Moving Pixels Podcast: Politics and Pathos in The Witcher 2

I don't know when it happened, but Rick Dakan has become the new Tom Cross. He hates everything.

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.

Moving Pixels Podcast: Politics and Pathos in The Witcher 2

Max Payne 3: A Shooting Gallery with Teeth

There are probably a lot of things that I want to say about Max Payne 3.

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:

Max Payne 3: A Shooting Gallery with Teeth

Moving Pixels Podcast: Who Do You Not Want to Be?

Not quite sure that this conversation ended up being what I thought it was going to be, but the intention was to consider how games sometimes put us into the position of playing roles that we don't want to play.

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?

Moving Pixels Podcast: Who Do You Not Want to Be?

Like Doom, In Heels

In preparation for an upcoming podcast on No One Lives Forever, I've been playing through this older title.

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.

Like 'Doom', In Heels

The End of the Adventure Game

On a whim, I picked up the first episode of The Walking Dead over the weekend.

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.

The End of the Adventure Game

Moving Pixels Podcast: Putting Fez into Perspective

If you haven't had enough of the talk on Fez, that is our topic for this week's Moving Pixels podcast.

We talk gameplay, plot, and, of course, the Fez community's interesting commitment to secrecy in the Internet Age.

Moving Pixels Podcast: Putting Fez into Perspective

Review: The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

Many video game characters are simple. Many are simplistic. Geralt is basic.

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...

Review: The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

Little Naked Men in Hats

Did you know that if you title a blog post "Little Naked Men in Hats" that you will have hundreds of hits in the first seven minutes following it going live? It's true.

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:

Little Naked Men in Hats