The videogame industry and I are about the same age. In the 1970s, we played with blocks. We blooped and bleated, the big people gathered around us with kindly smiles of incomprehension. By the mid-'80s, we hurtled toward puberty together. We bounced to synthesized beats, decked in neon and steeped in a culture the old folks labeled a passing fad.

The millennium came and went. We experimented. We argued. We put on airs of edginess. We prioritized style. Our girlfriend locked us out of our apartment because we made $5.25 an hour folding bath towels at K-Mart and we’d rather guzzle six-packs of Rainier tallboys on the futon or run out to see whichever aggressively apathetic Nirvana-bes were playing the local dive bars than stay home and help with the dishes and laundry.

But as 30-somethings, mainstream gaming and I went in different directions. Today, one of us knuckles-down at his white-collar gig to pay for the mortgage and the Rogaine, while the other still believes he'll be President of the United States of Firefighting Astronauts when he grows up.

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This weekend we wrapped up the GWJ annual executive board and shareholders meeting, which is to say that Shawn Andrich came to visit and we drank gin and suffered through a thrashing in Monopoly as delivered by my nine-year-old. It is possible that the gaming failure was an indirect result of some poor land deals I executed with my real-estate-baron child and my dramatic undervaluing of the railroads. Who could possibly say for sure?

This week, Stardock releases Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes, which apparently I still get for free as a purchaser of the original and widely panned Elemental: War of Magic. Fallen Enchantress is one of those games that I check in with every few months, and which does, I have to admit, keep improving. The difference between what Elemental was on release and what it is now can not be overstated, and I'll definitely give Legendary Heroes a try to see where the game has come now.

It's been years now, and for whatever sins can be laid at the feet of Stardock, their commitment to make things as right as they possibly can for Elemental is wholly remarkable in the gaming industry right now. They could have long ago just said, "ok, Elemental wasn't great so here's a coupon to get one of a few select Stardock games for free. We cool now?" No, we would not have been cool. But having gotten Fallen Enchantress and now Legendary Heroes for free, not only do I like that they are still trying to atone for the launch or Elemental but they are doing so by aggressively supporting a game that, by all rights, they should've long since given up for dead.

So, yeah, Stardock. We're cool now on the whole Elemental thing. Here's hoping that Legendary Heroes keeps moving the game forward. In a week of otherwise middling games, my interest in anything Resident Evil long since exhausted, my nod goes to a company that, successful or not, seems willing to keep trying to prove that they value me as their customer. There are a lot of things you can say about Brad Wardell or Stardock, but I don't think that you can question whether they are interested in building a relationship with their customers.

I know it may be a somewhat controversial pick, but my nod for the week goes to Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes.

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In her May 1st segment "Are Video Games Ruining Your Life?", Katie Couric blew it. She reduced the complicated issues of parenting, psychology, and violence in media to a bumpersticker-slogan solution.

We've had this conversation more than once over the years. So rather than reflexively taking her out behind the rhetorical woodshed, we took some time to gather up our facts. Hopefully, as a parenting veteran and [according to my editor] "expert in parenting in a gaming household," I can bring up a couple points from my experiences, and, most importantly, point out some tools and resources people can use to decide how they want their household to run.

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I have now been forty years old for thirteen hours, if my birth certificate is to be believed. Like so many others before me, and so many more to come, what I find is that being forty is exactly like being thirty-nine, except people are more likely to make fun of your age. What this tells me is that there is a meaningful lack of good 39-year-old jokes, but really not much else. I woke up this morning the same way I always do: with a big, cleansing stretch; the metal sound of the piece of titanium in my heart echoing up my jugular vein; and a notable disquiet at the acrid taste of morning breath in my mouth. The rare pleasure of sleeping in on a beautiful day off from work was not fully appreciated.

I’ve started my day in what feels like a relatively cliché way. I took a shower, put on a blue, collared shirt; checked my work email out of habit; packed my golf clubs into the trunk of my Lexus; and proceeded to knock about on what Mark Twain has described as a “good walk spoiled.” It occurred to me on the seventh hole, after I’d shanked my tee-shot into the deep rough near some trees, that perhaps I wasn’t getting the most out of my day — that, from certain perspectives, I was locked into the archetype of forty-year-old, middle-management, white guy to an extent that would perhaps seem sad. But then after a nice recovery shot (if I do say so myself), I snapped the picture on this article on my walk to the green as I realized that this was the kind of day for which I would wait through six months of winter.

