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sound

March 27th

…only exist for a few seconds at a time. You need to lower your flow barrier, learn to ignore distractions and technical errors, to focus in on fun gameplay instantly before it slips away. You need to spontaneously create a polished form of the game through imagination and mental tricks like making your own sound effects and storylines. All so you can snatch up those seeds and grow them until everyone on the team can see them.

Nicholas Geist at the Saved Games and Lost Lives blog writes about the idea of treating the “Reviews as a Lens”…

July 24th

…the other big online magazine pieces out of the way, Ethan Gilsdorf at Salon talk ‘My summer of Dungeons & Dragons’, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention my single favourite piece from this week which was Colson Whitehead’s dispatches from the World Series of Poker for Grantland. Hey, there are videogame versions of Poker, it counts.

Back down to earth and hanging with us mere mortals, Kirk Hamilton wrote in to alert us to his latest Kotaku piece ‘Why Videogames with Silent Heroes had the Best Soundtracks’.

He also sent us a link to…

March 11th

…The problem here:

Who decides what is the best?

And more critically:

Who decides what skills it is most valued to be best at?

We close this short-but-sweet roundup with an Ebert chaser, and why Owen Good thinks we should just collectively agree to ignore the man for good. Sound enough advice, but why are we still writing articles about him, then? Paging Eric Swain…

Have a safe trip home, all you GDCers, and a restful week full of shooting aliens, if you can manage. Remember that all tweeted and emailed links go toward…

Uncharted 2

…design, but a question of quality,” insisting that making a game relying on “’30s serial action adventure movie tropes” must be done with “plenty of style, panache and Hollywood production values to carry you over all the obvious pitfalls.” Additionally, the characters have to feature naturally smart dialogue, gameplay directly connected to the story and, above all, enjoyable play mechanics. “If this all sounds terribly formulaic, that’s because it is,” said Abbott.

Formula can be the paint-by-numbers template that makes your project look wholly derivative, or it can be the sturdy container that holds something special. You’d be

…

April 8th

…and eat every single one of them. Not because he needs to, not because he is hungry, but because he is a terrible person and he wants to.

I’m not quite sure at what point I started down this Brindle-shaped rabbit hole, but it does sound like something for next year’s Molyjam.

Are we done? Whew, we’re done. Is it me, or was this week a bit more depraved than usual? I’m going to assume it’s a response to PAX East going on, because I hate to contemplate the alternative.

See you all next week! As…

June 17th

…in the context of the industry that fostered it:

Imagine that there is a whole AAA studio full of women developers making Uncharted. Maybe there is one guy, who has to make the tea, we don’t know. Anyway, mostly ladycakes. And they are making a game where Nathan Drake dies suggestively, where the camera gets attached to his toned butt a lot, that fetishizes his being impaled on things, or bumping into things, that has his O sound attached to a drown animation. Now imagine that most gamers are women, and that most of the gamers who will

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July 1st

…sense of temporal and spatial continuity; it’s a built-in property (virtue, really) of the medium. The user is the protagonist and so must remain properly oriented to his environment as much as possible. In this sense, Mortal Kombat is far less “violent” than Bridesmaids.

Ever wonder what Quintin Smith’s up to these days? He’s over at Eurogamer, paying loving tribute to memorable start screens. Meanwhile, Kotaku Man of Sound Kirk Hamilton profiles barking— no, not the dog and seal kind, but the incidental dialogue filling gaming’s city streets and cover-based corridors.

And I know Earnest Cavalli knows…

July 22nd

…as well not to anything and just let things be. There is a certain person for whom this is a viable response, and it is typically a person to whom the market is advertising. Even if it is in an increasingly puerile and stock manner. For people who are not represented fairly or equally, it is not just a matter of being ‘offended,’ it is a matter of desiring a more rich landscape. Leaving that to the free market might sound good, but unless a desire for better and more is expressed, companies, who are typically conservative in how they…

September 30th

…stripped of its verse, are Shakespeare’s plays the same potboiler fiction as that found in many videogames?

That’s all the games criticism, commentary, analysis and rumination that’s fit to print for this week! Remember to submit your recommendations –including your own work, now, don’t be shy– via email or Twitter. Otherwise it will just lie there, depressed and un-CD’d, forever. That doesn’t sound too pleasant, does it?

Oh, and– you probably have at least a few more hours till Alan Williamson closes up shop on this month’s Blogs of the Round Table! Quick like a fox, now, get!

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October 7th

…that).

Anthony John Agnello wrote an article about the controls of video games. I wish that I had words to make that sound more interesting; I promise that it is actually really cool. A phrase that is used in the article: “Mastery leads to grand expression.”

Matt Marrone wrote about being a “deadbeat gamer”. I have a lot of feels (when you read this in the future, know that ‘feels’ was a thing we said in the fall of 2012) about this. There is something oppressive about the constant slog of content in games. Marrone remarks:

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