Search Results for “spec ops the line” – Page 3

November 18th

…back this week with an interview with Brendan Keogh, specifically about his upcoming ebook on Spec Ops: The Line, Killing is Harmless.

And a bit of signal boosting for the road: James Week reached out to us over email about his current Indiegogo crowdfunding project Pwned!, “A feature-length screwball comedy for the internet age of which 100% of proceeds go to charity.” It has a ways to go on its (admittedly ambitious) funding target but if you’re interested, I’d very much encourage you to check it out!

Thanks for joining us, dear reader. As always we greatly appreciate…

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…

February 16th

Hi. Kris Ligman again. I seem to be taking this whole semi-retirement thing pretty hard, because here I am again. Let’s hit the books and/or bricks and get cracking on a great new roundup of the week’s best in games writing! It’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!

Teachabilly

On Normally Rascal, Stephen Beirne contrasts a mob scene in Bioshock Infinite to a similar moment in Spec Ops: The Line:

It is forever the failing of the medium that Decisions must be made with a capital-D, structured for presentation of both sides, as if both sides

…

September 7th

…DiZoglio compares Little Inferno with Yvgeny Zamyatin’s “The Cave” as pieces that ask their audiences to tread the line between survival and civilization.

G. Christopher Williams, the final boss of the Moving Pixels blog at PopMatters, describes the race toward defeat in Spec-Ops: The Line as a videogame tragedy:

Walker and the player’s final choice in the game mark the tragedy of this downward spiral from badass video game hero to a character and player that is morally comprised by the very activity of playing hero.

James Wragg of Thrusting Sticks manages to write about…

Now Accepting Submissions for TYIVGB 2014 Edition

…(2005) –The Lester Bangs of Video Games by Chuck Klosterman (2006) –Ludonarrative Dissonance by Clint Hocking (2007) –Taxonomy of Gamers by Mitch Krapta (2008) –Permanent Death by Ben Abraham (2009) –Video games can never be art by Roger Ebert (2010) –The Pratfall of Penny Arcade – A Timeline (aka Debacle Timeline) by Unknown (2011) –Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line by Brendan Keogh (2012) –Tropes vs. Women in Video Games by Anita Sarkeesian (2013 to present)

2. Any pieces that are an excellent example of larger trends surrounding the most talked about games of…

Now Accepting Submissions for TYIVGB 2015 Edition

…you remember this piece of writing. They are pieces that get cited to this day, even years later, would fall under this category. Examples from previous years:

–The New Games Journalism by Kieron Gillen (2005) –The Lester Bangs of Video Games by Chuck Klosterman (2006) –Ludonarrative Dissonance by Clint Hocking (2007) –Taxonomy of Gamers by Mitch Krapta (2008) –Permanent Death by Ben Abraham (2009) –Video games can never be art by Roger Ebert (2010) –The Pratfall of Penny Arcade – A Timeline (aka Debacle Timeline) by Unknown (2011) –Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line…

June 18th

…Harrison considers whether the storytelling in Horizon Zero Dawn demonstrates the limitations of gaming as a medium, or just RPG design orthodoxy.

We Need Another Boundary-Breaker Like ‘Planescape: Torment’ – Waypoint Cameron Kunzelman wants to see more critical reflexivity in mainstream gaming.

“In the age of hype and Jason Derulo, I wonder about the next Planescape: Torment. I don’t mean spiritual successors or Kickstarter-funded jaunts down the memory lane of isomorphic RPGs. I’m talking about the next game that wants to have an ambivalent stance toward the genre it’s a part of. Spec Ops: The Line,…

This Year in Videogame Blogging: 2023

…Middle-Eastern settings for first-person shooting…that has significantly impacted how the world sees that region and the people from there,” GameSpot managing editor Tamoor Hussain said via email. “[Games and other forms of media and entertainment] present the region as places to be blown up and as having populations that are all evil cave-dwelling terrorists, whether that’s Call of Duty soldiers mounting Spec Ops missions to kill dangerous militants or Tony Stark proudly standing in front of a backdrop that is immediately recognizable as the Middle East…When you see those same settings in real-world news reports for long enough, the line…

July 9th

…systems themselves—and not the characters within the game—lie to the player.

Moving on to the subject of morality and ethics, the ever readable Richard Cobbett gets on the Eurogamer soapbox to write about the games which get players to feel implicated in the actions of their characters even when the choice isn’t theirs. He has some interesting thoughts about the morally grey shooter, Spec Ops: The Line.

Kill Screen’s Yannick LeJacq also shares his views on the aforementioned game, extrapolating on the themes from Cobbett’s piece rather well.

There would be little point in ethics or morality…

July 15th

…they can go.

Now come some back and forths.

Tom Bissel wrote another excellent essay at Grantland, this time on the new Heart of Darkness adaptation, Spec Ops: The Line in 13 distinct thoughts. Not everyone was impressed, however, Gobi at Fuyoh sees something fundamentally off in they way Bissel critiques calling them rather fuzzy and full of surface level critiques behind the wonderfully constructed prose.

Stephen Totilo asked several designers and academics the question ‘what makes a good video game‘ on his search for his own answer. Eric Zimmerman, one of the people Totilo asked, wrote…