Thing is, I’m in a place where I hesitate to talk about how I feel about my life, because I’m afraid it will come off as bragging. That’s a luxury and a sense of self-worth I’ve not had for many of the 14,610 days I’ve been alive to date. What I have become is the sum in the equation of a stretch of time much of which I would prefer never to live again. As the late-spring sun warmed my shoulder and I three-putted to a double bogey, I found myself with plenty of time to take a brief stock of my life.

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This week Julian, Elysium, Allen and Justin McElroy talk about what they see in the MMO genre and what they're looking for.

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Metro 2033 was an environmental, creative and deviously punishing shooter that not nearly enough people played. Honestly, I never really expected to get to walk the world of the post-apocalyptic, Russian Metro again, but here we are with Metro: Last Light ready to hit store shelves and Steam this week. Published by Deep Silver, a German publisher that has quietly accumulated a strong stable of franchises that includes, Dead Island, Saints Row, Sacred and Risen, Metro: Last Light puts you back in the role of hunter Artyom and back into the atmospheric and darkly claustrophobic environs of the previous game.

Though early indications are that some of the punishing nature of Metro 2033 have been mitigated, likely to broaden the new game's appeal, Last Light still seems to capture much of what made the previous game so memorable in its setting and execution. Even getting to the place I've been lately, growing increasingly tired of first person shooters, the appeal of a new Metro game is undeniable.

Also this week, Eve Online makers CCP launch Dust 514, a Free-to-Play massively multiplayer game in the spirit of something like Planetside 2, onto the PS3. Interestingly, set directly in the universe of EVE Online, and with some degree of tie-in between the two games, Dust puts players in boots on the ground battling in a first-person perspective over persistent world objectives that provide various faction benefits and resources. Like I said, think Planetside.

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This week Cory and I assault the Gaping Dragon in Dark Souls. The dragon is so nice we did it twice.

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As I am writing these words, there are more than 90,000 people watching the top five games listed on Twitch.tv. While likely a miniscule audience compared to the number of people watching Netflix, Hulu or HBOGo, there is something remarkable to me that as many people as live in Albany, New York are at this moment relaxing somewhere, taking in someone else’s play session of League of Legends, World of WarCraft, StarCraft 2, DOTA 2 or Marvel vs. Capcom 3.

So apparently, I’m not alone.

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"Find him ... and close shut the marble jaws of Oblivion!"

It is with this imperative that Emperor Uriel Septim VII ushers you forth on an Epic Quest of Epicness in Bethesda's 2006 release, Oblivion. It's a nice send-off. It has punch. Pizazz. Energy. And being read by the incomparable Patrick Stewart doesn't hurt. I, for one, wanted to run right out into the world, shut those gates and do … and do … uh, something. Oh, look! Milk thistle!

Oblivion's opening did a good job of instilling a sense of urgency, but it completely and utterly failed to follow through on its threat/promise of DOOOOOM. Like all Elder Scrolls games, you as the player are given a tremendous amount of agency, the ability to go pretty much anywhere and do pretty much anything whenever you damn well please — which is awesome. But what happens when you pair that with a narrative that instills a tremendous sense of urgency?

Narrative whiplash so bad that your great-grandchildren will be born with bruised necks.

Oblivion's agency/urgency conundrum is a clear case of the narrative not lining up with the gameplay, a problem termed ludonarrative dissonance by Clint Hocking several years back. Ludonarrative dissonance can manifest itself in several ways, but the agency/urgency divide is the one that is perhaps the most classic example of the concept. Agency and urgency are perfect exemplars of the tension between a gamer's preferred mechanics and preferred story.

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It's one of those weeks where you can count the number of releases available on two hands, with enough fingers left over to throw a bowling ball. And, as far as I can tell, none of the available games this week come in any kind of physical form.

Honestly, I can't say that anything on the generally small list does much for me, but I have heard Julian Murdoch prattle on about Pinball FX2 and its long journey to a PC release enough that I feel somewhat pre-programmed to single the title out for attention. And, the original Pinball FX entertained me on several devices over a reasonable span to the point that even as I'm sitting here thinking about it, I kind of want to play FX2. Heck, with the action on my mechanical keyboard, it might just be some good fun.

