I do admire Tale of Tales in general and what they have done and are doing for games as an art form. That being said, I'm rather mixed about their newest effort still.
At times, mesmerizing and intriguing. At times, tedious and repetitive. I'm still not even sure that I played Bientôt l’été correctly:
A little speculation on the thematic interests of Grand Theft Auto V, especially given the possibilities that the viewpoints offered by multiple protagonists might provide the series:
Grand Theft Auto V Giving up on the Dream of American Upward Mobility?
Spent the last week or so with the new Hitman game and kind of fell in love with its slow methodical gameplay and hard boiled tone, which is liberally spiced with an equal measure of the absurd.
With the the impending release of its final episode, it is time to talk about the penultimate episode of what might be the best game of the year:
Like I asid, busy week for Dishonored over at PopMatters.
This is my actual review of the game, as opposed to some of the stray observations about bits of the game that I posted the last couple of weeks.
In the end, in evaluating the overall quality of the game, I find myself a bit torn over its successfulness as an experience.
This appears as if it will be a busy week at PopMatters for Dishonored with a blog entry on Thursday from Scott Juster, as well as probably a review of the game from me rounding out the week.
Here are a few more thoughts on the game before then, though:
The Heart of an Empress: The Surveillance State and Dishonored
I've been moving through Dishonored pretty slowly. Which is kind of what this post is about: why I am moving through Dishonored very slowly is all about the meta-game.
“Remember to Save Often”: The Meta-Game Tactics of Dishonored
Thoughts on a game that I sadly will likely not get a chance to play (rooting for an eventual 360 port, though).
Admittedly, as one poster suggests, I may be misunderstanding the relationship between the persona mechanic in Liberation and its signification regarding Aveline's mixed racial heritage, but I still think that there is something potentially interesting about the way the game might represent putting on and taking off identities and the experience of doing so.
Experiencing Racial Identities: Passing in Assassin's Creed: Liberation
I have been speaking of my admiration for FTL for the past few weeks in various articles at PopMatters, so it was good to get the opportunity to get some additional opinions.
I did find myself in the role of the apologist for the game, though, in this week's podcast, as Rick and Nick did not, perhaps, share my enthusiasm for the brutally difficult grind that is FTL.
Moving Pixels Podcast: Spaceships and Sadism, The Universe of FTL
I didn't quite expect to see this article go up so quickly at PopMatters. I wrote it only a couple of nights ago, though some of its content has been bubbling about in my brain since my recent playthrough of Sleeping Dogs.
The prostitute has become almost an expected feature in gaming, especially in the open world game, and I wanted to consider how games present this kind of character as opposed to the manner in which such figures of vice and salaciousness appear in other storytelling media.
Inspired by a recent discussion at Gamers With Jobs about how to introduce your kids (especially those that haven't played a whole lot of games) to video games, I thought I'd talk a bit about turning my 13-year-old into a little murderer.
Jorge Albor of the Experience Points podcast was kind enough to join Nick and I to discuss the latest episode of The Walking Dead.
I was excited that he was along for the ride as he has written some good stuff on the series and especially about this episode's surprising turn away from leaving every important decision in the protagonist and player's hands.
Moving Pixels Podcast: The Paths Not Taken in The Walking Dead
So, I remain focused on my current obsession, what I have lately come to call the mini-roguelike. The Binding of Isaac and FTL as shortened forms of the consequential formula of the roguelike are games that I seem to spend more hours with of late than "longer titles."
This time up, though, my interest is in how unscripted and more choice-driven these games might be in contrast to other titles. In particular, I find contrasting Bioshock's deterministic view of gaming experiences with what I am thinking of as more self actualizing games, the mini-roguelikes, to be somewhat interesting.
Ah, the mini-roguelike, my new favorite form of mini-punishment.
One part Binding of Isaac, two parts Oregon Trail, add a sci fi backdrop, mix well, and you have FTL. A little game that is sucking hours and hours of my life away.
FTL: Faster Than Light Appeals to Some Kind of Inherent Masochism in a Gamer
Racy title, huh? Though not a racy game at least by the average estimation of such.
I spent some time with what I believe to be Edmund McMillen's most controversial title, and I wrote a bit about my response (well, more than a bit, really) to the grotesque imagery and gameplay. However, I am equally interested in how McMillen juxtaposes things that seem like polar opposites in order to unseat our expectations.
