Search Results for “sound” – Page 3

December 16th

Do you hear that sound? It’s the sound of only three Sundays left to 2012. Let’s start your morning off right with This Week in Videogame Blogging, shall we?

AMERICA, F*CK YEAH

Capping off his recent feature on text-based war games, John Brindle shares a roundup of his extended interviews with high-profile interactive fiction authors including Emily Short, Porpentine and Paolo Pedercini.

On Eurogamer, Wesley Yin-Poole shares a nice long retrospective on what went wrong in trying to bring the Xbox to the Japanese market.

Over on Nightmare Mode, Canadian Reid McCarter and American Jordan

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March 9th

We’re back. We never exactly went away, but now we’re here, fully, renewed breath in our lungs. It’s time to sound the bells. It’s Sunday afternoon. It’s time for This Week in Videogame Blogging.

Dev Tools

Critical Distance’s audience can roughly be split into two halves: games bloggers, critics and scholars to one side, and game developers of various stripes on the other. It’s my belief that these two have more in common than even they may think. With that in mind, I’d like to start off this week’s roundup with some recommendations tailored particularly to devs,

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November 2nd

…horror-themed close reads, as you might imagine. At Normally Rascal, Stephen Beirne runs through Fatal Frame 2‘s projector room with a fine-toothed comb, while at Videogames of the Oppressed, Mike Joffe concludes his three-part analysis of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night with a meditation on the game’s setting as the childhood home of its protagonist.

These two sound-oriented articles pair nicely together. At Game Sound, Kenneth Young compares the auditory approaches used to introduce characters in two science fiction games, Destiny and The Swapper. And over at his personal blog, Harmonix’s Dan Bruno shares some notes on Mother 3‘s…

May 10th

…intricacies. I had exhausted every possible conversation option with all of the people that live there. I wandered around for hours solving puzzles without knowing how they would add to the main story. I was a resident like any other (although it’s possible I was the only one with a purpose). Suffice to say, I lived there.

In a similar vein, Miguel Penabella compares the similar cinematic and writing techniques in The Last of Us and the 1956 John Ford western, The Searchers.

Switching from sight to sound, our own Zolani Stewart hosts this week’s episode of…

August 30th

…color on the Commodore 64 (video), and how game developers creatively worked around these constraints.

Back at Kill Screen, Dan Solberg recently paid a visit to Chicago’s Bit Bash indie game festival, and in particular looked at its layout as a work of gallery curation and sound design:

Although the games in this space had their own little external speakers, the house and electro pop booming from the stage assumed each game’s soundtrack save a few levels-peaking sound effects here and there. By overlaying the space with music, each game’s embedded audio may have been replaced, but

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October 9th

…what’s a certainty in the game. If what was shown in the marketing materials is possible in No Man’s Sky, then Hello Games have done nothing wrong, but if the version of the game that was released doesn’t allow for those possibilities then there’s a potential issue.”

Fostering dependence

Sound and interaction in games can create subversive narratives, playing on our expectations and reversing the expected outcome. These two pieces address the importance of silence in sound design, and weakness in player-character empowerment.

Indie Horror Month 2016: The Quiet Apocalypse of ‘The Final Station’ |…

March 19th

This week’s critical writing changed my understanding of how games connect to the physical world and to urban life. Let’s go on a little wander through the winding paths of online discourse.

Visuals and sound

Slightly stepping away from our overwhelming reliance on text for critical communication, in these pieces critics use sound and visuals to explore games.

304: Full Throttle Scenery Studies Ben Chandler carried out another in-depth visual analysis of point-and-click adventure sceneries, this time compiled into a PDF.
Waypoint Rescores: ‘Life Is Strange’ – Waypoint Mike Diver engages in an

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January 28th

…– Kotaku Logan Booker simply shares some of the iconic box art he created.

The Case for Amagami in 2018 – Medium Tom James highlights the importance of eye animations in the emotional resonance of a dating sim

“Eyes are an unsung, but hugely important piece of the puzzle, placed on just as high of a pedestal as its art, writing, and voice acting when it comes to characterization.”

Sound

Not Another Word: Silence as a Game Mechanic – Not Your Mama’s Gamer Jordyn Lukomski explores how a lack of sound is…

April 22nd

…altogether.

Soundtracks

I love it when there is enough writing on music or sound in games to warrant a section in the roundup – this week brings two soundtrack-focused analyses.

The Anxiety of Celeste and its Music | Game Score Fanfare – YouTube (video with accurate subtitles) Matthew Dyason highlights narrative and musical moments that explore the theme of mental distress, focusing on Lena Raine’s composition techniques.
The rise of the ambient video game | The Outline Lewis Gordon links music and software design to the regulation of emotions in post-bubble Japan.

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Braid 10th anniversary Critical Compilation

…vloggers, academics and students in the years since.

Braid is important:

In Issue 41 of the Unwinnable Weekly in April 2015, Editor Stu Horvarth contemplated the gradual shift in his feelings on Braid and Passage. He felt that Braid was brilliant when it came out, but this had faded into ambivalence as he moved away from the context of the game’s release, where he’d first played it:

“It is about relationships, yes, but I can’t tell you exactly how. It is damnably vague, in the same way that student art films are vague – all sound,

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