You might want to buckle in for a quiet couple of months on the old release list. There are a few things here an there coming up in the next handful of weeks, games like Metro: Last Light, Remember Me and the big summer release of The Last of Us, but they are isolated occurrences and not the norm.

Until the first hints of the holiday season start hitting in late September, your wallet can breathe a little easier.

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This week, Cryptic’s Neverwinter entered a state of open beta, and as a result a state of immediate chaos. This is of course both a testament to the interest in the game, and an indictment of Cryptic’s preparedness for that interest, and as a whole is exactly what any experienced MMO player should have expected. There are long queues, newly revealed bugs, a shift in the tone of the community — largely not for the better — and features that worked just fine a couple of days ago, now inconsistent at best.

In truth, I’m inclined to be a little more forgiving because, in the first, this is clearly positioned as a game still in beta and, in the second, giving Cryptic money to play their game is entirely voluntary. Free-to-play can mean a lot of different things in the genre, and often the result is a factual statement that hides behind the reality of providing a subpar experience that goads and annoys you into spending something at every possible turn. Want to be able to sprint like the cool kids, have more character slots like a real human being, receive mail like you exist or are important to anyone? Well, pony up.

Neverwinter is almost remarkable in the amount of access and availability a player gets without shelling out a single dollar. That’s not to say Cryptic doesn’t nudge you toward the idea of paying money, but the model seems built more around rewarding the decision to pay rather than crippling those who make the decision not to. No question: Spending money gets you benefits. But they are more convenience benefits than simply buying in-game success, and Cryptic claims that anything available through their Zen currency is also available within the game.

But is the game itself actually worth paying any attention to? I spent a substantial chunk of last weekend, after having just paid for the convenience of early access, trying to find out.

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Join Cory Banks and Shawn Andrich as they try their level best to figure out (and enjoy) Monaco!

When you say, we're going to make a game (or in this case DLC) that's pretty much based on the color palette and cheesiness of mid-to-early 80s action cartoons, with all the purples and neons your tacky little heart can handle, I say to you in response, "let's make out." This is probably why more people don't make the offer to me, but the guys responsible for FarCry 3 Blood Dragon DLC, who I can only assume are rocking out to early Def Leppard, wearing Ocean Pacific t-shirts and calling each other rad, better prepare themselves for some heavy petting.

As to what it's about, I dunno. There's something about cyber commandos and Michael Biehn. Just go watch this trailer, and you'll know in like five seconds whether this is for you or not.

Also, though it's not officially released, Neverwinter enters open beta this week on the PC. I've been enjoying an early headstart over the weekend, and speaking as a fan of MMOs in general, I am pleased. Built with a not toward a much more action oriented style of play Neverwinter has a lot more sliding around and clicking at things than tapping the number keys. With ten or so hours played so far, the game definitely delivers on being different without being confusing. While it comes with all the trappings of a free-to-play MMO, this feels like a very complete and fully realized game, which is not something I always feel in F2P titles.

Among its many interesting features, the Foundry in particular is worth note and works seemlessly in the game to allow players the tools to create quests and publish them for all players to enjoy. The best of these Foundry quests come with a healthy dose of storytelling creativity, and there's something very Dungeon Master-y about being told a D&D story by fellow players.

Other than that, a relatively quiet week, with Fez finally launching on the PC and an expansion for Might & Magic Heroes VI.

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Video games are sexist. They encourage mindless violence. Video games are mindless escapism. The video game industry hurts customers, developers, and society.

Stop me if you’ve heard any of this.

Last Thursday, as floodwaters rose around Chicagoland, the New York Times put up a Sunday book review about Chicago.

The review took three books about Chicago and used them as a launching point to talk about the problems Chicago has.

The real problem according to the article, though, was that Chicagoans will still point out that the city has good qualities.

The article was not well received among Chicago bloggers.

It also was not untrue.

It also was not news to any of us.

So why am I writing about this in a space where we usually talk about video games? Because the way the conversation played out on the internet could almost be a find-and-replace version of a discussion about the games industry.

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I was doing some research to write this, and set off a game trailer. It stopped playing and started buffering at the black ESRB warning screen on the front. Right at that moment my younger son walked in to bother me, did a double-take and said, "Ooh, simulated gambling?" This says something I probably shouldn't know about his weekend, and our game of the week.

Telltale Games comes in with a second installment in their Poker Night series. This time, it's Brock Sampson, Claptrap, Ash, and Sam (of Sam & Max fame) bellied up to the felts, with GlaDOS dealing. To sweeten the deal they included a large collection of items for Team Fortress 2 and Borderlands 2 gear.