Probably it would just be best if you read it yourself.
It plays well. Yet, it lacks a soul.
This week on the podcast we discuss Sleeping Dogs. A game I had a hard time pulling myself away from and yet a game that feels like some essential ingredient is missing from as well.
Moving Pixels Podcast: Disarming the Open World with Sleeping Dogs
Just checking in with a review of Darksiders II in which I argue that sometimes good gameplay needs stronger context to get a player motivated to play. Oddly, Nick Dinicola wrote a blog post that also ran today that kind of addresses a similar issue as he argues that sometimes the opposite is true (sort of), using Driver: San Francisco as an example of such. The two essays read well as unintentional companion pieces, perhaps.
I have been playing FTL and am hooked on it in a way very reminiscent of my obsession with The Binding of Isaac. My latest post is some attempt to explain what motivates the compulsive play of these two games for me by trying to find their commonalities.
So, I'm interested in the brutality of Sleeping Dogs.
Not that open world crime games aren't violent, but there is a moment late in the game, that is really surprisingly intense.
I published little last month. Of course, I played little as well. Summer doldrums, other projects, no access to a console, tons of reasons.
But now there's an open world game on the scene. I'll probably be writing a few pieces on Sleeping Dogs, as these virtual spaces (even when there are only mild variations on the typical iterations of the genre, as is the case with this game) tend to always open a few interesting avenues of discussion.
In this instance, I am back to an old hobby horse of mine: the messages sent by clothing your avatar.
Dressing Up and Dressing Down: Clothing, Semiotics, and Sleeping Dogs
So, I never played X-Com. It is one of those blanks in my gaming life that I probably needed to fill.
That being said, I get it, but I don't love returning to it. A difficult interface and graphics that leave me a bit cold fail to thrill. It's interesting design admittedly, but the other guys advocate for it a bit more strongly than I do:
Today's Moving Pixels column largely concerns how conditioning to game difficulty may alter game design choices. I kind of consider how the shift from arcade-level difficulty to console ease affects how we think about how challenging a game should be.
I think that Nick and I had a really good discussion about the pleasures of shooters. We go well beyond the obvious stuff as well, looking at more than just Call of Duty and the like.
Nick had a really good concept for what he wanted to discuss this week about the manner in which games simulate physicality. We aren't talking so much about Wii and Kinect, as we are about how games make us see things from various perspectives and how games add drama by making us "feel" them in an almost physical way.
I think we explain it better during the podcast. So, please, have a listen.
Ah, League of Legends, you always get me thinking about player conduct and good sportsmanship... and mostly bad sportsmanship...
The only writing that I had the chance to get at this week was a review of Civilization V: Gods & Kings:
Earlier this week we posted our follow up discussion of Telltale's The Walking Dead.
I'm still in love with the game, especially its commitment to player choice and how those choices allow the player to mould and shape the game's story. Much of Nick and I's discussion revolves around such choices and their consequences.
Well, I'm a few days behind on updating my PopMatters work (quite honestly, of late I feel a few days behind on life).
However, I did post a review of LEGO Batman 2 last week, focusing more on the game's new approach to the camera than maybe anything else. A new approach that comes with some nice elements and some not so nice.
If you are at all interested in the creative process, in what makes creators tick, and how they deal with their creation once it is out there, you should see Indie Game: The Movie--even if you don't play video games.
Nick proposed this topic recently in response to some negative experiences with shops and shopping in single player games.
We often get wrapped up in talking about multiplayer economies because they have real world implications, but single player game economies have a definite effect on how we play and what we value in game.
A few notes on the atypical (atypical for a video game) physique of the female barbarian from Diablo III:
So, we decided to chat a bit about Kickstarter and its influence on the financing of game development.
You can check it out at the usual spot:
Moving Pixels Podcast: Kickstarter, Crowd Sourcing, and Game Development
So, a few more thoughts on Lollipop Chainsaw today. I've talked about what I think Suda51 means by aligning himself with punk before, so I decided to go down that road again.
Much of the thinking on it is inspired by my wife's thought. She has a longer history with punk than I do, so she filled in a number of gaps in my thinking.
Lollipops and Chainsaws: Doesn't Anyone Listen to Punk Anymore?
