When you approach the PAX 10, it’s a melange of televisions and Xbox controllers. However, in the middle of it all, the Shibuya booth stood out with two iPads and an iPhone. Between the bright colors, the falling blocks, and the shiny hardware, the booth was brilliantly salient. John Plewe, the game and software creator for Nevercenter, was onhand to help explain why.

Ok, so I was scrounging through Koji Igarashi’s trash (in a totally journalistic capacity) when I happened across the following pages. I only managed to scan a handful before their informative radiance broke the scanner, but I’ll post more once I work around that bottleneck.

Who knows, maybe if I’m suddenly inspired (or I find a bored graphic designer willing to work for site credit), I’ll bind these and the ingame pages into an honest-to-intellectual-property-theft manual.

I’m not terribly mindful about my generational membership, but I’m pretty sure that being 30 makes me an apathetic gen X. I say this by way of explanation for why I find it embarrassing to admit that I have a blogging hero. Jeremy Parish is an editor at 1up and maintains gamespite.net (and bakespite.net, though it’s more foodie-oriented). He produces more words in a day than I do in a week, and I aspire to his standards for quality. So I’m a bit worried by the fact that I completely disagree with his position on the role of money in game reviews. Still, If I don’t hold my ground on this one, I may as well hang up one of my favorite review tools.

With all the hubbub about Blizzard’s reversed stance on the use of real names in the forums (for now), it’s easy to forget that the Real ID system brings in a wide array of changes, most of which are staying in place. While much of the functionality is handy, the implementation of the system comes with significant drawbacks. After watching Facebook, Blizzard’s new partner, get torn apart in the media over privacy concerns, one might think that Blizzard would be a bit more careful in implementing features that involve a player’s real name. This week, we look at Blizzard’s Real ID, and the pros and cons of the various aspects of the system.

Say you’re one of the six people left on Earth who are playing World of Warcraft for the first time. The actual gameplay is a little grindy but eerily compelling, so you push through the starting area and decide to PUG Deadmines. You trot through Westfall wheat, dismantle harvesters, and you’re generally minding your own business when you suddenly keel over dead. Annoyed that you must have lost track of your health at a critical moment, you make a quick corpsesprint back to your body. You flop down to munch on Westfall stew and POW! You’re dead again. This time, when you resurrect you see that someone said “kek” in your chat log. Wikipedia tells you what it means and you curse rogues for the first time.

Wouldn’t it be nice if it was also the last?

There was a bunch of fancy hardware on display at this year’s E3. Sony continued aping the Wii with the Playstation Move. Microsoft debuted the motion-capturing Kinect, and Nintendo hopped on the theatrical 3D bandwagon with the 3DS. However, none of this hardware means anything without good software to back it up. Having already hit up the portable and downloadable titles, we’ll close this E3 summary week with console and PC games. Keep in mind that this includes Kirby: Epic Yarn, but somebody already covered that elsewhere. Everything else is here.

Today brings the promised survey of E3 downloadable titles. Before we get started, it bears mentioning that Castlevania: Harmony of Despair falls under this banner. However, because It already had the run of the site’s front page last Friday, today it gets this paltry link. Take that, you self-centered but probably still awesome digital product. Pickings were actually pretty slim for interesting downloadable titles, but what was there was awesome.

E3 has an explosive information problem. Thoughtless journalists hit your RSS reader with headlines like so much shrapnel. By the end you’re lucky if you’ve only lost an eye. Fortunately, the brave staff of Pixelsocks.com has thrown themselves on that deadly overextended metaphor, and today you reap the benefits. So here’s everything worth knowing from E3; read it so that our sacrifice was not in vain.

I have one big regret about my Rocketbirds Revolution! interview. It was the perfect chance to unpack a pervasive problem with a thoughtful and interested developer. I blew it because I was low on time and didn’t realize he’d be so interested in the issue. This article makes amends for that failure: today I explain a usability problem called interference.

Interviewing Daniel Benmergui, sole developer of Today I Die, was ill-fated from the word go. I caught him leaving the expo hall on the last day, and when I got in touch by email, I caught him leaving for Europe. However, he has some fascinating thoughts on his game’s novel approach to exploration, how to teach players a new mechanic, and monetizing a free game without being crass. So just think how easy it is to click that link and read! We really do live in the future.