Aggregate Herald - Early Edition 03.28.12: Heavyweight Champions

Every day a lot of intelligent articles get written on the subject of gaming and the culture surrounding it. More articles than anyone could read, or even find. In order to make those pieces easier accessible for everyone, we here at Gameranx have decided to compile a list of those things that we think are most worthy of your time every other day now. So without further ado, here’s the first edition of Aggregate Herald.

Oh Mass Effect 3. The trouble with, you know, THAT ENDING will not go away anytime soon. Chances are, even if BioWarEA budges and provides a new one it won’t. So well, to start off our first round, here’s a pretty interesting podcast-cum-transcript from a couple of gaming journalism heavyweights.

Speaking of heavyweights, over at PC Gamer, Evan Lathi went to a bunch of actual game design silverbacks to ask them what they think about the way BioWare should handle the situation. It’s a great, star studded piece and well worth the read. Especially since if there’s anything this whole ‘controversy’ needs, it’s voices from the industry giving us some insight on how all this brouhaha is received on their end of things.

Slightly out of date, since the subject matter of this article on Game Front by Phil Hornshaw - the ‘Retake Mass Effect Child’s Play Charity Fundraiser - is not just quite a mouthful, but also has been canned by Child’s Play themselves since last week. Still, it’s a good sum up of the so called ‘Retake Mass Effect Movement’ and their controversial fundraiser.

Taking a break from THAT ending, there’s a quite huge article up on Gamasutra by none other than Chris McEntee, who worked at Ubisoft Montpellier (you know, Michel Ancel’s Ubisoft of Raving Rabbids, Beyond Good and Evil and all things Rayman fame), presenting to us the design processes involved in creating Rayman Origins.

Also in slightly related news, Forbes Magazine’s horrible online version graced the internet with an article shunning ‘fake nerd girls’. Because nothing says ‘adorable, socially inept outsider’ like bullyish, elitist behavior. Except not. Luckily, gaming journalism superheroine Leigh Alexander quickly tuned in with a heartfelt rebuttal to the Forbes trainwreck. And the day was once again saved.

Finally, have a look at this in-depth analysis at the Sen’s Fortress level from everyone’s favorite, soul-crushingly (pun intended!) difficult Dark Souls. Chris Dahlen goes into quite a lot of detail there, raising my personal desire to jump right back into that game.