I’ve been writing, on average, two and a half articles a day… for the past three weeks. I’m stockpiling words for the shortage that will result when I go on vacation, see. I have three new 1UP pieces online today, in fact. I kinda feel like I’m hogging the promo space.

There’s another Crisis Core thing. I’m not sure that we actually need to go into quite so much detail, but it is Final Fantasy VII, and the kids do love it. Sometimes you just have to prostitute your brain to pay the bills, you know? At least it’s a game I’ve enjoyed. I’m less optimistic about this Smash Bros./Mario Kart Wii face-off that asks, which game panders harder to Nintendo nerds? These are the crucial questions of our times.

However, I have no issues whatsoever with the final piece, Five Things Games Have Learned from Dungeons & Dragons. We wanted to publish a tribute to Gary Gygax, and honestly something like “top ten D&D video games” seemed inappropriately prosaic. So instead we put our heads together and dug a little deeper, looking at the influence of Gygax’s creation in larger, more abstract ways. My name’s on the piece because I put the words together, but it was a collaborative effort and, I think, really does the topic justice. And we didn’t even get into the less entertainment-specific social influences of the game, like the big D&D scare of the early ’80s.

I still remember my whole bible school class being trotted across the road to the nearby college so we could sit and listen to a lecture by a local cop who had launched a personal crusade against the fell satanic evil of a game that, ultimately, was about lonely kids getting together with their friends and exercising their imaginations (and algebra skills). I’m sure if he’s still around, he’s probably lecturing people about the grotesqueries of Mass Effect‘s explicit hardcore gay rape pornography simulations. Things never really change… they just become stupid in new and different ways.

(The D&D piece is also the first 1UP article to sport our new features layout and CSS and it’s gorgeous — so much cleaner-looking than the old format. Hooray for my eyeballs no longer feeling abused.)