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Game controls and the ephemeral ‘feel’

In a recent post at his blog The Inbetween, Mike Nowak bemoans the gap between intent and action which appears when game controls are more than usually complicated. Nowak notes that the unwieldy button combos in the Street Fighter series would seem unacceptable elsewhere.

This [kind of] first person shooter doesn’t exist. Can you imagine the backlash if it did? Controls like this in such a competitive and highly reactive genre would be dismissed in an instant. No one wants such a vast roadblock between intent and action in a game. It adds nothing but an added

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Prince of Persia

Editor’s note: This compilation has remained unscheduled in Critical Distance’s backlogs for going on three years and is no doubt out of date. We’ve elected to publish it so as to not let Sparky’s hard work to go to waste but we definitely welcome any further contributions by our email submissions form. (As for why it’s so late in the first place, it’s best not to ask really…) -KL

The decision to completely reinvent the Prince of Persia universe, following the (mostly) widely-praised Sands of Time trilogy may have come as a surprise to many fans. Removing the

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May 10th

Welcome! Welcome! Pull up a pew – anywhere will do. Let us now pray and give thanks to The Gods of Blogging About Videogames for this bountiful harvest of tasty reading we are about to receive.

Today, we give thanks for the Polycat blog, and its excellent summary of the pros and cons of eliminating numerical health values from games. A rather interesting point is the argument that what it can do is act on the player psychologically similar to being shot at and not hit in a real combat simulation. It’s noted that it becomes a trade

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Flower

Flower was released three months ago, and has spawned an amount of discussion that is quite disproportionate to the game’s brief length. Given all this, we thought that it was time for a Critical Compilation on the subject. If you’re aware of pieces that I missed, please link to them in the comments.

One of my favorite early reports on the game was Michael Abbott’s shout on The Brainy Gamer that “I LOVE THIS GAME. IT MAKES ME VERY HAPPY.” He followed up with a somewhat longer musing on “[h]ow a video game can convey such emotions without

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May 17th

Links updated June 29th 2017 A short ‘n’ sweet one for This Week in Videogame Blogging. Not because no-one wrote anything good but because I didn’t keep my usual close tabs on the regular blogs I read. C’est la vie! As always, TWIVGB makes no claims to comprehensiveness, only quality.

This week saw N’Gai Croal return to his Edge column with ‘In the Line of Fire: Part One‘. In this post, Croal talks about the reactions he faced to his now (in)famous comments expressing his hesitancy with problematic imagery in the Resident Evil 5 trailer. It’s interesting to see…

Episode 4 – Genre Bending Discourse

This episode of the CDC Podcast is extra long to make up for the missed days in releasing last week’s CDC Podcast. This week we discuss genre in videogames by starting off with the Western and eventually interrogating the role of genre between videogames and other medium, videogame genres in general, and the role of genre and videogame hardware. After this week’s episode the CDC Podcast will be taking a brief hiatus, but stay tuned for future episodes. As always, I urge you to leave feedback in the comments thread and don’t be shy to drop by IRC to

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Punk and Indie Games

By the mid 1970’s, Rock & Roll sounded nothing like the energetic blues-inspired pop songs after which the genre was named. The soundscape was now made up of concept albums, rock operas, synthesizers and 30 minute ballads. The music was elaborate and pretentious, carefully constructed by trained musicians and backed by symphony orchestras.

Then a bunch of angry teenagers yelled into their mics, strangled their guitars and killed rock and roll forever. They were fast and cheap and young and refused to compromise. Punk music made people remember what they had loved about rock in the 50’s and

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May 24th

Links updated July 1st 2017

This Week in Videogame Blogging: Hard-Casual reveals exclusively that Dig Dug has uncovered the body of Jimmy Hoffa!

Now that that’s out of my system; Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

For my fellow Australian readers, David Wildgoose turfs up another thoughtful commentary on the “plunder down under” that is targeting us players of electronic videogames. Actually, that’s a complete fabrication – I just wanted to be able to say “plunder down under”. In reality, David talked about how prices are set for different regions on digital distribution services such as

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Surfer Girl Reviews Star Wars

Creative Commons licensed, via flickr user Mike Baird

This is the first entry in a new series for Critical Distance – the writer/critic’s spotlight. This series focuses on the body of writing produced by a single videogame writer, critic or commentator. In this post I turn the spotlight on the mysterious blogger, critic and industry deep-throat that was Surfer Girl and her blog Surfer Girl Reviews Star Wars.

Come with me on a trip in the wayback machine – the date is early 2008 and the name on everyone’s lips is “Surfer Girl”, author of the videogame industry

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May 31st

Links updated July 1st 2017

This week in videogame blogging we cruise through some videogame music, take a look back at an overlooked classic, pick up a couple of excellent pieces we missed from last week and a Chick gets stood up by Sony. Onwards and upwards!

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised any more when videogame publishers do something like this but I had thought that after last years Gerstmann-gate saga that the industry had learnt a thing or two. I stand thoroughly corrected this week after hearing that Tom Chick was given the cold shoulder by

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