that hope is the Leipzig Games Convention, which happens next month in Germany ...

Game design must be super, super hard. What else can explain the number of shortcuts being taken in almost every one? Genres are repeated, environments are recycled and storylines all begin to sound the same. Most copied, however, are the characters. Dreaming up an entirely new personality with entirely new traits is a daunting task, so the majority of folks you meet in games end up feeling identical to the folks you met in previous games. ...

Now that the dust has settled from the most aggressively mediocre E3 yet, we've entered that yearly lull in which the game industry kicks off its shoes and takes a pre-autumn nap. With crumminess behind and boredom ahead, we can't think of a better time to dedicate this week to a celebratory prodding of all that is banal, boring and mediocre in the game industry. In the coming days, we'll drag the laziest aspects of our industry - kicking ...