Growing up, I listened to Godspeed You! Black Emperor all the time. I always thought of them as a post-apocalyptic band -- pretty much perfectly used on the 28 Days Later... soundtrack when Jim is walking around London discovering how fucked everything has become. Great music for walking around late at night in the middle of a big city. It is a lot of dynamic variance and a lot of loose structure, oftentimes descending into beautiful, auditory chaos from a quiet few cello notes.

This video is perfect for the music. The track is called The Dead Flag Blues, and it features a great voice actor describing a ruined world over a series of Half-Life 2 visuals. This is pretty atypical of GY!BE, so listen to more if you don't dig into it right away.

Enjoy the next 5 minutes.

Hi, folks.

​If you haven't read my review of Amy just yet, allow me to summarize: It is a poorly constructed, buggy mess. Tasked with giving the game a fair and balanced assessment, I simply could not overlook the multitude of problems that arose both technically and from a design standpoint.

That being said, there is still a dark, masochistic corner of my heart where a morbid sort of affection burns dully for Amy. While I would never recommend someone fork over their hard-earned cash for the game in its current state, a part of me is willing to admit that I kind of liked various bits and pieces.

But some of the gaming community has taken that bizarre fondness a step further. A quick search of the Gamefaqs message boards yields dozens of posts wherein the authors profess their love for Amy and recommended their fellow survival horror fans ignore the reviews and go download it immediately.

Those people are daft.

Then again, maybe it's wrong of me to fault someone for loving terrible things. I'm guilty of this myself from time to time. (I quite liked the Bionic Commando reboot, for instance. Yeah, I said it.) This makes me wonder what, exactly, makes someone cling to such a monstrosity. No matter how bad a game is, there's always someone willing to stand up and defend it.

In this week's Infinite Ammo, I ponder some of the possible reasons for this contrarian behavior.

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​By: Drew Paryzer

I declared myself done with video games early on in my undergraduate education. As I saw it, I had spent enough hours of my life rabidly pursuing secret levels and alternate endings and mini-games that - I proclaimed grandly, to myself, in my head - amounted to prolonged digital masturbation. (I won't mention my senior year relapse during which I performed such tasks as essentially being Super Mario World TWICE in a week, due to an accidental file erase.) I travelled for a year right after I graduated, and didn't touch a controller for that entire time. I got philosophical about it -- "Oh, my former self who built a bunker of Link and Yoshi to blind himself from the anxiety-filled ambiguity of modern experience yadda yadda yadda." I convinced myself that listening to Radiohead B-sides while looking at some dry mountains in Chile was what I should actually be doing.

When I returned to the States, I moved to Los Angeles with two actor friends and steeped my days in a soul-crushing mix of menial office work and hours of solitary, misplaced TV writing at assorted Starbucks'. It was soon into this debacle that one of my friends acquired his brother's old Nintendo 64. Larry David was probably somewhere in my peripheral vision the first time we fired it up, and the smell of Stouffer's Dog-Food Lasagna was most likely seeping out from our microwave. All I know for sure is when I wrapped my hands around that triple-stalactite of a controller, my liberal-arts pretentions melted away. I remembered that I LOVED VIDEOGAMES. Simply, truly, deeply. Deliberate identity formation, be damned.

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​With Mass Effect 3 just a few months away and Dragon Age 3 officially announced, not is as good a time as any to talk about Bioware. The company has long been lauded as one of the few developers that have put an emphasis on storytelling. Even their games that have featured largely unimpressive gameplay have been remembered as classics just because of how well the story was told. But with Bioware's latest two series they've found a very unique way of telling a story with the mechanics through each property's protagonists. Shepard and the warden are both vehicles for the player to act in a separate world and individual characters in their own right.

 

There are a number of ways RPGs can tell a story but for convenience's sake, we'll polarize them in a graduating scale with Elder Scrolls or Fallout style characters on one end and Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest on the other. Bethesda's RPGs feature a faceless set of eyes airdropped into a strange new world; in this world the player is free to wander and change the landscape and politics however they wish. The player and the protagonist are one, they share the same motivations and are driven by the same interests, they have the same knowledge and they are guided by the same morals. Opposite are the Square-Enix heroes that are fully written in a strict narrative. The player and the characters are separate entities experiencing a plot from very different perspective. No matter how convincing the cosplay, there is only one Cecil, and he is not the same person as the player that guides him.

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​One of our chief editorial topics at Joystick Division is video game narrative. Many of us labor to understand and complicate the medium by looking into its brilliance, shortcomings, and the uniqueness of its narrative delivery capabilities, compared to art forms around it and examples of the past. In short, we try to appreciate the fiction of games, and how they work on a pseudo-academic, and very personal, level.

This year was particularly strong in terms of narrative content. Blockbusters and indie games took bold leaps into the fold of previously uncharted territory of creative game storytelling, by handing us dozens of beautiful, well-told stories that can move and change us. We've selected the ten that best represent 2011 as a whole, and the ten best that will go down in history as some of the best the medium has ever offered.

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I say holster, because it steadies and readies that shit like a gun.

I don't have much more to say, except that I told you a few days ago I would be delivering news more and more frequently. And, if you're the kind of gamer that would've fit the stereotype in 1999, this shit is news to you. (Made by Ben Heck. Please fast-forward to the last two minutes if you want to see it completed and working. Before that, its just DIY.)

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I am pretty pleased with my Alan Wake experience. Sure, Remedy Entertainment has a lot they could improve on when looking to a sequel, but overall the story of Wake and his wife was plenty suitable enough for a half-dozen hours of thrills and some unique story arcs. Which makes Alan Wake's American Nightmare a relatively pleasant and intriguing upcoming game.

From the looks of the trailer, Remedy set the original Alan Wake's octane to "high" and loosened up a bit from the slow-build plot unraveling that held tempo for the original narrative. From the soundbites in interviews, it sounds like American Nightmare will be more of a "fun" game to play, with more diverse enemies and modes to delight gamers who thought the original was a little lacking in the "options" department. For instance, an Arcade Mode is being introduced that promises to add a whole new dimension to the survival-ness of the horror.

I'm particularly excited to see how they spin urban legends into the build of the enemies. Mr. Scratch might be a little gimmicky, but from what I can tell, Remedy knows pretty well what they're doing and how to deliver. Look for the game February 22, 2012. It'll cost you $15 on Xbox Live Arcade.