On March 3rd, my wife and I attended Kitchener Comiccon. Taking place at Kitchener City Hall, this free convention was a cool event for the community. Here are a few pictures and highlights from our time at the show!
video game culture
Older Games I Want to Cross Off My Bucket List
A few years back, I made the tough decision to sell off the vast majority of my backlog. From that point onward, I’ve made it a point to only buy games that I was ready to play in the near future. I also minimized the number of games I would play at once, pretty much capping my limit to one-at-a-time so that I get the most out of each. Though I buy fewer games and play fewer games nowadays, I’m largely comfortable with the way my approach has allowed me to squeeze the most out of my gaming dollars while not having to carry the weight of dozens (or hundreds) of games vying for my attention.
And yet I still have a backlog. A few games slipped through those cracks, while I began gaining interest in others relatively recently. Here are some titles I’m hoping to cross off my bucket list someday!
Extra Life: More Than a Game
Last week, I attended the Extra Life Toronto Guild Kickoff Meeting at SickKids Hospital. With dozens of gamers in attendance, the staff at Sick Kids and the Extra Life Toronto Guild gave us an inspiring presentation that demonstrated how important our fundraising efforts are. It served as a wonderful reminder that video games and our interactions with them can mean so much more than just the immediate gratification we get from playing them.
Anthem, Review Scores, and Evaluating a Game on My Own Terms
Will be the first to admit that review scores play a heavy role in my game purchasing decisions. From the moment I got my first GamePro magazine in 1994, checking the opinions of critics before plunking down the funds on a game is a must. It sucks to spend so much on a game and not have it meet your expectations. Most recently, I cancelled my Crackdown 3 preorder after reading the reviews and watching its Metacritic score crash to a 60 out of 100.
Having said that, Anthem came out not long after and also was smacked with a 60 out of 100 Metacritic score. With the BioWare pedigree behind it, this seems like an even bigger disappointment than Microsoft’s exclusive offering. Yet, here I am, playing Anthem and generally having a good time with it.
10 Years of In Third Person: The Post That Changed Everything
About a year after I started the site, I bought a PlayStation 3. It was the first Sony console I had ever owned and I took some time to write my impressions of the hardware at the start. The piece has an odd flow to it, as I spend most of the time nitpicking at its issues before trying to sweep it under the rug at the end by saying my overall impressions were positive. Not at all my best or most personal piece of work.
But on a special day in 2010, it became the single biggest turning point for In Third Person.
Twitch, the Road to Affiliate, and Losing Myself in the Chase for Numbers
Numbers are great. They help us quantify what we have and what we aim to achieve. But numbers aren’t everything.
When In Third Person launched a decade ago, I made it a point to not use numbers as the primary measure of success. Part of that was out of necessity. It’s easy to fret over pageviews when you don’t generate any.
But more importantly, this is a creative medium where the success that comes from the work one creates isn’t entirely defined by pageviews, clicks, or ad revenue. Factors such as (but not limited to) the quality of the work, the satisfaction felt from releasing those ideas out into the world, and the impact the work has on others are some of the intangible things that can mean a whole lot. Whatever that quantitative and qualitative mix is, success is usually a balance.
Finding that balance is difficult. It always changes from day-to-day, from one piece of creative work to the next, to whatever mood you happen to be in at the time. In recent months, I lost hold of the balance while chasing a particular streaming goal. I’m on the precipice of finally reaching that goal, but I’m not proud of how I lost myself along the way.
Board Games I Want to Play During Future Board Game Night Live Streams
Once we got past a few technical difficulties that plagued the start of the broadcast, our first board game night live stream was a smashing success! The technical solution that I put in place to play Codenames worked smoothly for the most part, and playing with some of my favourite people around melted away whatever distance there was between our webcams. Thank you to Mat, Jon, Kris, Rachel, & Steff for making this way more special than just a streaming experiment. And thank you to everyone that tuned in to watch our shenanigans and chat with us!
We will do this again. We had too much fun to let this concept slide. Even if we didn’t publicly broadcast it, just being able to play board games remotely with a group of friends separated by hundreds of miles and still feel connected was magical. Now that we’ve proved that it works, here are some other games I would love to make work in this format!
Return of Retro Game Streaming?
Retro game streaming has been something I’ve wanted to do since I started doing this seriously at the beginning of 2018. However, it fell pretty low on the priority chain as my laundry list of technical things to fix piled up. On top of all the basic things I struggled to sort out – such as broadcasting a stream with a decent picture quality at a steady frame rate – retro hardware added additional obstacles to work through.
Knowing that I couldn’t solve everything at once, all of my retro-specific issues were put aside in order to broadcast a solid modern stream first. After months of research, tweaking of settings, breaking of stuff while live on-air, and the purchase of numerous pieces of hardware, I think I’m finally [knock on wood] at a point where I can finally play old games more regularly.
Hip-Hop Week | Hip-Hop vs. Game Design: How Game Designers Incorporate the Freestyle Elements of Hip-Hop into Hip-Hop Themed Video Games
Hip-Hop Week concludes with this post on In Third Person! For the grand finale, I look at the point where the elements of hip-hop freestyle collide with game structure. Has any game ever found the right balance? Thank you for joining me on this adventure!
The element of improvisation is a foundational block of hip-hop music and culture. In the beginning, the scene started with DJs, rappers, and breakdancers making things up as they went. Though hip-hop music and culture has been mainstream for quite some time, the ethos of what freestyle means still permeates.
Translating that freeform nature of hip-hop has been a challenge in the world of video games. By virtue of being a game, the “game” part needs some sort of quantifiable benchmark to define success. This flies in the face of the freeform nature of the culture.
Let’s look at a few ways in which developers have tried to provide structure for the purposes of making a fun game, while trying to maintain the freestyle nature of the activity its emulating.
Hip-Hop Week | PokeRap and Your First Exposure to Hip-Hop Music
Hip-Hop Week continues on In Third Person! What was your gateway into hip-hop music?
I remember my gateway into the world of hip-hop vividly. Borrowing my friend Faiz’s cassette copy of Homebase by DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, I dubbed my own copy and bumped it all the time. Despite “Summertime” being an enduring classic, starting out with Will Smith doesn’t do anything for my street cred.
It got me thinking about other potential gateways into the genre. There’s no shame in where you start or where you end, but when I started to think about it, the “PokeRap” from the original Pokemon animated series immediately came to mind.
In Third Person 
