This Year In Videogame Blogging: 2018
…examines a Polygon article on Fallout 76 and is frankly a little disturbed by the slavish devotion to the brand to the point of the author disregarding his own feelings while playing it.
Battlefield V
fallout
April 26th
…the comments.
Tom Chick reluctantly finished his great series on the new game Demigod this week, with his ‘Final Word‘. The discussion surrounding whether reviewers should evaluate the quality at launch versus what it will be once issues are resolved is discussed and handled in a most excellent way, I felt.
Michael Abbott at the Brainy Gamer this week commented on the change to the ending of Fallout 3 that Bethesda’s Pete Hines outlined would happen with the last piece of DLC for the game. Abbott was sad that the lesson learned from player feedback on Fallout 3…
October 31st
…of ‘bigotry’. So when they’re talking about ‘expectations of the self’ and ‘things that are just a little bit off’, there’s no darker than pale-beige image associated with what’s right and normal.”
At PopMatters, G Christopher Williams examines ‘Fallout: the scrounging simulator’, for what its teaching kids and adults alike about the benefits of frugality in these tough economic times. Staying with the PopMatters crew for the moment, and Fallout: New Vegas, Rick Dakan looks at ‘Sex Workers and Sex Slavery in Fallout: New Vegas’:
For all its bugginess and slightly outdated graphics and stiff animations, this
…
February 5th
…I would have changed: Twilight Princess.” Going over what was fundamentally off about the game and how it could have been great and innovative instead of the stagnant entry of the series.
Eric Schwarz of the Critical Missive blog is back again, this time writing about Rage and multiple design missteps it takes.
Rowan Kaiser in his weekly Joystiq column on role-playing games turns his eye to the two most recent Fallout entries, comparing the different rhythms to the quest structures in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. The former is based on free form explorations whereas the…
This Year In Videogame Blogging: 2015
…bring the whole epic 9 game cycle to a close.
On his blog Normal Rascal, Stephen Beirne lamented the loss of the Codec sequences of previous Metal Gear Solid titles as, to him, they were an expressionistic menu option that delivered a thematically rich safe space that could be played with.
Gaby of Girl From The Machine looked at “Queerness in Metal Gear Solid” series and the problematic ways it presents its queer characters as punchlines or vessels of villainy.
Fallout 4
Fallout 4 is an apocalypse outside of context, so says Yussef Cole, as the…
Kill Screen archive
…league of legends and the problem of online communities
…
June Roundup: Time
…in Night in the Woods, time is as much an economic influence as it is an intellectual one.
Read it now
Seth Tomko
Perceptions of Time in Fallout 4
At Level Skip, Seth Tomko compares the protagonist of Fallout 4 to other characters forcibly removed from their moment in history like Captain America and Billy Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse-Five. For Tomko, Fallout 4 reworks notions of time as a linear process by displacing the player in several key moments. Like other stories featuring an “out of time” protagonist, Fallout 4 humanizes the player character by removing…
November 28th
…who prevents wars, stops trouble, and does so with the lightest touch possible. You could be an unstoppable assassin, but you aren’t. You’re better than that.
Radek Koncewicz at the Significant Bits blog brilliantly looks at Segues in games: how they are functional from a technical perspective yet rarely present a ‘smooth’ transition, belying the very name.
Robert ‘Radiator’ Yang writes in response to Jim Sterling’s Destructoid piece [mirror] of the previous week in which Sterling held up a Fallout: New Vegas character as a positive, matter-of-fact depiction of a gay character. Yang has ten points expounding…
November 22nd
…put in, then feel around for the walls, the limitations of exactly what could be achieved in that dark place.”
The Elephants in the Room
AAA is going strong this week, with the recent releases of both Fallout 4 and Rise of the Tomb Raider. At Gamasutra, Simon Parkin looked at the conflict between narrative and violence in games like Tomb Raider, noting how, for instance:
Nathan Drake becomes an unsettling blend of chirpy wise-cracker and insatiable murderer. This kind of observation has become so prevalent with regard to blockbuster games that even its mention…
December 6th
Hello Everyone, this is Zolani taking over for Kris on This Week in Videogame Blogging. Let’s get to it!
Big Box
Aevee Bee wrote two stellar pieces of writing on Destiny this week, one of them is a series of mini-reviews on the game’s flavour text, the other a longer piece on what makes Destiny curious and interesting as a massive budget title.
Over at Kotaku, Patricia Hernandez does well articulating Fallout 4’s struggle between its role-playing roots and its streamlining towards action-game systems. At the Mary Sue, Bryan Cebulski makes recommendations of literature for Fallout
…