Trembling Hand - Why Champions Will Never Be Balanced.
However, Champions makes things harder for itself because players aren't
forced to specialise. In most games, you're forced to choose Rock, Paper or
Scissors, so you know there'll always be folk out there who can trounce you
with ease. But you also know you can trounce others with equal ease. And it
all comes out in the wash, with the population of players settling in to the
three strategies in equal proportion.
But in Champions, you can effectively choose from any power in the game. You
can choose Rock, Paper and Scissors - which means everyone else will
effectively be forced to take all three as well in order to remain
competitive. (Just call them Regeneration, Force Shield and Force Sheath,
and you'll see what I'm saying.)
The Escapist - Too Gay for the U.S.A.
That's largely due to the way the two different cultures view sexuality.
North American viewers tend to be bombarded with violent imagery, while
depictions of sexuality - especially involving lesbian, gay, bisexual or
transgender (LGBT) people - raises more eyebrows than anything else. A poll
conducted by family gaming site What They Play in April 2008 offers further
evidence of this aversion to homosexuality in media: When shown a series of
provocative pictures, respondents were more offended by the image of two men
kissing then that of a severed head.
Crispy Gamer - Capturing Perception.
There is still a frontier in the realm of representing intuitive action
and unconscious perception. As games proffer more sophisticated narratives
that require more than casual observation from the in-game characters and
players controlling them, they are also getting better at representing the
much more interesting aspects of being human -- like how we move
unconsciously through space, how we read the intent of people around us, and
how we register easy-to-miss but important actions that have big effects.