Search Results for “history” – Page 45

Videogames are for TV

A pair of pieces document some early incursions of videogames onto TV.

That Show About Video Games You’ve Never Heard Of – Bobdunga (11:03)
Bobdunga presents a neat retrospective on 90’s Canadian children quiz show Video & Arcade Top 10, celebrating its focus on fun and participation in a time before gameplay footage was abundantly available. (Autocaptions)
The Game Awards and The History of Video Game Award Shows – NowThis Nerd (12:27)
To uh, celebrate (?) the madness of The Game Awards, which also happened in December, NowThis

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January 12th

…to save human society and history. Everything will end. Endings are inevitable. But that doesn’t mean the end of everything.”

Bit Crit

I just want to reiterate how glad I am to see the continued proliferation of critical writing on small-scale indie games and other stuff that big sites typically miss. Here are two of this week’s standouts.

Gayme of the Week: A Tavern for Tea – Gayming Magazine Aimee Hart picks up a small games that’s totally just about two dudes having some tea and nothing else.
Fool’s Errand – A Mystifying Experience…

February 2nd

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Why I’ve Loved Waiting for Kentucky Route Zero | Sidequest Melissa Brinks relates the opportunities for growth afforded by KRZ‘s drawn-out release history.

Kentucky Route Zero Review: Thematic Surrealism | Fanbyte Jay Castello meditates on KRZ‘s relatable, surrealist traumas as the series draws to a close.

Global Game Hegemony – No Escape Trevor Hultner, in the week of KRZ‘s conclusion, gestures to the games and makers outside a specifically American sphere of perspective and relevance and asks how we might make room for more of that.

Busy and Poor: The Gentle Violence of Kentucky Route Zero

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February 23rd

…justified, or necessary?

The Righteous, Musical Violence of Ape Out – Haywire Magazine Stephen Mansfield explores the energetic violence of Ape Out as a counterpoint to the more meditative examination at play in Hotline Miami.
On Killing Hitler | EGM Michael Goroff delves into the history–and the critical limitations–of Hitler revenge fantasies in games and beyond.

“Killing Hitler is an easy choice. Who is more universally recognized as deserving of a violent death? But Hitler’s evilness is largely left abstract in video games, presupposing a knowledge and understanding of why Hitler’s death should feel

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March 22nd

…crisis-of-the-moment.

Reading Between The Lines – The Bookshelf Limbo | RE:BIND Emily Rose browses a game about bookstores, but actually about consumerism, but actually about the struggle to navigate the white spaces in some of our closest personal relationships.
The Latest ‘Final Fantasy XIV’ Villain Is Populism Incarnate – VICE Natalie Flores recounts how the Square-Enix MMO on the never-ending redemption tour deals with class struggles of another kind.
How Madden Forced Me to Confront My Inherent Racial Bias – Uppercut Brian Bell comes to grips with the long, fraught history of Indigenous cultural appropriation and

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April 5th

…the real-world climate and conservation issues that disproportionately endanger islands and island communities.

Animal Crossing, SimCity, and the Long History of City Planning in Games | EGM Emilie Reed interrogates the oversimplifications and omissions endemic to city and community-building games and the inherent non-interventionist arguments these systems support.

“Games like SimCity have been promoted by proponents in the gaming and tech industries as a useful tool for teaching the fundamentals of city planning, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons has taken some cues from the same philosophies in terms of how it frames the process of developing…

Elizabeth LaPensée, Ph.D | Critical Distance: Keywords in Play, Episode 1

…is thriving, right?! And so, and then another way of looking at it, the origin of it is that he was actually acting to, he uses the term appropriate survivance from the French. And so he took the French term to act back on them to say “actually our stories, our oral stories, and our re-tellings of history are in fact valid in the court of law”. That was actually the very beginning of the term ‘survivance’ and so it is interesting how even that terminology goes back to, being able to have power, within a court setting in order…

April 19th

…think it now can be easier than ever for anyone to understand why I spend so much time being a part of make-believe communities where there’s always someone who wants to talk, and always something I can do to help.”

Retcon

Two authors this week look back at remakes–both of individual popular titles, since that’s a thing right now, as well as of the industry itself, via a charming what-if visual novel.

Arcade Spirits Imagines a World Where Gaming Is Mainstream and Doesn’t Need Validation | DualShockers Chris Compendio considers a visual novel alternate history…

May 3rd

…recounts, through interview and anecdote, the history of an off-beat, personality-driven gaming magazine that outlived its home platform.

Thomas Malthus’s Video Game Industry Simulator 2020: Part 1 – No Escape Trevor Hultner breaks down the refrain of “too many games” along different metrics, different measurements, looking for a means to describe the value we often perceive in games but struggle to articulate.

“Indiepocalypse is a narrative that, I believe, starts with the AAA industry and ends with you and me. Everything from what our shared understanding of what “good” and “bad” are to the kinds of…

May 10th

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Ted Woolsey Remembers Final Fantasy 6, Evading Nintendo’s Censorship Rules, and the Early Days of Localization | USgamer Nadia Oxford presents the history of Final Fantasy VI‘s original SNES localization, with commentary from its translator Ted Woolsey.

“Woolsey’s clever alterations to Final Fantasy 6’s script and his dedication to the game’s characters still echo in ways he never expected. As Woolsey himself admits, parts of Final Fantasy 6’s translation are odd. Sentences often feel truncated, no doubt because of the strict memory limitations Woolsey worked with. Despite these problems, Woolsey’s Final Fantasy 6 translation built up

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