Article #1 - Dwarf Fortress wil crush your CPU because creating history is hard
Pretty neat and interesting article about terrain generation. I still feel like I'm missing a massive component of this story (i.e. what is Dwarf Fortress? I guess a game?), but it's cool. Working on something like this for 20 years feels nuts, but more power to those dudes.
Article #2 - No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry
This feels like what people usually give polygon shit for. Not sure why, it seems like they keep publishing these sorts of articles so why do people care? You wouldn't ask a snow leopard to stop wearing his spots.
This is an acceptable reminder of how shitty everyone treats girls/women on the internet. I was worried that it was going to fall in to that clickbait category with the opening statement, but it's mostly a reasonable commentary using people's personal experiences as a guideline. My biggest complaint? That it doesn't take time elude to the fact that this is a problem on the entire internet. It's an anonymity problem and people are animals - it's not exclusively a game industry problem, women in the games industry are just giant targets, front and center in front of the anonymous animals that love trolling or destroying people either for fun or personal satisfaction. I don't think it's fair and I'm certainly not trying to excuse or diffuse the behavior, just as an outsider it seems slighlty less surprising.
And, while I don't doubt for a second that as far as game industry careerists go women have this problem x1000000 more than men, I'll bet I could find almost word for word some of the same super offensive quotes about rape / dead babies / racist shit in my personal xbl messages if I still had my account. And I didn't even play online that much.
Still, not the terrible pit of hell writing and destruction I expected based on people's derision of polygon. Not what I want to read in my free time either, but that's cool.
Article #3 - In the face of recent wins, Nintendo's lack of online functions is no longer forgivable
That title might be clickbait, not sure. The wording is just clever enough that every part of it can be argued (1. What recent wins? 2. Lack of online functions? There's plenty! 3. Is no longer forgivable? That seems harsh, it doesn't bother me etc etc etc)
Long story short, Nintendo still doesn't have a reasonable online id / digital content management system and it really, really should in 2014. This article seems to be a response to the weird new WiiU content transfer system which admittedly looks a little ridiculous and I can't think of a scenario where I would use it if I had one. It's hard for me to be mad at this article if only because I agree with it - it's not as overly harsh as the title implies, but reads more like a lamenting. It really is incomprehensible why Nintendo hasn't done any major overhaul in this arena. But in any event, the article is fine. Ben Kuchera wrote it and I think he's somebody?
Decent article, but also has been echoed by every wang on the internet for the past 10 years.
There was also an advertisement for 'Golf Management College' at the bottom of this page which got me to laugh.
Article #4 - Launching Civilization: Beyond Earth
First article about a game (I mean I guess article #1 was about a game? still not totally sure.). It's a big history lesson about Alpha Centauri and Civilization. Thought it would be interesting, but it's seriously like 20 pages long and contains factoids like 'Sid loves California Pizza Kitchen'. It ends up being sort of the story behind these game designers that are working on Beyond Earth I think. I had to skim the rest because I ain't got time for that.
For people that love the designers behind the games or learning about the history/process, probably a really good albeit reeeallly long winded read. Seriously long winded.
Article #5 - This is the most accurate Pokemon trailer you'll ever watch
I have a feeling this is going to be about twitch plays pokemon...
Nope! Phew! Article is short blurb about a shared video that's supposed to be I guess a realistic depiction of pokemon games. Harmless, but hardly worth clicking on. Didn't want to watch the video because pokemon.
Article #6 - Unforgiving, sophisticated and vast: Three deaths in The Long Dark
I like this article - a sort of first person narrative of what it's like to play this game (through the first three deaths) that's set in the canadian wilderness by someone who has apparently sunk hundreds (!) of hours in to DayZ. This game sounds like a first person Don't Starve which to me sounds like possibly the only thing that could be worse than Don't Starve, but the article is well done and made me interested. It's a nice way to expose something without doing one of those silly preview pieces that magazines tend to throw together with boilerplate text from the advertising branch of the developer.
. It's like a reverse sexual predator movie where she's an alien. I could only take so much of seeing her drive around looking for men. What a waste. 
