Critical News Rundown

• 101 Greatest Gaming Moments
  The week kicked off with a good old fashioned list from GamesRadar, this time aiming for the 101 Greatest Gaming Moments. An enjoyable reminder of the flashes of genius that help reawaken our belief in the medium every once in a while, with a worthy winner and a particularly emotive description of Frequency’s in-the-zone moments: “you have military grade reaction time; you are unstoppable; you are music.”
  
  
• What are game mechanics?
  Meanwhile Lost Garden’s “What are game mechanics?” piece sought the source of such buzz moments, as well as a definite scientific lexicon for its expression.
  
  
• Mizuguchi: Games are Invisible Architecture
  At the other end of the clarity scale was yet another wishy-washy and/or poorly translated report on Tetsuya Mizuguchi, full of disposable metaphors about “invisible architecture” and the games industry being “like a sponge”.
  
  
• Don't Call Them 'Videogames'
  And after all this linguistic confusion, ESA chairmen Doug Lowenstein said that even calling them videogames is problematic from a public image perspective. Personally I do kind of agree with him; not only is it nowadays inaccurate for describing many exponents of the medium, but in the hands of a skilled condescender the term can sound searingly trivial.
  
  
• GTA: The Trilogy
  Of course, if any title can dispute that assumption then it’s a PS2 box set of the most important game series of the last generation. But you do have to wonder how anyone receiving Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy this Christmas would possibly go about enjoying such a mammoth game bulk in any structured kind of way? Answers on a Comment post please.

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