The web’s littered with reviews of Final Fantasy XV already, Square’s beleaguered fifteenth entry in its flagship franchise. I’ll try and share information and judgements you hopefully haven’t read a dozen times already. I’m coming from the perspective of a longtime fan of Final Fantasy, as a franchise. I’ve played almost all the mainline games, having started with the entirely iconic and brilliant VI back in 1994, and culminating with XIII, which did its best to break me with its amateur, fragmented storytelling and disappointing design decisions.

My playstyle with FF XV was to tackle the main storyline first, with an odd bit of optional content here or there, and see if the game grabbed me enough to keep going after that. As it turned out, this may not be the optimal way to enjoy this title, which just annoyed me a bit further. This game is definitely more of a road trip. You’ll probably walk away from it with better memories if you don’t blitz through the main campaign as I did, taking the time instead to essentially hang out with your boy band and wander.

If you’d rather skip my rambling and get to my list of pros and cons, hit Page Down like…twice or something.

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This shit should be called PTSD.

Trauma describes rather accurately the state that I was in after an evening with P.T. – an “interactive teaser” released into the wild via the PSN yesterday. I found myself unable to play this sample-sized preamble to a new Silent Hill project for more than 30 seconds at a time before escaping to the serenity of the PS4 home screen with a tap of a button. I marvelled at how we didn’t really have that escape method when playing a horror game back in the day.

And by back in the day, I’m referring to my night with Silent Hill 3, and a certain, terrifying scene in a dilapidated hospital room where some nightmare clone stepped out of the mirror and proceeded to chase me, and my only reaction was to turn my PS2 off and flee my pitch black living room. It was a flight-or-fight response, and it was to a video game.

I think I experienced a mild version of that at least five times over the course of one hour  last night. Even after my boyfriend joined me on the couch, with the lights on in the neighbouring kitchen. Even then, this experimental, bite-sized entry into horror gaming got me. It got me good.

More than just the delicious horror this visits on gamers, it’s the insidious marketing methodology behind this release, as well as the ensuing conversations online for the past 24 hours that have grabbed me. This little teaser wormed its way into the online gaming consciousness, and I’m fascinated by it.

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Like OL magistrate and chief jester Caffeine Powered, 2013 was a bit of a banner year for me. Overwhelming change in my personal life — from a return to postgraduate education, to a complete re-invention of my career and life direction, to the advent of a serious, life-changing relationship — it’s been a year of serious upheaval for me, and one that I now realize deeply affected the entertainment I enjoyed.

I promise, I ain’t full of shit when I say this – what you do, and who you do it with has a huge effect on what you partake in and what you’re drawn to. My new career has me in Communications and Public Relations. It’s no coincidence then that my great fascination this year in the nerd sphere was the amazing PR landmarks and media fiascos that accompanied the console gaming space. E3 in particular was THE shitshow of 2013, a spectacularly-enjoyable ride for gamers everywhere, and one that meant so much more to me now that my mind was tuned to the Comm/PR-perspective on everything. The way a business conducts itself publicly, the way it announces its products, the way it does damage control – these things fascinate me. They rocked me. I loved every second, and this year more than any, was aware of my own consumer agency as I allowed myself to partake in the stories businesses were trying to weave and tell to their audiences.

Here’s what captured me this year:

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Let’s talk about how important Monday was for determining the game industry’s narrative for the coming months.

Let’s also talk about what it means to gamers like you, and me, and how industry giants like Microsoft and Sony communicated with us via the grand stage of E3.

Monday saw PR-beleageured Microsoft take the stage first, around 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time. There’s no beating around the bush – they had an uphill battle to wage, one very much set up by their own PR snafoos over the last month.

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The Monday and Tuesday of the annual E3 week are always a fascinating pair of days to watch unfold from a PR perspective. The show floor opens its doors to attendees on Tuesday afternoon, but by then, an entire story has been told to the media through a series of conferences, briefings and events that kick off the week.

E3 seems unlike any other industry trade show on the planet. It’s equivalents in other industries, from television, to film, to fashion, to food, all seem tame by comparison. At least, from the perspective of public relations.

