Pac-Man Will Die: Cynicism and Retro Game “Endings”

A fairly brief and (hopefully) pithy little posting this week. This post reminds me a bit of some other blog entries that I have done in the recent past (such as The Satisfaction of a Switch and Elegance Is a Shotgun), in which I ruminated about some traditional video game tropes and their general strangeness in a narrative or aesthetic context. In this case, I got to pondering the weird consequence of narratives that lack win states, specifically in classic coin-op games. Mostly the inherent and inevitable failure of protagonists in arcade games breeds a weird cynicism in early attempts at adding narrative elements to games.

I probably say all this in a much more straightforward manner here:

Pac-Man Will Die: Cynicism and Retro Game “Endings”

Experiencing Waking: Thomas Brush’s Coma

Thia week, I kept things simple with a review of Thomas Brush's indie flash game, Coma. It is awfully engaging by the way:

Experiencing Waking: Thomas Brush’s Coma

Moving Pixels Podcast: Games We Want to Play

Based on screenshots, teasers, and gameplay demos, the Moving Pixels podcast crew discusses upcoming titles that look exciting, disappointing, and just plain intimidating (I’m looking at you Portal 2 gameplay demo):

Moving Pixels Podcast: Games We Want to Play

Why Is the Femme Fatale?: Considering the Four Faces of Lady Noir

We're a little light on reviews this month, and I've been spending time poking around New Grounds a lot in the last few weeks. I'll be posting a discussion of the very cool little flash game from that site, Coma, next week. In the meantime, I thought that I would write up a brief discussion of a flash collaboration called Lady Noir that was also posted over at New Grounds a couple of months ago.

It's a neat little set of brief vignettes all focusing around a femme fatale figure. What is cool about it is that because they have been collected together you can see some interesting similarities and differences between them that suggest what a traditional (or non-traditional) femme fatale amounts to.

As always, my thoughts can be found over at PopMatters

Why Is the Femme Fatale?: Considering the Four Faces of Lady Noir

Abusing the World: An Aesthetics of Demolition

A discussion of breaking stuff in games. Pretty, no?

Abusing the World: An Aesthetics of Demolition

Moving Pixels Podcast: The World of Max Payne

So, the reason that I have been chattering about Max Payne off and on the last few weeks is because I played it in order to prep for this podcast:

Moving Pixels Podcast: The World of Max Payne

Possession As a Metaphor for the Player-Character Relationship

I've been messing around with a lot of freeware lately, and the best of that experience has been the 2003 game, 5 Days a Stranger. Since I often think about the relationship between myself as a player and the character that I am inhabiting, I got really interested in the way in which possession becomes a major way of driving the plot of the game.

This new essay might serve as kind of a companion piece to the one that I wrote a couple of months ago called "But Who Am I?: Schizophrenia as a Metaphor for the Player-Character Relationship", recalling some similar ideas:

Possession As a Metaphor for the Player-Character Relationship

8-Bit Twilight Eclipse Interactive by Doctor Octoroc

Just a bit of 8-bit fun from the ever charming Doctor Octoroc:

8-Bit Twilight Eclipse Interactive by Doctor Octoroc