Search Results for “adam%20saltsman” – Page 7

November 7th

…us about the nature of ethics and realism in the gaming industry [mirror] and how the events that play out in games shouldn’t be confused with actual conflict.

Spectacle Rock’s Joel Haddock examines what it’s like to be locked out of a turn-based game and how the worst thing that can happen to you is to be denied your turn [mirror]. I for one remember the annoyance I experienced whenever my soldiers had their minds controlled by Ethereals in X-COM.

On his blog FlickeringColours, Adam Ruch attempts to extract meaning from Far Cry 2 [mirror], from its mechanics…

December 2nd

…post-apocalyptic identity Adam Page, in an absolutely fantastic piece, documents the ways in which irreverent power fantasy Sunset Overdrive has proven itself to be a spectacularly poor read of the room just a few short years after its release.

A day trip to Yakuza 6’s Onomichi • Eurogamer.net Malindy Hetfeld reflects on the whimsical, uncanny experience of visiting the real-world counterpart of a game-world locale.

Sucking Blood from the Earth | Unwinnable Sara Clemens muses about Vampires, ethical consumption, and the exhaustion of media in an exhausting world.

“A newly-vampiric doctor tormented between following his…

January 2020

…of observations, including the sort of traits that keep coming up in the list, the problem with these few labels within the breadth of possible gaming experiences, the changing role of written consumer reviews and numbered scores, and why new games are less likely to make the cut. (Autocaptions)[Note: contains embedded advertising]

Why Don’t Mystery Games Need Mechanics? – Adam Millard (19;36)

I feel like the title of this one obscures the decent point that Millard goes on to make, which is that newer mystery games are doing a better job at aligning player knowledge with how that

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Pathologic

…these.

In an interview with Adam Smith for Rock Paper Shotgun, Golubeva identifies much of the inspiration for Pathologic comes from both tabletop roleplaying games and theatre:

The way that the City works and how the narrative behaves is not something that we could take from games…Literature, film and theatre. When the RPG campaign ended, Nikolay [Dybowskiy, studio founder and creator of Pathologic] looked for new ways to tell the story. He wrote a stage play based on it.

Continuing with the focus on the language of theatre, in an interview with Rashid Sayed for…

Assassin’s Creed II

…is conveyed mostly through cutscenes, instead of holding players prisoners to in-game dialogue sequences as in AC1. The email “metacommunication” of the Desmond plot of AC1 became the interactive Renaissance Italy database of AC2. Finally, if AC1 provided temporal skips in story sequences, highlighting “the operations of the Animus”, the player spends more time overall “in the Animus” in AC2, in the so-called “memory sequences”.

AC2: the Glorious Meta-Game

Writing for the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds in 2010, Adam Ruch was perhaps the first game critic to fully account for the multifaceted accomplishment that was AC2….

The Stanley Parable

…post-release.

If anything, Pugh and Wreden’s story is a parable for other independent developers, unprepared for the suddenness of an overnight success, the switch from anonymous bedroom coding to international acclaim, with no run-up.

Pugh and Wreden also granted an interview with Adam Sessler at GDC 2014, that leans more heavily into discussions about game design and thematic intentions for TSP (video link, CC/auto-captions).

Ironically, the story of criticism about TSP largely fits into the meta-fiction of TSP itself. Player agency becomes critical agency. Branching paths become hyperlinks. The voice of the narrator becomes the…

Deadly Premonition

…comparing them favourably to those found in Heavy Rain and the Grand Theft Auto games. He asserts that the low population and lack of traffic in the world are true to the game’s location and that it makes possible “little details like noticing the townsfolk all start to make their own way to a town meeting at the same time as you drive there yourself.”

“Lovely Useless Elements”

Others were less generous in their assessment. In a review of great ambivalence, Rock Paper Shotgun’s Adam Smith describes the town not as a living breathing universe unto itself but,…

Sonic the Hedgehog

…complete douche move.

Big Shoes to Fill – The Adventure era

With the introduction of narrative and lore in Sonic 3 & Knuckles Sonic Team made it a focus along with edginess for the new millennium. Adam Richter:

More than any later releases in the series, Sonic Adventure feels like it’s set in the same world as the Genesis games. It’s fitting that Sonic Adventure was the last Sonic game released in the 1990s. To a degree, it achieves what Super Mario 64 did for Nintendo’s mascot: it filled out a familiar and beloved game world…

July 2020

…terms with personal identity against social expectations. (Autocaptions)

Episode 1: “9:05” by Adam Cadre (2000) – Victor Gijsbers IF Analyses (13:49)

Victor Gjisbers describes how 9:05 uses IF genre conventions to mess with the player and expose the inherent fiction-gap between player and player-character. (Autocaptions)

Geography Lessons

Grouped here is one video contemplating the horrendous environmental and political impacts of videogame production on developing countries, alongside two contemplating the depictions of specific places (both sites of extractive and colonial violence) in videogames.

The PlayStation War – HeavyEyed (16:22)
Mitch Cramer shines a

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Dishonored

…the history but is “by no means the originator of the ‘play your own way’ premise…”

The flexibility inherent to Dishonored also makes it a funny (hag)fish to nail down. The original game is filed away under the action adventure genre, although later instalments have been listed as FPS, Assassin, Supernatural and Stealth games, without really changing the formula. Adam Biessener for Game Informer describes its chimeric qualities best; how expectations, even when it came to what genre the game was, were “unshackled”:

It’s a game about assassination where you don’t have to kill anyone. It’s a

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