Search Results for “sound” – Page 11

Assassin’s Creed II

…and time isn’t due just to its visuals”, wrote Kevin Van Ord, “Its high-quality sound design is equally responsible, delivering a busy-sounding Florence while still allowing the little quips of citizens commenting on your acrobatics to shine through.” The lively rendition of Italian gesture and social interaction patterns in AC2 may also help one overlook the occasional hammy performance. In “Assassin’s Creed Taught Me Italian […]”, language professor Simone Begni describes how “Anime-like” games like AC2 can be used as tools for language acquisition. “These animated, interactive adventures serve as fully inhabitable environments that enhance language and culture acquisition.” By…

June 23rd

…Pasts: Strategy Games and Ecology | Play The Past Peter Christiansen offers a brief history of ecological mechanics in strategy games, observing a pattern of gradual simplification that has been broken by Civilization VI‘s latest expansion.

Sexting With A Robot Is Just About As Weird As You’d Expect | Kotaku Kate Gray rediscovers the frustrated, janky art of bot sexting via Kara Stone and Nadine Lessio’s Cyber Sext Adventure.

“Cyber Sext Adventure is neither a bot nor generated content; it is a Twine game, authored to look like a bot, sound like a bot, react like…

October 13th

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Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 – Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster Kimimi takes a fresh look at one of Castlevania‘s less-appreciated installments.
The Mumbling of Control | Unwinnable Jeremy Signor digs into the foreboding sound design at the heart of what makes Control so creepy.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN – DEEP HELL Skeleton reflects broadly on the importance and value of horror games.
Falling From Heaven | RE:BIND Catherine Brinegar profiles a game about bein’ Lucifer ‘n killin’ stuff.
October Spookfest: Misadventures of Laura Silver | Unwinnable Gingy Gibson explores a spooky murder mystery which subverts the

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May 2020

…Do Horror Games Sound So Beautiful? – Jacob Geller (29:14)

Jacob Geller highlights and celebrates the role of particular musical cues in the linchpin moments of popular horror games. (Manual captions)

Why Do We Love Skateboarding Games So Much? – Writing on Games (11:57)

Skateboarding games have aged well because they’re more tangibly about unrestricted physical movement (whether ‘realistic’ or not) than other extreme sports games can be, posits Writing on Games. (Manual captions)[Contains embedded advertising]

Fake Newspaper Publications In Video Games – Bobdunga (12:59)

Isn’t it weird how frequently games use newspapers as props

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Resident Evil 2

…Design is particularly salient to discussions of horror games. Ethan Horn points out that in survival horror games like RE2, a lot of the work of horror must exist outside of what the player is able to control:

It’s important to remember that at the beginning, with games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil, the atmosphere made the game. The atmosphere did its work through dilapidated structures, eerie soundscapes punctuated with screams and roars, dark environments and the constant threat of an inhuman aggressor. Verbs, how the players could interact with the game world, had a lesser emphasis.

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Xenogears, Xenosaga, Xenoblade

…faith in a game some would characterize as anti-theistic.

Writing for his blog, Aaron Suduiko applies Leibniz’ Monadology to the game to show how it dethrones authorial intent. As obscure as that conclusion may sound, what this means is that it’s the cast’s relationship with the player that lets them smash the chains of fate. Because the player inhabits a position similar to Klaus’s when he creates the world, the player is just as much a god as Zanza or Meyneth. In Leibnizian terms, this means they can affect an otherwise deterministic system.

To One’s Own Future

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Deadly Premonition

…ending “both disturbing and heart-wrenching.”

Shaun Prescott’s look back at Deadly Premonition (in an article that requires the Wayback Machine to access) embraces the tone and suggests that the murky graphics and sound design actually beautifully supplement the world of Greenvale. The piece describes the game as creating an “impressionistic world” in which the real mixes with the unreal in a unsettling way. It forces the player to clash their understanding of how games should feel against the compelling artificiality of the world of Deadly Premonition.

To be engrossed in such a world is a dramatic sensation. While…

Sonic the Hedgehog

…throughout the series. Morgan Troper at Vice:

Sonic Adventure 2‘s soundtrack represents the perfect amount of zeitgeist pandering. And while it may sound grandiose, it was also something of a gateway: As a prepubescent youth with only a passive interest in contemporary popular music, this was my first extended exposure to anything in the vicinity of punk or hip-hop.

As Allegra Frank revels at Polygon, “‘City Escape’ — man, “City Escape” is unforgettable.”

Dedicated Disquisitions – Sonic 2006 and Mania

After Sonic left the Dreamcast, the vision of the character shattered completely due to the…

August 16th

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Three articles this week looking at art in games along axes of production, technical constraint, and technical breaking points.

“Mythic Quest” and the Pursuit of Anti-Capitalist Media | Current Affairs Ciara Moloney looks at Mythic Quest‘s portrayal of the production (and compromise to integrity) of art in what could be any commercial industry, but in this case is videogames.
How ’80s House Came to Define the Sound of the Sega Genesis | Paste Dia Lacina sets the sonic stage (lol) for Streets of Rage and other bangers.
The Beautiful Rebellion of Video Game Bugs (how

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July 11th

…murder mystery machines.”

Sight and Sound

Next up, some criticism focused on objects and sensations, the values they import from outside, and the impressions they make upon design.

Serve me through the wall | KRITIQAL Nate Kiernan muses on the discordant melancholy of Lofi Ping Pong.
Object Oriented #01: Keys | getObject_ Paul Walker-Emig, in this innagural episode of an ongoing series, goes deep on the key-as-videogame object–the design practices in engenders, the values it conveys, the ideas it instills.

“We are often placed in the role of interloper; the keys…