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I actually finished a game last night, and it feels really weird. It was Borderlands 2 (and yes, I completed it with my good friend Breaky still equipped). I'm not really sure how to handle this.

See, I haven't seen credits roll on a game in a while; I'm always picking up something new or abandoning the stuff I'm playing for various reasons. I took a break from Assassin's Creed III to play through Borderlands 2, and I put down Darksiders II to play Assassin's Creed III. I've stopped playing Resident Evil 6 while I'm waiting for it to get better, and I hung up Demon's Souls because I was tired of editor Rob Savillo's constant requests for progress reports.

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This article contains spoilers for Xenogears.

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I started Xenogears on my PlayStation Portable, hoping to finish it in only three months time. Instead, the Japanese role-playing game took almost a year to complete.

My lengthy journey is just a testament to the overly convoluted legacy of the six-part Xenogears chronology.

I really enjoyed how the game opened, although the first anime sequence is terribly confusing. In short, it starts with a simple spaceship crashing into Earth. A naked woman emerges from the rubble for some reason.

It all looked pretty epic and dramatic. This event, however, looked completely unrelated to my main character, an amnesiac named Fei Wong. Fei is a completely clothed guy, painting landscapes in a rural town called Lahan. I eventually gave up trying to figure out how that naked lady related to Fei.

Fei's best buddy is a doctor named Citan Uzuki. He apparently loves tinkering with robots and machinery. I figured that maybe the doctor knew something about that naked lady, but Fei has no memory of his entire past. I guess Fei is just completely clueless.

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Recently, I picked up one of the 10,000 special edition copies of Persona 4: Golden. It was a pre-order-only item, and apparently they sold out across the U.S. mere moments after I switched my GameStop credit over to it. Well, the game's been out for two weeks now, and one thing's for certain: I haven't bothered to take any of the special-edition goodies out of its massive box.

That's because, as enticing as limited or collector's edition games might be, the over-priced items inside are often better-left untouched to perserve their value. That's the problem I'm facing with the cool Vita case that came with my copy of Persona 4 Golden....

Internet comedian Stuart Ashen recently put together another video completely trashing all the overpriced things people clamor for when video games launch. While I will defend Atlus' pre-order exclusive goodies, I think Ashen has a point when it comes to mass-marketed games that come in massive boxes. 

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It appears that Sonny “Skrillex” Moore is trying to expand his appeal to video game fans. The poster boy for the aggressive, abrasive American variety of dubstep music certainly has his fair share of haters … like people over the age of 25 who can’t get into his style. Regardless of your opinion on the guy’s music, however, give him credit for his efforts to broaden his brand with a handful of recent video game-related projects. Here are three examples, all from this past November.

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I’m probably a little late here.

The PlayStation Portable was released over seven years ago here in the US, the Vita is coming up on its first anniversary, and here I am sitting in my chair and playing the original PSP 1000 for the first time. You could say I missed the system’s bandwagon (not to mention its entire life cycle), but that hasn’t stopped me.

You see, I’ve been on a mission to learn about gaming history. Popular franchises and games, consoles, arcades, and the PC are all on my list, but the PSP was next. Now, growing up on Nintendo and eventually switching over to Microsoft’s Xbox 360, I have only played a Sony system twice. Before now, I didn’t hold “that other Japanese company” in very high esteem. I mean, it’s not like they’ve done anything else important, right?

Well, the men in black suits who control my opinion have told me that I have to look at these things “objectively,” and that apparently Sony actually has had a big part in gaming history. So, I bought a PSP and some games, and began playing.

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The question was brought up recently in the Mother Jones article “Why It Sucks to Be a Woman in the Video Game Industry” by Interactive Editor Tasneem Raja.

Raja's article examines the sexism women deal with in the gaming industry from sexual harassment and disparity in the compensation structure to having female developers go unacknowledged for their accomplishments. 

