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metroid

September 12th

I know it’s late this week, so let’s get right into it.

There are two video essays this week. Continuing his series examining Shadow of the Colossus and Ico, TheGameLocker published the third part this week. At the Escapist Daniel Floyd in his weekly video essay examines a single choice in Mass Effect 2, the implications and how only video games can present this moral dilemma as it does.

Michael Abbott explores the backlash G4’s review of Metroid: Other M inspired because actual criticism had the gall to slip into the piece.

Kateri looks at how

December 12th

…shit if games are art.

IGN UK’s Michael Thomsen, the same man who declared Metroid Prime to be the Citizen Kane of video games, writes a lucid Contrarian Corner post on Fallout: New Vegas [mirror].

Jose Gonzalez Bruno on his blog gamereader (which he should tell some people exists) writes about the “Tyranny of the Masses” [mirror] with regards to the Mass Effect 2 player data, saying:

As we have seen, publishers and developers have profoundly different ways of looking at the world, and this creates the possibility of conflict when it comes to interpreting player

May 8th

…the realization of the wasted potential found in so many ass-kicking video game women like Samus and Lara Croft. FemShep is not Barbie-fied supermodel who kicks ass in revealing clothing so that male gamers can have their violence with a side of tits and ass. And while the option exists for her to have sexy moments if you pursue a romance, that romance is still on her terms. This isn’t any of the Metroid games, or Dead or Alive, or Tomb Raider. FemShep’s nudity is never a reward for the gamer – it’s part of her story.

In…

June 30th

…the concept of Primordia as a tale of ideological fallout.

On PopMatters Moving Pixels, Mark Filipowich observes that few games have their heroes wrecking the local ecosystem. As if in answer, Ontological Geek’s Sebastian Atay poses that Metroid Prime‘s ‘Ruined Fountain’ area is an illustration of exactly this.

Last before we move beyond the land of textual readings, but Janet Murray brought us a hell of a (welcomed) blast from the past this week: the slides from her 2005 DiGRA keynote, “The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology.”

BEYOND PLAY

Those darn kids, playing with their…

December 1st

…of interviewers with great energy, Kris Ligman dives into a Saint’s Row IV expansion and gets some great stuff out of the developers. Kris is great. Someone should give Kris a job doing this sort of thing.

design dot edu

J. Parish has a bunch of long-running series dissecting the design of various games. Right now they’re running through the Game Boy classic Metroid 2. Over at RPS, Adam Smith has a great conversation about the detailed simulations of Football Manager (it’s called SOCCER), including a great tidbit about how global warming has forced the team to update…

January 19th

…commercial games are often produced. Meanwhile at Kotaku, an anonymous developer talks about the overwhelming negative feedback from fans. And Mary Hamilton talks about play and compulsion.

In the “almost certainly a Cylon, how are people so good at video games?” department, Polygon talks about e-sports and Super Metroid speedruns. (Kotaku has a link to a video of the event under discussion).

Via the Organization of Humans Are People, Too

Lexi Alexander talks about a subject that resonates with the games world – the difficulty behind employing women in Hollywood and how it’s structural.

A video…

Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

March 2nd

…Online.”

Tracey Lien writes a much more comprehensive and lengthy article on the same game, taking us for an oral and systemic historical analysis of EVE in “The Most Thrilling and Boring Game in the Universe.”

Switching into a different mode of history, Jeremy Parish gives us “7 Reasons Super Metroid Was A SNES Masterpiece,” which doesn’t win any awards in the article title category, but manages to pay off anyway.

Emma Vossen does a bit of personal history, thinking through how her modes of interaction with female characters as a child has formed her. She writes:

March 23rd

…of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, so he went to the source, Dan Pinchbeck.

Robert Rath calls Ground Zeroes the first Metal Gear Solid game that gets, like the tagline says, Tactical Espionage Action right.

Leigh Harrison looks at the super lengthy Darksiders II and how that and its repetition are, in a way, something to be admired.

Stephen Beirne looks and the concept of exploration by eschewing the normative model of an open world filled with collectables for something far different filled with weird sights.

And Austin C. Howe wrote a defense of Super Metroid‘s…

Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

May 11th

…latest installment of his “Let’s Crit” Critical Let’s Play of Perfect Dark. And at The Border House, Samantha Allen interviews veteran games journalist and musician Maddy Myers on her recently released Metroid-inspired EP, “Peace in Space.”

Last Call, Last Call

Thanks for reading! If you have a link to an article, video, podcast or other piece you think would do well in This Week in Videogame Blogging, please send it in to us by email or by mentioning us on Twitter!

A bit of signal-boosting: Good Games Writing has announced its second Pitch Jam, which is a…

September 28th

…Connected Learning, a panel discusses respectful game design specifically when targeting games used for education. In it, Caro Williams asks to “interrogate multiple concepts… if we take a textbook and wrap it in a game, we’re reproducing the logic that children best learn math by repeating an algorithm over and over again.”

Meanwhile, Owen Vince talks about the tension of open world games over at Ontological Geek.

Essays

On a literary note, we have a scattering of game-specific essays worthy of a Guardian’s attention. Jared Ettinger talks about his experience with Metroid: Other M mirroring his experience…