Some games not only stand the test of time; they actually get better with age. Such was the case with Eternal Darkness, released for the Nintendo GameCube in 2002. When I reviewed Eternal Darkness upon its release, I gave it 9.0 — a high score, and the fifth best GameCube game I ever rated. But my ratings are often assigned after only 3–6 hours of gameplay, and I could not tell at the time of publication that, whereas I would play each of those five GameCube games to completion, Eternal Darkness is the only one I would play through a second time — then a third, and a fourth. It is a wonderful game with an intricate story, a dozen unique, playable characters, and an innovative Insanity Meter. Some critics say that the game would not have fared as well on the PlayStation 2, where it would've had stiffer competition in the survival horror genre. But we'll never know for sure how this game from Silicon Knights would've performed on other systems. All we do know is that, unlike Resident Evil or Silent Hill, the franchise has lain dormant since its release, leaving us only with a short fanfilm and the hope for more chapters in the book of Eternal Darkness.

Finally, that hope is being realized. Dennis Dyack and the rest of Eternal Darkness's creators have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $1.35 million with which to fund the development and publication of Shadow of the Eternals, a spiritual successor to Eternal Darkness. Here's the pitch:

The solicitation was followed shortly by an effective ninety-second teaser trailer:

Don't like being teased? Then engorge yourself on nine minutes of gameplay:

Several featured characters and settings appear lifted right from the original game, suggesting Shadow of the Eternals isn't just "inspired by" Eternal Darkness but shares many assets and design features, much as Perfect Dark did with Goldeneye. With so much overlap between the art and talent of the two games, why wouldn't people rushing to give this project their money?

Apparently, the reason is Kotaku. In October 2012, Andrew McMillen posted an article examining X-Men: Destiny, a Silicon Knights game that received largely negative reviews and ultimately lost a lawsuit from Epic Games. It's the latest black mark against Dyack and Silicon Knights, as outlined in this comment by Kotaku reader LostToys:

Dyack has been toxic to the industry and has never been willing to admit his mistakes. He blamed the quality of Too Human on Epic; blamed the bad reviews on Too Human on reviewers who just didn't get how "innovative" his game was; blamed Activision for not giving them enough time to work on X-Men. Dude needs to start taking responsibility for his own shortcomings.

Realizing these accusations could not be ignored, Dyack, at the urging of Shadow of the Eternals developer Precursor Games, has offered a 33-minute video response to the Kotaku article:

I have played neither of Silicon Knights' two most recent releases, those being X-Men: Destiny and Too Human. But I did play their two immediately previous titles, Eternal Darkness and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, both excellent games for GameCube. Unfortunately, these are not the games on which the industry is pinning Dyack's reputation.

The memory of the video game industry can be short, as I witnessed when reading the comments on my interview with John Romero: viewers lambasted him for failures such as Daikatana, overlooking his overwhelmingly positive contributions to the industry such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake (and Dangerous Dave!). Ditto with Richard Garriott, who may not have had a winner with MMORPG Tabula Rasa but who created the entire Ultima franchise, for which he earned my Kickstarter pledge for a spiritual successor.

I am an ardent supporter of Kickstarter projects that show talent, vision, and good faith. Dennis Dyack and Precursor Games have earned my pledge, and I am hopeful others will help this project become a reality.

In January, former Gamebits contributor and now big-time indie game developer Robert Boyd posed a solution to his gaming backlog:

For each new game purchased, three games from my existing library must be completed. No exceptions, no matter how tempting or cheap a particular sale may be.

Boyd isn't the only gamer drowning in software. When gaming is one's primary hobby, it can be easy to acquire media faster than one consumes it: there are so many good games, and only so many hours in the day! But for those of us for whom gaming is only an occasional pastime, a wealth of options can still be challenge. Even though I buy and play less now than I used to, I'm still buying more than I play. A new contributing factor to this dilemma is the move to digital distribution. Whereas retail games sit on the shelf, serving as a visual reminder to be played, downloadable games can be easily lost in the virtual shuffle.

Although I'm not ready to take Boyd's approach to this feast, I did think it important to catalog the games on my "to play" list before I forget I own them. Here's that short list of games, all for Xbox 360:

• Alan Wake
• Batman: Arkham Asylum
• Breath of Death VII
• Cthulu Saves the World
• Half-Minute Hero
• Hard Corps: Uprising
• Outland
• Scott Pilgrim
• Silent Hill: Downpour
• The Walking Dead

Two of the games are Zeboyd RPGs whose battle systems I never got my head around. Another, Scott Pilgrim, is a good party game that I need some additional players for. Hard Corps is a spiritual successor to Contra that I found too easy once some additional in-game armaments were purchased; I need to lay off those options. And Outland needs only the final boss vanquished — I made it that far before giving up.

