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Year Walk

April 21st

…of ‘flow.’ Meanwhile, on Eurogamer, Rick Lane looks at the challenges in modeling climbing in games.

For those who were curious about Magnus Hildebrandt’s recent Kentucky Route Zero article for Superlevel.de, Dennis Kogel has helpfully translated it into English.

Speaking of German, or rather in German, our Senior Ultra German Correspondent Johannes Köller has hooked us up with another round of excellent games criticism auf Deutsch.

On Videogame Tourism, Rainer Sigl and Christof Zurschmitten have wrapped up their three-part letter series on Year Walk. Also for the same publication, Jannick Gänger wonders what Mass Effect would be…

August-September Roundup

…shooters are essentially linear roller coasters, it’s difficult to convey the feeling of unpredictable attack that comes with real-world terrorism. Although perhaps he is looking in the wrong place – XCOM: Enemy Unknown does a great job of this, albeit in a different genre.

Desmand King from Plus 10 Damage takes a look at Spec Ops: The Line and Year Walk (spoilers for both). There has been a lot written about The Line, but it’s still one of the standout games of 2012 – I was thinking about it last week while watching Apocalypse Now. It falls into the…

November 10th

It’s getting rather dark and rather chilly around here. Another week, another list of links for This Week In Video Game Blogging.

Video Games Both Great and Small

Horror month continues a little past October with Zachary McAnally looking at Slender: The Arrival‘s horror design and Soha El-Saaawi explaining the journey of Year Walk.

Emanuel Maiberg at Kill Screen looks at the new Call of Duty and how the campaign ends up turning you unintentionally into a terrorist and a Nazi. While E.T. Brooking at The Escapist explores the real world space faring weaponry that has

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September 14th

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We Critique Because We Love

At Pop Matters, Jorge Albor writes about living, embodied folklore in Year Walk.

Robert Rath takes to The Escapist to explain what Destiny can teach us about terraforming a planet like, say, Mars.

Shira Chess writes about moral panics, Slender Man and the “Tulpa Effect” at Culture Digitally.

And Now, Foreign Correspondent Joe Köller Has The Floor

Forgive my long absence friends, but I made the grievous mistake of sorting my schedule alphabetically, so I had to address academia and beach reading before being able to return to correspondence.

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March 21st

…alone or together, in a tire fire of a year.

  • Meet the Animal Crossing users who spent up to 2000 hours in game | The Washington Post Shannon Liao talks with Animal Crossing players about completion, burnout, community, nostalgia, and more.
  • The Year We Spent in Animal Crossing: New Horizons | Polygon Nicole Carpenter documents the major intersections over the last year between Animal Crossing‘s events and happenings and ongoing developments in the material world.

“We’re back to New Horizons’ launch date — 365 days later. And who is here to greet us? Zipper

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December 13th

…its serious themes, R.O.M. is not a stuffy or serious game. It strikes a marvelous balance between wry humour and genuine emotion.”

Since I’m on the topic of cyberpunk, this is a great opportunity to bring up Invisible, Inc. which Jake Tucker believes is the ‘Best Strategy Game of 2015’ according to his article on Vice:

The reason Invisible, Inc. is the highest-placing strategy release on VICE Gaming’s end-of-year round up, and my own personal game of the year, is that every single decision matters. Whether it’s closing a door, upgrading an agent or leaving half my

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Far Cry 2

…the best writing about Far Cry 2. Now that I’ve done 10 year posts for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and for Far Cry 2, I am out of games to write 10 year posts about. I badly wish I could be three years away from putting up a ten year retrospective on some game I made at LucasArts or Valve or Amazon – but the waves just didn’t break that way.

That said, I’m working as hard as I can to get you all something you can write about for the next ten years. Thanks so much for all…

The List Jam Roundup

This February, the annual games writing jam took the theme of Lists! I chose it for two reasons, first of all that it’s obviously been a hell of a year since the last writing jam, and I wanted to choose a theme or format that would allow people to easily scope their contributions as big or as small as they were comfortable working with. But secondly, I’ve noticed over the past few years that people have been getting increasingly meta and critical within the year end list period (Into The Spine’s massive guest list is a great example of

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October 2013 – Game Changers

Ah, October. That time of year when you realise you’re never going to finish all of those resolutions you made in January. The month when you open long-forgotten lists of unfinished work and see articles with a deadline of ‘December 2012’ on them. You delete those items and go for a walk instead because CRUNCHY CRUNCHY LEAVES.

This autumn doesn’t just mark the end of a year: for games consoles, it’s the end of a generation (those who play games on a PC can excuse themselves for the rest of the paragraph). The PlayStation 4 and Xbox

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Pathologic

…battlefields. All places to realise power fantasies; all backdrops for tales of extraordinary adventure. America and Japan entice, allure and sell you on your destination. Pathologic and Stalker take your money and strand you in deplorable shitholes.

In his 2006 review of Pathologic for Eurogamer, John Walker grapples with the then-standard practice of numerically scoring a game. Although Walker seems to find the game critically significant, indulgently recounting a number of memorable anecdotes and experiences, in the end of his review he also describes his utter frustration with how to actually give a rating:

Pathologic offers…