Dead Island Riptide (a sequel to last year's tropical zombie nightmare) deserves a mention. The first game's visceral take on the zombie genre came through from trailers to closing credits. Early word is this one is more of the same, for better and for worse.

If you're on the look for something a little quirky, Thomas Was Alone is an indie platformer/adventurer that's been around for a couple years but has made it's way to the PS3/vita (it's a cross-buy).

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It all started with the snails.

It wasn’t much of a surprise when what my daughter really wanted for her 13th birthday was to go to New York, see a real Broadway musical, and eat expensive food. Both kids, overwhelmed by the volume of toys and games coming in Amazon boxes to my name, are experience junkies, not hoarders. And thus, sitting over appetizers at Les Halles in New York, my daughter came up with the idea.

“Oh my god. You should totally take Peter to PAX for his birthday!” she mumbled over a mouthful of escargot, her current favorite food ever. “Oh daddy you have to,” she beamed. “You have to take him. Can I come too?”

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I look around, trying to anticipate a cold start, searching for that little something that will start the controlled riot I’ve been waiting for. Nothing. Just a restless mass, shifting about. Waiting.

My friend zips her sweater, tosses the hood up and pulls down – hard – on the laces, bundling herself up for protection. She kneads her hands together in front of her face, muttering something quietly. Were this another circumstance, she could be wrapped up in prayer. Perhaps she is.

Her eyes dart up. I meet her gaze and, with overblown gravitas, place a hand on her shoulder. “Whatever happens… live. Just live.” My joke is met with a small, nervous laugh, the kind that says we’ve made a grave mistake, with the kind of adrenaline-fueled jitteriness that takes hold just before the horizon peaks above the crest of a rollercoaster.

We are in the middle of San Diego during Comic-Con weekend, taking part in The Walking Dead Escape, and I don’t think we’re going to make it.

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We managed to throw Sean off a bridge chain Sean in the basement "convince" Sean to take a "vacation" long enough to feature none other than Pandora's Tower this week. Pandora's Tower is the last of the three Operation Rainfall games localized by Nintendo (the other two being the extremely well-received Xenoblade and The Last Story).

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At the far end of the panel freelance games writer and general man-about-town Rob Zacny is speaking and saying entertaining things like he usually does. He is currently describing his experiences having been on his high-school football team, and the audience of some few hundred gamers seems largely engaged and responsive. It’s been a good PAX East panel that seems to get better with each anecdote and joke, and the topic “Dorks vs. Sports” feels largely like fresh and fertile ground.

But, I begin to detect a growing dissonance between what Rob is describing as his high-school experience and the reality of my own. Rob is talking about playing D&D with his football teammates, and beginning to draw lines to what he describes as the myth about jocks stuffing nerds into lockers and the artificial social stigma of being a gamer. It’s largely BS, he is saying, and around him there are some nods of agreement.

I have no reason to doubt this mirror’s Rob’s experience, and judging by the tacit and in some cases active agreement, it appears to be a shared representation of what many experienced. But, it stands in stark contrast to what I remember of high-school. I turn my head to look at Bob Salvatore who I am sitting with and who is my partner in middle-age on the other end of the panel. I am somewhat relieved to see an equally puzzled expression on his face. I begin to realize that somewhere between the world Bob and I existed in, and the one that the younger panelists on the other side of the table experienced is a line where Things Changed (tm).

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Roger Ebert passed away last week.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship towards Ebert. He gave the original TMNT film 2 ½ stars, the second he gave one star, and though I can’t find it, I’m pretty sure I remember seeing him give TMNT III a better rating than either of the previous movies. I guess I just never figured out how to come to terms with that. I mean, he’s a genius, right? A master of words and analysis. A titan among journalists, standing tall among his peers in my own hometown.

But I think we all know that Turtles III was awful.

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I realize that from the outside looking in, it probably looks like the formula for Game of the Week is for me to collect a list of games coming out, choose the most prominent AAA title to talk about and call it a day. There are a few reasons for that, most of them having to do with the fact that the big title is the one I likely know the most about, have the most things I can say about it and is probably the one of the group that I am legitimately most likely to pick up. The problem here is that sophisticated and eclectic are probably not the first adjectives you'd pull out of your thesaurus to describe my gaming habits.

