Trendy Entertainment (archive): In my first extensive article, I took a look back at an older story by Kotaku’s Jason Schreier. It was actually one of his more recent pieces on the subject at the time that brought it to my attention. I happened to come across a Facebook post by Trendy Entertainment’s Marc Singer, which unraveled a thread of intrigue that brought new light to Schreier’s old investigation.
David Prassel (archive): Game developer David Prassel made a game called ORION, released it on Steam, and had a DMCA run-in with Activision over alleged asset theft. But this wasn’t the first time Prassel was in the hot seat over a controversy, and the community’s ire toward him in an infamous Reddit thread led me on a quest to uncover where exactly this man came from. There were things that David didn’t want people to see when he tried to rally the public to his side, and I made sense of what those things were.
Star Citizen Essays: The $140+ million leviathan of a circa 2012 crowdfunded project by Chris Roberts had a rough early summer in 2016. When it came to my attention that this game’s development processes was potentially going to get a reality show segment for one of the aspects of it, I decided to spend the rest of the summer months going over every part of the project in detail. From trying to trace the history of Star Marine, to analyzing the feature creep and stretch goal accumulation, and finally exploring the man behind Star Citizen itself. The focus of it was aiming to answer questions people had at the time. Part of that included giving some alternative title recommendations with a much more solid deadline, and making a tutorial of how to get a refund for any backer who had doubts about the success of the project.
Devin Faraci (archive): When prominent Film Critic Devin Faraci faced accusations of sexual assault and abuse by several women in October 2016, I stepped outside of the realm of games journalism to take a look back at the checkered internet past of the troubled man. Taking things a step too far was a consistent theme in Faraci’s history: trying to oust colleagues, insulting people in the Film Industry, and hitting random Twitter users below the belt in their interactions with him online.
SAG-AFTRA Strike (archive): One of the final pieces I’d write for Gameranx was trying to do right by the SAG-AFTRA union and the #performancematters protesters. Dennis Romero of the LA Weekly wrote an article that portrayed it as an issue of greed. The debate raged online after it was published, and the whole thing would be brought to my attention after a flurry of tweets went out from the author’s profile. Phil LaMarr, Christian Lanz, and Jennifer Hale praised my work as the more balanced piece they were hoping for. The protest group went on to place it on the top of their website media page.
Saving the Superheroes (archive): Over on Break.com, I looked into the distant past of the Comic Book Industry. The paranoia and political red tape of yesteryear had been forgotten, and the echos of it had struck back on the comics community of today as it tried to police itself. Comic book covers had come under fire in recent weeks, and it sparked a debate about the true sources of the problem. Was it the content on the front of the book itself? Or was it the author behind the artwork that people were really offended at? Both of these questions have answers in the situations I go over.