Search Results for “journey” – Page 11

June 2015

…and pretend you’re playing along.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0F-1dMBEGY&list=PLhyKYa0YJ_5DMa0bI8pwVum4SzV8U86od&index=1

Josh Trevett continued his critical playthrough of the first Souls game, this time highlighting the way the level design reflects Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. This series brings a lot of useful insights to the game, and I look forward to seeing more of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBlBtbdwbzE

Marsh Davies of RPS took a look at where Dark Souls 2 less than shines in the latest installment in his “Fail Forward” series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7Td0aesimw

And though not specifically Souls-related, Stephen Beirne’s latest Two Minute Game Crit looked at weapon degradation, something that…

July Roundup: ‘Pure Fun’

…fun more accessible in some games than others, and if so, why? This month, I want to hear your thoughts on fun, meaning making, and where the two meet.

Joseph Dwan kicks us off this month by examining the marketing trend in games that tells us making our own path is fun. Yet, whether this fun is made in open world games, or games where players set their own goals, Dwan finds them only amusing at best. For him, fun happens when he’s taken on a quest or a journey with defined characters and stories. In other words,…

August Roundup: ‘Nostalgia’

…in my 30’s, I can’t ignore the text. The words immediately register in my head. The magic I brought to it, the sacred act of playing it, the mysteries it contained, and the story it allowed me to create for myself are all gone.

Stephanie Jennings of Ludogabble recalls the game that awakened her love of horror, Resident Evil 4, and reminisces about that first journey through it, a feeling that can never be restored:

I believe that our nostalgia is a pursuit of that initial contact with a game, when the game was full of…

September 20th

…Carolyn Petit muses that what is missing from Mario Maker is a sense of continuity or a journey for the player:

You can share levels with other players, but those levels exist in isolation. Someone plays the level, and finishes it, and that’s it. You can’t create even a rudimentary world map to string, say, four or eight stages together, which I’d love to do. I want players to be able to design not just stages, but journeys for me to go on; the road to Bowser’s castle, the pleasant pathways and underground tunnels and flying fortresses that

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Episode 30 – Everything’s Better Embed

Concluding this year’s series of interviews of the authors and editors of video game criticism publications we turn our eyes to gonzo. Cara Ellison‘s Embed With Games: A Year on the Couch with Game Developers brings the long form, lifestyle gonzo journalism to video games as she chronicles her year long journey around the world to see various small and independent game artists in their element. Come and listen to us discuss the influence of an artist’s location, the Hawthorne effect, the process of choosing who to cover in the first place and much more.

We hope you

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April 17th

…simply be boiled down to the question of “ludonarrative dissonance.” Here we have three pieces in one week that address interaction from the perspective of narrative pacing.

Quantum Break is better TV than videogame | Kill Screen Reid McCarter observes that Quantum Break is actually faster paced as a TV show, offering less excitement in moments that ought to be more action-packed.
Storytelling Engines: The Story Arc Has Ended and Yet the Game Keeps Going | PopMatters Eric Swain argues that emergent story arcs struggle to hew to the same pacing as the larger journey that the

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April 24th

…a simple way to teach these new users how to conduct themselves online by rewarding those who quickly adapted to the preferred communicative modes and punishing (and often driving away) those who did not.”

Ghosts

Agency also comes to light in writing about the different roles the player can take on, from modder to director to participant in history.

Mitu’s Blog | The Tiniest Shark Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris presents a pretty excellent and didactic example of modding as games criticism
Podcast Episode 62: “Faith has been a huge part of my journey” with Navid Khonsari…

May 1st

…and esoteric as hell,but more than that it is the shared pain, elation, and surprise of thousands. It is the adventure of gamers as they band together to fumble through the dark, and the pleasure and joy that comes from such a journey.”

How Dark Souls III designs around our expectations | ZAM

Steven Strom discusses Dark Souls, technicity, and the processes of learning and unlearning games.

“”Prepare to die,” its PC re-release said. “Prepare to Die,” the Dark Souls marketing campaign said more frequently. At first I took these as yet more examples of…

May 22nd

…a very specific “war is hell” vibe, there’s massive dissonance there. Doom drops that pretense entirely. It wants you to know, from its very first minutes, that this is a game about having fun shooting and bludgeoning DEMONS FROM HELL IN SPACE.”

Scouting out

Speaking of SPACE, this week brings two particularly astute pieces on games as worlds and places.

The Evolution of Dark Souls Level Design (and Bloodborne!) | YouTube (video, auto-captions) Super Bunnyhop breaks down some of the spatial techniques used in the Souls games to give players a rewarding journey.
Gamist…

June 12th

…that Lionhead had such a great history of innovation,’ said one source. ‘We’d already done experimental things with stuff like Kinect, with Journey, that proved we could pull off different ideas. ‘The other thing you could say is that Lionhead was the studio that Microsoft was willing to risk.’ “

“An open-world game is cluttered”

Peeling back the lid on non-stop, nonsensical action adventures, two games critics look at narratives that have fallen flat.

Uncharted 4.5 This comedic text adventure acts as an interactive satirical critique of Nathan Drake’s dramatic mishaps.
By Aiming Big,…