Search Results for “gamer” – Page 34

August 29th

…be fun.

Ashelia at Hellmode received a glowing endorsement from Epic Games’ own Cliff Bleszinski for her piece ‘Videogames are undeniably art’ [dead link, no mirror available]. Her argument is that “…gamers and their attitudes are why video games aren’t perceived as art–even if we’re why they exist in the first place.”

Leigh Alexander tries to catalogue every videogames console she has ever owned, in chronological order (she’s up to part 2). Back when the whole “it’s a new decade!” thing was still new, I briefly considered trying to do this for the previous decade’s worth of videogames…

September 19th

We’re back for another week of top-shelf videogame blogging, writing and criticism.

First up, Rob Zachny writing for Gamers With Jobs talks about RUSE and ‘the Fall of France’. It’s a story about a young girl who meets a pianist… kidding! That was a ruse. It’s actually about the missed opportunity for telling a fresh and poignant story from a different perspective. Zachny says,

I am most disappointed by the campaign in RUSE because I know that one of the best chances to tell the story of the fall of France, Vichy, and the Free French

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This Year In Video Game Blogging 2010

…worlds obey a strict, error-free canon, or can they be mythical and malleable? How do we get our heads around this gigantic and nebulous and yet totally important undertaking?

Annie Wright wrote for GamerMelodico ‘The Zombie Apocalypse is the New American Dream.’ [mirror] A great deal of our culture, including that of geek and gamer culture, has become fascinated by zombies and surviving a world inhabited by them. She explored in depth the reasoning why.

Alex Raymond wrote on her blog, While !Finished, one of the first posts of the year, about why the things we critique…

November 11th

…document the ways in which their products are profoundly inaccessible to players with disabilities.

The Many Problems of The Quiet Man | One Odd Gamer Girl Susan skewers the clumsy, broken, ableist power fantasy that is The Quiet Man. Readers, I wanted to quote every line of this article.

How to design for coziness…and kindness | GamesIndustry.biz Rebekah Valentine rounds up interviews with Tanya X. Short, Rebecca Cordingley, and more about designing games that make the player feel good.

“Alongside the panel, GamesIndustry.biz caught up with a few of the panelists after the fact to…

November 18th

…Steps: Arx Fatalis & Arkane | Arkane Studios Ludography (1/6) – YouTube Ludocriticism takes a look at the failure of conveyance in Arx Fatalis in the first of a series looking at Arkane Studios’ games.

Pokemon Let’s Go | One Odd Gamer Girl OneOddGamerGirl offers a deaf-accessibility breakdown of the new Pokemon games.

How One Dev Is Using Games as Therapy to Reach Across Generations – Waypoint Dante Douglas chats with Heavily Medicated Games about their therapy-focused approach to game design.

““Video games are a big industry. And to youth, they’re a big world. I’ve…

January 16th

…a little performance to everyday play’. Also at Gamasutra, blogger Kamruz M looks at the oft-overlooked classic PlayStation game ‘Vagrant Story and its lessons for uninspired JRPG game design’.

Nicholas Lovell at Games Brief asked a host of thoughtful and influential people ‘What is a social game?’, including John Romero, Ian Bogost, Jesse Schell, Brenda Brathwaite,Margaret Robinson and a host of others. To quote Bogost, “A social game is the last unicorn in the vacuum of space.” I blame Bogost for getting the song from Robot Unicorn Attack stuck in my head again.

At Gamers with Jobs Chris…

The Last of Us

…all they do for the narrative.

Frustrated with the game’s combat, Tom Chick asks “Is a remarkable story buried under hours of non-remarkable game actually a good game?” Finding a myriad of inconsistencies while playing the game, Alisha Karabinus for Not Your Mama’s Gamer discovered not the Citizen Kane of games but rather “a movie occasionally interrupted by [her] urgent need to move a dumpster around.” Stu Horvath found the game unable to authentically replicate the feeling of frailty.

Sure, I have controlled characters that were frail, but I still controlled them. My avatars suffer…

Bioshock: Infinite

…day before the game’s public launch, major reviews ran in several publications. Evan Narcisse, at Kotaku. Kevin Van Ord, at Gamespot. Tom Francis, at PCGamer. Arthur Gies, at Polygon. Joe Juba, at GameInformer. As a general rule, these reviews were positive, although Juba criticized the game’s underutilization of the Songbird, and Gies remarked that the game’s political ambitions seemed unmet by the game’s execution:

By the end of BioShock Infinite my understanding of its world had been blown so wide-open that it was all I could do to navigate the final twenty minutes in stunned silence, which followed

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February 10th

Happy Sunday, readers!

Hmm.

So, in a colossally disingenuous display of both-sides-y dog-whistle journalism, some fifth-rate Gamer™ rag has apparently gathered enough recalled copies of Too Human to summon Beelzebub and try to re-awaken the Great Toxic Ones of games culture from the dreamless sea of man tears. I like to include links to topical stories in games from the past week to situate these roundups, but I couldn’t honestly be bothered here.

These are the death throes of gatekeepers in games culture. They and other edgelords trying to “elevate” a discourse that is already rife

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March 10th

Happy Sunday, readers!

So last week I used this space to essentially subtweet a major publisher that did something really stupid and toxic in a cynical attempt to grab headlines. Is it possible to do the same thing to the largest distributor of PC games in the business? Anyways, here’s a really good summary of (and commentary on) this week’s bullshit (content notification: Gamer™ Idiots waffling about sexual violence).

On to good stuff! If you haven’t checked it out already, Gilles Roy has written a Critical Compilation on Assassin’s Creed II, a game which I have been

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