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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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You've probably stomped on a thousand goombas without thinking of the consequences, but did you ever stop to think that those little guys might have loved ones who would mourn their deaths? Of course not, you monster. 

This video, posted after the break,  will show you exactly what kind of a monster you are. Now you can live a life filled with regret and remorse.

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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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Many questions that children ask can leave parents feeling dumbfounded, embarrassed, and awkward as they attempt to provide an appropriate explanation for mature or complex topics. Equally so, a child of the 80's and 90's asking “Where do games come from?” would have most parents scratching their heads as they tried to figure out how the mystical cartridges actually come about.

As an adult with a far better understanding of the process of creating video games, I've taken it upon myself to discover the true origins of the key titles that defined my youth. This doesn't simply mean creating a list of development studios and teams, I want to learn about the individual people and individual minds from which these important pieces of my own personal history were born, as well as what they went on to do, and where they are today.

Although such a task would have been nearly impossible for my parents in the days before the internet, my access to modern online social media and networking makes it ridiculously easy. However, a minority of bitter gamers who take the ability to interact directly with developers for granted may ruin it for us all.

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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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For a lot of us, games supply the feeling and the emotion of conquering problems. Franchises like Grand Theft Auto and The Legend of Zelda have an explorative progression, providing escapism just like movies, books, art, vacations, and even cartoons.

So, what happens when a game or movie features the feeling of loneliness? Most titles that take this approach are more survival horror in nature, and that, for me, takes away from the notion of being truly on your own. Yes, you are by yourself, but somehow, you come into contact with other survivors. That brings more relief, which destroys the implied purpose.

See, loneliness isn’t about being solitary in an environment and looking for someone or something. It’s a mindset that can fill you with defeat. Knowing that, the stories we take our characters through in a game could force us into a state of loneliness.

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If you haven't cried enough this year, artist Daiki Sugimoto's look at what Mario might be like later in life is sure to get you choked up. Mario is now a battle-damaged old man going through all the memories he's gathered from a life full of adventures.

Page by page, Old Super Mario increases the heavy notion that you should never forget to savor youth while you have it. 

I've included another page after the jump, but you will need to go to Sugimoto's blog for the painful finale. 

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Silent Hill: Revelation appears to have little understanding of what made its source material compelling enough to warrant a cinematic adaptation in the first place.

While the first film was far from perfect, it at least captured the forlorn isolation that pervades the best entries in the series. These games tormented players with haunting sights and, more effectively, sounds, to create locations steeped in atmosphere that were deeply unsettling. For a time.

The first two games are widely recognized as landmark titles -- both within the horror genre and video games as a medium. They both feature broken, guilt-ridden protagonists descending through a hell of their own design, populated by antagonistic manifestations of their deepest fears.

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