It's kind of weird to have one of my reviews featured at the top of PopMatters front page. I can't recall that ever happening before.
I will have a few more thoughts on Lollipop Chainsaw up tomorrow in the Moving Pixels blog, though. More exploitation, more offensiveness, more Suda.
I'm not exactly sure what we talked about when we talked about Max Payne 3.
The game is awfully good, though. One of the year's best. So far, that is.
This week Rick, Nick, and I discuss what I consider to be one of the year's best games so far, Telltale's The Walking Dead.
I'm so looking forward to see how the episodic content develops over the next few months because the game is such an interesting evolution of the adventure genre.
Moving Pixels Podcast: Reviving the Adventure Genre with The Walking Dead
Some more general thoughts on Alan Wake's American Nightmare, as this is more of a review essay. It fails a bit in my mind in its approach to horror this time out, and I explain why I think so.
It is still playable, and I do like the environments a lot.
I swear I'll talk about a new game eventually again.
Been playing Diablo III, Alan Wake's American Nightmare, and, of course Max Payne.
However, before we get back to the present, a little more time in the way back machine with the delightful Cate Archer:
In this case, though, Nick and I are right, the Witcher 2 does some pretty cool things with its branching narratives and convoluted political plotting.
One thing is: Max Payne 3 is so good that it makes my teeth cry.
In the meantime, though, I thought that I would write a little bit about how the game fares as a shooting gallery and how that relates to my sense of what is enjoyable about a shooting gallery (and what is not).
I suspect that I'll probably have more to say about the game in the coming weeks. In the meantime:
While unlikable characters exist in other mediums, generally protagonists are created to evoke sympathy. But sometimes one just hates a lead or a novelist or filmmaker or other storyteller wants to tell the story of a cad, a jerk, a fool. What happens when you not only have to put up with such a character, but you actually have to be that person?
This is one I missed the first time around, and despite dated graphics and some poorly paced levels, I am surprised by its depth, attention to detail, and sheer variety of levels and things to do in an FPS. Plus, Cate Archer is a pretty cool customer, much more fun (as a character) than many other curvy brunettes with British accents.
I know that Telltale has experimented a bit with that geriatric genre, the adventure game, in recent years, but what I played is fresh, mature, and very, very modern. This is probably the best thing that Telltale has done to date, and it bodes well for a direction to really take this genre that people of my age are constantly sighing over the eventual disappearance of.
We talk gameplay, plot, and, of course, the Fez community's interesting commitment to secrecy in the Internet Age.
He kills. He fucks. Rinse. Repeat.
I'm not sure why Geralt works, though. It may have something to do with the mechanics that surround this character. The level of complexity of combat--preparation, choosing the right weapon, choosing the right manner of approach, executing--juxtaposes the simplicity of the character, the basicness of the segments between combat that serve as the lull in play. His simplicity is a kind of pleasure given how tricky monster hunting is and how involved working out the politics and all the other complexities that make up both play and plot of a Witcher game.
Maybe I should have written about this idea more in my review. However, since I started blogging regularly, I've found that my reviews are more like reviews than the review essays that I wrote for years before. Maybe next time I blog...
That being said, my discussion of Fez (a game about a little naked man in a hat) focuses on the game's ending for the most part and what I think it suggests about the nature of games, which is: it's the play, stupid.
I know that a lot of people are intrigued by the community springing up around the game (and I am, too), but I wanted to discuss some of what the game seems to be suggesting about our relationship to the pixel because everybody else is writing nice pieces already about the community thing. Hunting three dimensional pixels (cubes) is the central interest of the game, after all.
I will also be discussing my interpretation of the game's unusual ending on next Monday's Moving Pixels podcast. In some ways, I think that I probably explained my thinking on it better verbally than in writing. However, there are definitely a few thoughts that I had about it that are only present in my written post:
This week the Moving Pixels podcast switches from interactive mode to passive mode, as we look at some live action versions of video games. We discuss the episodic content of Assassin's Creed: Lineage and Mortal Kombat: Legacy. We also watched the short film Portal: No Escape.
It's surprising how much better these adaptations of games are (for the most part) by comparison to some of the things that Hollywood has attempted with games.
Oh, and Scott Juster and Jorge Albor are also in on the conversation, which, of course, makes it all the better.