Not on this list are games I don't own but want to: Deadlight, and Mark of the Ninja. I will likely buy them not as soon as I finish some of the above games, but rather, as soon as I have some Microsoft Points to burn.

Where will the time for all this gaming come from? Good question. I'm a master of diversifying my commitments, having collected paychecks from six different companies in the last three months, only one of which is my full-time job. Of the five supporting gigs, one runs only through the academic year, suggesting that the summer might present some time for gaming. (Too bad — I play Silent Hill games only after the sun goes down.) At that time, gaming may take its place, not as a hobby but as a professional commitment. I like to be productive, which means engaging in activities which produce something to show for that investment in time. If Let's Play videos for my YouTube channel count, then I'll be screencasting my way through titles that others have played through years ago.

What games are on your backlog, and when will you get to them?

The fourth annual Penny Arcade Expo, or PAX East, has left Boston, having given 80,000 gamers the weekend of their lives. From Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering to Tomb Raider and DuckTales to League of Legends and World of Warcraft and more, the show floor was packed with games and media to whet anyone's appetite. Cliff Bleszinski, formerly of Epic MegaGames, opened the event with tales from his childhood, including the Nintendo World Championships, where he, like I, placed second in his age group in Worcester. Panels of industry experts discussed independent journalism, Kickstarter crowdfunding, and sexuality in gaming. Wandering the halls, you could spot cosplayers dressed as their favorite characters, with the best of the best being Pit from Kid Icarus, Lucca from Chrono Trigger, and Quorra from TRON Legacy.

I've broken my photos down into two albums: cosplayers, and everything else. Samples of these galleries are also available on Facebook, Google+, and Flickr, and there is a gallery specifically of the retro console room's Apple IIe, the donation of which I coordinated, at Apple II Bits.

If you are one of the featured cosplayers and wish to have the original high-res version of your photo, please contact me!

PAX East 2013

Photos from the fourth annual Penny Arcade Expo East, held at the BCEC in Boston, Mar 22-24, 2013.

68 Photos

PAX East 2013 cosplay

Cosplayers, or gamers dressed in costume, at the fourth annual Penny Arcade Expo East, held at the BCEC in Boston, Mar 22-24, 2013.

21 Photos

The fourth annual Penny Arcade Expo East, or PAX East, descends upon Boston this month. As a Massachusetts resident, it'll be easy for me to attend, as I always do … but this year, I'll be doing more than attending. The event schedule has been published, and it features — me!

The National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers, or NAVGTR, each year recognizes the electronic industry's best video games across dozens of categories, including animation, character design, sound editing, and more. In anticipation of this year's winners being announced the Sunday night of PAX, NAVGTR will build anticipation with a "Will Win/Should Win" panel Sunday at 4:30 PM EDT:

Developers and journalists discuss and handicap the NAVGTR Awards races with last-minute predictions just hours before the winners are announced in each category, in one of the weekend’s final panels.

Moderated by Ken Gagne of PCWorld, guest panelists include Susan Arendt, editor-in-chief of The Escapist; Jesse Cox, co-host of the Gamestation podcast; Charles Battersby of Explosion.com; and Will Brierly of Snowrunner Productions and Soda Drinker Pro, downloaded by 10 million popheads.

My connection to NAVGTR came when I met Paul Marzagalli a year ago this weekend at the opening of the Art of Video Games exhibit at the Smithsonian, which I covered for PCWorld. I followed up that piece with the recent "Operation Rainfall vs. EarthBound" feature, which lent me the credentials to moderate this PAX panel under PCWorld's aegis.

I'm looking forward to making even more connections by sharing the stage with so many industry luminaries — especially the EIC of The Escapist, the eclectic and edgy online publication that brought us Unskippable.

If you're at PAX East on Sunday evening, please swing by the NAVGTR panel and say hello afterward!

UPDATE: The audio from this session is now available via iTunes.

I've been writing video game reviews for nearly two decades. I don't remember at which point the medium moved me to formally express its impression on me, but the first time I did so for a print outlet that wasn't self-published was 1995. The Boston Herald was where I got my start, and in that first year, I reviewed several Super Nintendo games — most notably, EarthBound, a Nintendo RPG set in modern times but featuring aliens, psychic powers, and parodies based on Japan's interpretation of American culture. Part two in Nintendo's Mother trilogy of games, EarthBound is the only entry in the series to have come Stateside, despite gamers' efforts to the contrary.

