This week, Critical Distance passed the auspicious milestone of one hundred thousand pageviews. So to that one person refreshing the page constantly for a week straight – thank you.
And now, onto more serious matters, and Eric Swain has continued his tireless efforts of scouring the videogame blogosphere for our collective benefit. In a yin-yang pairing, The Game Overthinker proudly proclaims “I heart Bayonetta”, while Gunthera1 writes at The Borderhouse after having played the demo of the game with some friends and concludes that “the game is the perfect visual example of male gaze” [mirror].
Eric Swain also had a reaction to the FFVIII “Squall’s Dead” theory, which I encountered for the first time this week, comparing the idea to a similar reading of Mulholland Drive. (Confession time: I’ve never seen Mulholland Drive.) Swain also asked this week, ‘Where is the last 1/3rd of Brutal Legend?’
G Christopher Williams brings his best game this week with two pieces at PopMatter’s Moving Pixels blog; “Is Suda 51 the Alfred Hitchcock of Video Games?” as well as ‘How games might challenge the tyranny of authorship’
Jim Rossignol had a remarkably busy week, announcing his follow-up book [mirror] to 2008’s This Gaming Life. I for one can’t wait for the as-yet untitled work. Rossignol also talked about online communities, the site Rock Paper Shotgun as a community [mirror], and a bit about how the infamous Sunday Papers regular feature ties into and reinforces the community.
Kirk Hamilton finds out what it would be like “If my games could talk” with important implications for any backlog of games.
With Bioshock 2 and other sequels having now had time to arrive and settle, sequels in general became a hot topic this week with both Mitch Krpata and Michael Abbott talking about the proclivity of the industry towards game sequels. Krpata’s piece, ‘Why we need sequels’, appeared just hours before Michael Abbott’s ‘Sequel 101’ so you’d be forgiven for thinking they were working from the same playbook. As always, great minds think alike.
In ‘On my shoulder whispering’ Abbott begins with an exploration of the classical roots of modern tales of heroism and conflict, and ends up talking about how Bioshock 2 resonated with him on the themes of fatherhood.
David Carlton has been thinking about the changing dynamic that spoilers have with respect to shorter, independent games. It made me rethink my own policy, as it is something that I wrote about earlier this week for my own online diary/blog.
Chris Livingston wrote about Stalker: Call of Pripyat this week, recounting an exciting dynamic and emergent story [mirror]. I actually had a very similar experience at a similar point in the game, having been playing it this week myself (and it is glorious).
Mike Schiller wrote about ‘Videogames & art as inspired by Autechre’.
Jamin Brophy-Warren editor of Killscreen Magazine wrote at Killscreen on Good about how games are one of the worst media industries for accessibility.
I want to know when The Atlantic gained such a stable of excellent bloggers that talk about videogames. This week A. Serwer wrote an entry called ‘Welcome To Rapture’ and Evan Narcisse hit a homerun with “Wrex in Effect, or, Deep Space and the Negro/Injun/Krogan Problem” (thanks to Kate Simpson for the latter article).
A reminder that for all TWIVGB posts on Critical Distance comments are turned off by default to encourage discussion on the original entries, and we can always be reached via the contact page.
Help us prevent link rot by alerting us to inactive links! This page was last updated on October 21, 2018.