I’m not as passionate as some people are about video game reviews (and how flawed they may or may not be.) I think there’s clearly room for improvement in the way the average review is conducted, but I also think that the answer to the problem will come in the form of review sites that cater to specific audiences; i.e. the 30+ crowd, or the socially-conservative crowd, etc. That said, I would like to express the opinion that all review sites, in general, should be careful how they incorporate “lasting appeal” into their scoring system.

The inspiration for this post comes from the IGN review of Braid. I’m absolutely not complaining about it — the review was positive and enthusiastic, and the reviewer did exactly what they were supposed to do within the particular constraints of the IGN review system. But IGN’s final score is one of the lowest given to Braid, apparently because Braid lacks “lasting appeal” — one of IGN’s five primary review criteria. IGN appears to define “lasting appeal” as a combination of sufficient game length and replayability. So how about it… does Braid really lack “lasting appeal?”

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As a general rule, I choose not to write about individual XBLA games on this blog. But this was a special week for XBLA, and I’d like to acknowledge the primary reason for that:

Last Wednesday, we launched Jonathan Blow’s Braid. As many other commentators have already noted, Braid is now the highest-rated game on XBLA. Its review score puts it in the company of Mass Effect. Rock Band, and Halo 3. It is being compared to Portal, but Portal had a much larger development budget. IMO, Braid is in a class all its own.

That said, I’m not writing this to promote Braid (it doesn’t need the help at this point.) I wanted to share some thoughts on the game itself, and on lessons that we can potentially learn from it.

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I’ll be giving a lecture at the IGDA Leadership Forum in November. Quick summary: “This session will attempt to summarize, and make relevant for the game industry, the most important lessons that I learned when getting my MBA from MIT Sloan. This session will not be a thinly-veiled attempt to glorify business school or to suggest that attendees enroll at MIT Sloan. :-)”

Henry writes about Eric Klopfer’s work on Augmented Learning and mobile educational games. Eric’s team has created an “Outdoor Augmented Reality Toolkit” — a drag and drop authoring tool for location-based games on Windows Mobile devices that has been used by researchers and educators around the world, and will soon be available for download here.

Microsoft has announced that XNA Creators Club members will be able to actually sell their games via LIVE.

Via Raph, news of the open alpha of PlayCrafter, another “easy way for anyone to make games” platform. (See Raph’s blog for a video.)

Google’s developer challenge for its Android mobile platform is resulting in some really interesting applications, including a barcode scanner that finds pricing and metadata on the fly, and an iris (eye) scan for biometric authentication. How long will it be before Android-based games are piggybacking this functionality?

Blizzard is creating a new cross-title Achievement system, much like Xbox LIVE’s Achievement system, which will give players a unified score across all Blizzard games. I wonder if this indicates that Blizzard intends to expand Battle.net into more of a comprehensive platform like Steam?

Recap of what seems to have been a very, very interesting talk by Jon Blow, who asserts that gameplay elements and narrative elements often conflict in commercial games.

Crowdsourcing games (like Google’s “Image Labeler”) are one of my favorite topics, and here’s word of a new one — The Stock Moose, which presents you with performance charts for two stocks and lets you choose which one you would buy.