The International House of Mojo

Agree with this absolutely, still. I've always been frustrated that there seems to be some received wisdom that Tim is great at story but no good at gameplay. Not only is it, as you pointed out, very hard to separate the two in his work, but I just disagree with the opinion that his gameplay is bad in the first place. Count me in as another one who thought that Psychonauts was one of the most mechanically sound 3D platformers I've played. I also thoroughly enjoyed Brutal Legend (for the most part) and always enjoyed the little details that interactivity brought to his adventure games, that could never have been achieved in something non-interactive.

"The probability is low that he’d played these games as a preparatory measure."

Isn't that precisely what he admitted to in his conversation with Ron?

And progress on the resurrection of old Mojo articles lumbers forward! The relevance of this piece takes a slight hit with Tim actually making an old school adventure again, but oh well.

I should probably note that as wrongheaded as I felt Alex Riviello was with that old article of his that spurred this one, I generally admire his game writings a lot, and can definitely recommend his columns at badassdigest,com, where a few CHUD vets have migrated.