So, what to do on weeks when there are no clear big hits coming out for the myriad systems available? Well, in a way these are the best weeks because it's an opportunity to discover something I might not otherwise have looked at.

A game like, for example, Guacamelee! for the PS3 and Vita this week. A fairly typical Metroid style side-scroller, Guacamelee! seems notable first and foremost for its uncommon art style and setting, a style deeply invested into Mexican heritage and sensibilities. The danger for these kinds of games is always that the makers don't understand their source material well enough to do it justice, and instead of honoring a setting it instead treads on stereotypes. It's hard to say where on that line Guacamelee! will fall, but as a mid-western, middle-age, white guy, I can say definitively that it doesn't seem culturally insensitive to me. Which is to say, how the hell would I know? I'll wait to see what others think.

That said, the game does seem to have invested heavily in building a distinctive art style along with an entertaining stable of characters. Hard not to be hopeful they got the gameplay and the cultural touches right.

Also this week, Microsoft seems to think it's 1999. Along with the launch of Age of Empires II HD for the PC, which I can say from experience plays exactly the same as Age of Empires II Non-HD, only it's in HD, XBLA is also providing us a new Motocross Madness game. For awhile back in the late '90s, Madness games were a staple for Microsoft including two Motocross games along with the, as I recall, fun Midtown Madness. This updated version seems to revolve around the same '90s mentality of big jumps followed by hazardous mid-air tricks.

I suppose someone has been dying for a Motocross Madness reboot. Whoever you are, this is your week.

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I devoured BioShock Infinite in what, for all intents and purposes, could be called one sitting. I did get up about halfway through and drive down the street for some fast food takeout that I ate while watching Archer — you know, just for a massive palate-cleansing dose of cognitive dissonance — but otherwise it was an early-morning-through-late-evening furious run of 13 hours.

There are no shortages of BioShock Infinite reviews, so I will spare the world yet another one that tells you what you already know. Infinite is phenomenal, and you should buy it and play it. What I do want to talk about, and only briefly at this point, is what the game made me think about on a higher, conceptual level as I played and finished it.

This is a land of what I call the “gray spoiler,” the sort of spoiler that isn’t an explicit recounting of key story beats, but an area where if you think hard enough on the subject you might glean the shape of the story and as a result the directions it might go during its many twists and turns. For example, knowing that Darth Vader is Luke’s father is an explicit spoiler, however knowing that the story of Star Wars is, at least in part, about a son’s fight to redeem his father, might lead you to guess in the right directions. This discussion will lean to the latter part of that example, and thus should be avoided entirely by those who have not played or do not wish to risk spoiling the terrific overall story of Bioshock Infinite.

Do we understand one another? Good.

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With today's release of Don McLean's "American Pie", Harmonix is ending its weekly releases of DLC songs for the Rock Band series.

The tale of the tape is astounding. 281 consecutive weekly releases, and over 130 million songs sold through the Rock Band store since 2007. In terms of cultural impact, its effect has been immeasurable.

I was late to the Rock Band party. My household had done Guitar Hero on the PS2, but I had downplayed that sort of thing when we moved to the 360 due to the fact that we lived in an apartment and we already did enough stuff that would annoy the neighbors. But I got a kickin' deal on a full The Beatles: Rock Band set, a couple extra mics, and the base Rock Band game. The rest, as they say, has been history.

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Just a reminder not to believe anything you read today. The internet is full of lies and deception today. Actually, that really doesn't differentiate it from other days. How about, people are actively trying to deceive you today online. Nope, same problem. People are just making things up out of thin air and posting them as fac ... damn!

So, basically what I'm saying is that the internet is acting normal. Just, maybe, a little moreso.

As for the week at large, after a wonderful few weeks of big releases, we get a bit of a breather. Trion, makers of the underrated MMO Rift, are launching Defiance this week, an MMO Shooter that is paired up with a SyFy Network show that launches later this month. As if I weren't skeptical of any MMO that hits the market these days, there's something about this co-branding with SyFy -- which has never prematurely pulled support for a new show -- that feels shaky.

That said, Trion knows what they are doing, and the fact that the game enters a largely untapped MMO space on consoles suggests it's possible this will be successful. It's something I'll keep an eye on.

Also this week, Cities in Motion 2, a transportation simulation from Paradox for the PC, and Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge for the WiiU, 360 and PS3.

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