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There’s a lot of mixed reaction to this finale on the web. After a kick in the nuts right off the bat with the aftermath of the Red Wedding massacre, the final episode of this season of Thrones brings things down a notch to a very steadily paced character piece. Longer, drawn out conversations between sometimes-unlikely pairs of characters round off the episode before ending on a strange note of Disney-esque triumph, instead of the standard game-changing fare that past finales of Thrones have employed.

More than ever, it’s palpable just how constrained the show feels by its 10-episode limit every season. There’s barely enough time in this extended finale to visit every character just once or twice and quickly touch base to set things up for Season 4.

The back half of Martin’s third novel, a Storm of Swords, will likely serve as the backbone for Season 4, while elements from later books are already creeping into the show all over the place. It’s difficult now to even decide ‘where’ in the book we are at this point; every story has stopped someplace different. It’s become a truly fascinating experience to watch how things are adapted, and if Season 3 was a good indication, the rules are quickly becoming loose with the adaptation of the rest of the saga.

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It’s a confusing fucking start to E3’s flagship channel of coverage, Spike/GTTV.

A Vita world premiere that amounted to an esoteric Japanese handheld bore that looked like a war of icons and numbers?

Rare’s return to the centre stage to show off a new Kinect Sports?

Kill me.

We can all hope this is all just ancillary padding to the main events – the first of which is Microsoft’s XBox Media Briefing at 12:30pm EST – which are primed to be as packed full of goodness as they ever have been.

Today is the day the big hitters – MS, EA, Ubisoft and Sony – speak to the gaming press, the gaming population and the public at large about their plans for entertainment for the next 5-7 years. Make it good kids! The world’s watching.

What are you all excited for this E3?

Astute viewers knew something was wrong when the wedding musicians started playing the Lannister song of war and battle, ‘The Rains of Castamere’.

I remember feeling physically ill for an hour after reading the chapter in George R. R. Martin’s ‘A Storm of Swords’ that corresponded to the end of tonight’s episode.

The interesting conversation is: what happens now? What’s become of the North? The Starks are dead or scattered all across the world. Winterfell is in ruins. Where are all of Robb’s generals, like the Blackfish, and the groom himself, Edmure Tully?

The still-more interesting conversation: will viewers be encouraged enough to hang on, persist, and see this story through? Many people I know felt completely gutted after this chapter years ago, and the ones I saw watching tonight seemed doubly so – it’s quite something to see these events play out visually.

How do you hang on when the good guys get torn apart so viciously, so brazenly?

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Welcome to E3 vs PR – A blog series on the Gaming Industry’s Most Important Season from a Communications Perspective.

You’re having a bad PR week with the media if you’re one of the following two clients:

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, following allegations of crack-cocaine use caught on tape, or, Microsoft’s Games and Entertainment Division, following the incredibly confused and poorly communicated debut of their next generation platform, the Xbox One (XBO).

I’m a gamer. Have been since I was 3. I’m also an upcoming communications and PR graduate. The lens I’m looking at this industry through is changing radically, but the last week has been bad enough that the popular opinion is all on the same side.

We all threw our hands up at Microsoft’s lack of a coherent set of key messages throughout the eight days since launch. Everything we’ve been taught not to do, they’re doing.

While Microsoft didn’t match Ford and (allegedly) break the law over the last poorly-planned eight days of the XBO PR launch, you’d definitely call most of their actions criminal, from a communications perspective.

A game and entertainment console ‘reveal’ is one of the most critical and risk-laden PR events that can take place in the interactive entertainment industry. A console, like the XBO’s predecessor, the XBox 360, typically lives on the market for a healthy five to six years. That’s before being relegated to second-tier status upon its successor’s launch for the next three or four years.

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It’s getting tougher to piece these recaps together in recent weeks on account of a school schedule that’s getting busier than ever; but it’s a labor of love, and a true pleasure to get to reflect on some of the most memorable television being made. Apologies to the OL community for the tardiness! Hopefully, this look back on ‘The Climb’ will whet your appetite for the next Thrones ep we’ll have coming this Sunday.

The episode this week was a strange mishmash of plodding and excellence. Let’s start with the rotten side of the apple.

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