So imagine my surprise when Operation Rainfall, a recent fan campaign to convince Nintendo to localize three Japanese RPGs for the Wii, was successful. Sure, the market is different now — EarthBound predated Final Fantasy VII, which brought JRPGs to the American mainstream — but it's still a genre aimed more at hardcore gamers, a demographic the Nintendo Wii is not exactly known to target. Why these games? Why now?

When PCWorld gave me the opportunity to investigate Operation Rainfall, I chose to put their success into historical context. The result is a feature story published this week to TechHive: "Operation Rainfall: How a fan campaign brought Nintendo to its knees". I didn't come up with the somewhat adversarial headline, but I am pleased with the final product and the communities who contributed to it. Richard Ross of Operation Rainfall, Reid Young of Fangamer, and Clyde Mandelin of Starmen.net were all enthusiastic subjects who took time out of their day jobs to speak with me about their campaigning strategies, giving me insight into the state of the industry across the eras and the influence that fans can have, not only with publishers but with each other.

And so it was that, eighteen years later, I was writing about EarthBound again. How many more years before we get the rest of the Mother series?

Following on the heels of slideshows picturing GamePad artwork from Nintendo Land and New Super Mario Bros. U, here is a slideshow of my favorite 50 drawings from the YouTube community on the Wii U's Miiverse. Anime proved a popular theme!

See the video's description on YouTube or click individual photos below for credits.

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My slideshow of the 50 best pieces of art from Nintendo Land proved popular, so here's another one. These 50 drawings were taken from the New Super Mario Bros. U community on the Nintendo Wii U's WaraWara Plaza.

See the video's description on YouTube or click individual photos below for credits.

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I'm the sort of artist who finds every round of Draw Something a challenge. In my mind's eye, I picture detailed, evocative images that Bob Ross led me to believe would be easy to bring to life. In reality, it's rare I can produce art that looks anything like I intended, even given the best of tools.

Which is why the black-and-white sketches that are popping up on the Nintendo Wii U's WaraWara Plaza are so impressive. Using nothing more than a stylus and a GamePad with a resolution of 854×480, the Miiverse's inhabitants are creating some impressive artwork that invokes their favorite Nintendo characters.

In the days before and after the turn of the year, I captured my fifty favorite such drawings from the Nintendo Land community and compiled them into this YouTube video. If you see any particular sketch you like, the corresponding image files are in the gallery found after the jump. Note that the only editing that occurred was to add some whitespace to the 26 images that were not drawn in a particular minigame, to make them the same height as those images that did declare a game's title.

See the video's description on YouTube or click individual photos below for credits.

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After unboxing my Nintendo Wii U last month, I was left with a Wii U box and a Wii console. The older system was no longer necessary: if I want to play original Wii games, I can use the backward compatibility feature of the Wii U; if I want to play GameCube games, I can hook up my GameCube, which additionally has a Game Boy Player accessory Thus, by having just three consoles — a Wii U, a GameCube, and an Xbox 360 — I'd have access to six different systems' worth of games.

As the original packaging for my six-year-old Wii is currently in storage, I temporarily put the Wii in the Wii U's box. I then realized the potential this combination held for a great Christmas gag gift:

Merry Christmas!

The original Street Fighter released in August 1987; four months later, Mega Man was born. Capcom is celebrating both 25th anniversaries with one marvelous mashup. Today, on the exact release day of the original Mega Man, PC gamers get to enjoy Street Fighter X Mega Man: a new, full-fledged Mega Man game, with Street Fighter combatants standing in for the Robot Masters, offering new powers for the Blue Bomber to absorb. Check out the trailer:

The eight bosses are not synonymous with the eight playable characters from the original Street Fighter II, as evidenced by Rose from Street Fighter Alpha and Street Fighter IV. Regardless of their origin, the characters' fighting styles and theme songs will be in evidence in SFXMM, rewarding fans of both series.

Speaking of rewards, did I mention that the game is entirely free? Surf to Capcom Unity to get your copy today!

(Hat tip to ThinkGeek)

Last week's unboxing of the Nintendo Wii U was longer than most other videos of the genre because I went beyond inspecting the physical components and into the software setup. I eventually did get the day-one 1GB patch installed and have since played Nintendo Land and New Super Mario Bros. U, which also required their own updates. So far, the Wii U is proving a fun party system, much like its predecessor did, but I've not yet found any compelling content for the single player.

Many gamers still haven't gotten their hands on the Wii U and are curious to know more about it. I've taken the top 20 questions from the 1,000 comments posted on my last YouTube video and have answered them in this week's Q&A.

Thanks to everyone who asked about upgrading the hard drive, Internet connectivity, GamePad support, Wii backward compatibility, and more! I hope I've provided the helpful information you were looking for.