One could just brush all that off as some liberal publication trying to preach about feminist ideology. Unfortunately, Raja is not the first writer to bring up the misogynistic aspect of video game culture.

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Laura Shigihara, best known for composing Plants vs. Zombies, released a new music video set in the iconic world of Minecraft. The song starts off all fun and humourous, but it gets surprisingly poignant at the end. I mean, you won't need a tissue or anything. Unless you're a baby. But, yeah, it's cool. You should watch it after the break.

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Side-scrolling dungeon exploration games still have a place in this world, and strangely, Mickey Mouse is upholding that tradition. Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion is a beautiful callback to the Sega Genesis Disney games while embracing the limited character development and exploration concepts found in post-Symphony of the Night Castlevania titles.

In Power of Illusion, the wicked witch Mizrabel has trapped iconic Disney characters in a decitful magical castle. It's up to Mickey and Jiminy Cricket to rescue all of them while thwarting Mizrabel's attempts to conquer the cartoon world. Along the way, Mickey gains new powers that allow him to paint or erase various obstacles and tackle new enemies. While the mechanics are very basic, they harken back to Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance Castlevania games.

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This creative short film has everything you'd want in a classic Legend of Zelda adventure, like sword fighting, traveling, a showdown with Ganon, and the rescue of a princess. The big difference is that this story forsakes pixel and polygons for simple, scanned drawings animated over multiple Apple product screens.

FinalCutKing, a group that focuses on creating tutorial videos for the Final Cut video editing software, is responsible for this fun short, which you can watch after the break.

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You could say I’m a bit perturbed. After watching one of the most recent videos from the team at Extra Credits (this one, which I wholly recommend watching), I’m beginning to worry to about the lack of preservation in our industry.

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For his keynote speech at Gamercamp in Toronto, game developer Shawn McGrath gave the floor to his Twitter followers, who overwhelmingly asked about the technology that went into his psychedelic abstract shooter Dyad for the PlayStation 3. But time ran out before he could circle back to the topic he really wanted to tackle: how storylines in video games are "a worthless endeavour."

That's an especially controversial thesis considering that many of the discussions at Gamercamp centered about elevating narratives in games.

I spoke with McGrath after his talk, and it became clear that his potentially controversial take was really an outright rebuttal. McGrath doesn't believe traditional narratives have any place in gaming.

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Jonathan Ore: You mentioned that linear narratives aren’t exactly your thing. Could you talk about that?

Shawn McGrath: I think linear story and interactive anything are completely diametrically opposed. They make no sense together at all, and any attempt to put storylines in games in any traditional sense is completely idiotic.

Mass Effect attempted it, and people praise it. It’s horrible. It’s horrible because the choices that you make are so meaningless. People say, “Oh, but it’s getting to a point where the whole galaxy is going to change based on your decisions,” and I say, no, that’s impossible. That’s an NP-hard problem. That’s a computer science problem where the problem is not computable. So attempting that is a worthless endeavor. Games are really fucking awesome. We can tell stories through entirely interactive ways instead, with no text.

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Over the past few months, illustrator Laura Bifano has been running a side project through Tumblr in which Pokéfans describe their favorite pocket monster, and the artist will draw it based on what she may or may not remember. She claims not to have seen a Pokémon since she was 12, so the accuracy of the final piece depends entirely on her own recollection and the strength of the original description.

For example, you can see her take on Lickitung above, along with the official art by original artist Ken Sugimori. The fan request read:

Would you mind illustrating the Pokemon, Lickitung for me, please? Lickitungs are chubby with a round shaped head w/ small black beady eyes and rounded shaped belly w/ yellow semicircular markings and has stubby arms. It has a thick, tail - that’s about the same size of it’s body mass. But the most important feature of the Lickitung, is it’s long, large, tongue that’s always hanging out of it’s mouth and almost over it’s belly. It’s also bipedal. Thank you!

You can check out a couple more examples after the break, or you can head over to the Tumblr page to see the lot of them.

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