// archives

Archive for June, 2009

June 28th

By Ben Abraham ⋅ June 28, 2009 ⋅ 2 comments

This Week In Videogame Blogging is going to have to tend ever-so-slightly towards brevity I’m afraid, as I’ve got exactly two hours to bash this out before I go to a charity event organised by a friend called ‘Drawtism’. I’ll let your ample collective imaginations fill in that one.
First thing I spotted this week was [...]

Okami

By Michel McBride-Charpentier ⋅ June 26, 2009 ⋅ 9 comments

“Oh, our Merciful Mother, Okami Amaterasu…”
In early 2006 Clover Studio released Okami for the Playstation 2 in Japan. Several months later it crossed the oceans to Western audiences in North America and Europe, and eventually found new-found life when re-released for the Wii in 2008. Okami, meaning both ‘Great God’ and ‘Wolf’, was immediately recognized and appreciated by [...]

An Open Invitation to Contribute

By Ben Abraham ⋅ June 24, 2009 ⋅ 4 comments

Critical Distance is a community driven blog and as such we rely on contributors for our posts. Until now we have solicited contributions by invitation only; however we would now like to open it up and invite anyone with an interest in videogame criticism to contribute to Critical Distance.
Critical Distance exists to serve the emerging [...]

June 21st

By Ben Abraham ⋅ June 21, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Welcome to This Week In Videogame Blogging, where I try to round up the best blog posts from the critical gaming blogosphere.
This week, Rob Lefevre’s reflective post about why he runs a gaming website caught my eye. Because of the decision by his managing partner to leave the Games Are Evil website, Lefevre has been [...]

Surfer Girl Reviews Star Wars

By Ben Abraham ⋅ June 18, 2009 ⋅ 8 comments

This is the first entry in a new series for Critical Distance – the writer/critic’s spotlight. This series focuses on the body of writing produced by a single videogame writer, critic or commentator. In this post I turn the spotlight on the mysterious blogger, critic and industry deep-throat that was Surfer Girl and her blog [...]

BioShock

By Michael Clarkson ⋅ June 17, 2009 ⋅ 5 comments

BioShock is the rare game that really does change the way we think about video games, if for no other reason than that it has turned up as an example in almost every discussion of game style, mechanics, story, or design that has been written since its initial release in 2007. BioShock has received excessive [...]

June 14th

By Ben Abraham ⋅ June 14, 2009 ⋅ 2 comments

Time to play catch-up – what posts did I inevitably miss reading last week? First, this piece on Left 4 Dead (the first) from Gregory Weir’s Game, Set, Watch column ‘The Interactive Palette‘. He says that “by creating enemies that can combine their abilities to become even more powerful, Valve significantly increased the complexity of [...]

June 7th

By Ben Abraham ⋅ June 7, 2009 ⋅ 6 comments

Is it really that time of the week again already? I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the whole “passage of time” thing – surely it’s some sort of crazy conspiracy…
Much like this week’s announcement of Left 4 Dead 2 by Valve – which is apparently a crazy conspiracy to charge money for a [...]

Gears of War

By Justin Keverne ⋅ June 2, 2009 ⋅ 2 comments

As two of the most successful Xbox 360 exclusive titles to date (with a Metacritic average 93.5%), millions of people have played the Gears of War games, and even those who haven't  know what to expect: muscle bound soldiers in enough body armour to make a tank jealous shouting macho insults while chain-sawing aliens into [...]

—