I’ll be posting an episode of the Moving Pixels podcast next Monday, in which we discuss Playdead’s Limbo. Having completed our recording it occurred to me that we had never discussed one element of the game: a little boy is dismembered in Limbo with an astonishing regularity.
Another week, another podcast. This week the Moving Pixels crew discusses the (in my estimation) excellent, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne.
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.
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):
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.
