gamer

…a poor choice for a videogame protagonist. Meanwhile on Electron Dance, Joel Goodwin posits that 2D shooters are about “cleaning.”

On the Radiator Blog, the well-informed Robert Yang takes us through a history of PC gaming’s “use key.”

Game historian Richard Moss takes a look at the videogame adaptation of The Thirty-Nine Steps and deems it a sign of “a bright future for interactive stories.”

Michael Clarkson describes why Dontnod’s Remember Me falls flat and Not Your Mama’s Gamer’s Alisha Karabinus takes a peek inside how State of Decay achieves a sense of harsh realism through emergent…

…Pieschel delivers an excellent analysis of a text-based “shooter” written in Twine, Tower of the Blood Lord.

On Unwinnable, Stu Horvath wonders what it would be like to play as a sidekick. And Push Select’s Jeff Wheeldon offers up a reading of The Legend of Zelda‘s Link as a Christ metaphor.

ROGUE LEGACIES

(Not actually about Rogue Legacy. I just couldn’t think of a better subheader.)

Eurogamer continues its stride of sturdy retrospective pieces with this one by Rick Lane: the story of Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines.

On Not Your Mama’s Gamer, Alisha Karabinus recently…

…Alexander on his site Imaginary Playmates doesn’t look at the game, but rather the pre-hype response it has received both in the above posts and on twitter and how troubling it is given no one commenting has played the game.

Stephen Beirne’s piece on Gameranx compares the troubling design of the wife and kids characters in The Castle Doctrine to Ico‘s treatment of Yorda within the game systems.

And Jason Rohrer explains his own perspective on the treatment of otherness in his games Diamond Trust of London and his upcoming game The Castle Doctrine in their design.

…

…inside that curious machine art-turned graffiti wall-turned ersatz gambling community, Salty Bet.

And Edge has a nice look back at the genesis of expressionistic American gothic point-and-click (and IndieCade award winner) Kentucky Route Zero, whose developers insist they didn’t set out to upend anyone’s chess board.

Theft No More

On Kotaku, Leigh Alexander laments aging out of the target demographic of games, while the hype cycle chugs on. Elsewhere, on Higher Level Gamer, Erik and Gaines address that so tricky of topics: whether Grand Theft Auto 5 is defensible as satire:

Rockstar could have written

…

…mutated over their many iterations and looks at the core of what makes a quote/unquote Final Fantasy game.

Nathan of Metopal.com compares Baseball to Spelunky in regards to their various levels of play and the deceptively simple descriptions of how they play.

Eric Swain at PopMatters explains how most games that claim to be cinematic fail to take advantage of the techniques of film and how Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons was a game that incorporated such techniques into its camera.

Stephen Beirne wrote a piece at Gameranx claiming that BioShock Infinite‘s combat design was a…