Search Results for “fallout” – Page 7

January 23rd

…responding to last week’s Steven Totilo Kotaku article. Also along for the ride is Bitmob’s Chase Koeneke with another defense of ‘Why game music matters’ [mirror].

Also at Bitmob this week, Dennis Scimeca does a little bit of interesting research into how outlets review RPGs [mirror]:

I tried to read all 77 critic reviews of Fallout: New Vegas on Metacritic in order to see how many of the writers actually finished the game, but I could only get through 26 before I almost died from boredom. Of those 26, only one reviewer stated that he finished the

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…and more “realistic” elements of adventuring as they expand what an RPG can do. Two games especially – Dead Space II and Fallout: New Vegas – have tackled with various success two key elements that I think have been horribly, almost criminally, overlooked. These are: 1) The effects of violence on the psyche and 2) The emotional tolls of dealing with that violence.

Dear Readers, you’ve been keeping up with Leigh and Kirk’s Final Fantasy VII email series, correct? It’s up to part IV. Good.

Something for those interested in Game Preservation: at Bitmob this week, Rus…

July 24th

…At the ‘Blogossus’ blog, Nathan Hardisty has been working up a sweat in the deserts of Fallout: New Vegas and directs our attention to an older post on ‘The Story of Boone’. It takes a while to wind up to it, but here’s where it gets good:

From the first instance we talked I knew something interesting was going to happen. Not just from the fact he asked me to help him shoot someone in the head, but the fact he looked so disclosed. I prodded him about his history and interesting back-story, I got nothing out of

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January 29th

…item. Fallout: New Vegas doesn’t so much solve this problem as it doesn’t really care. […] Bastion, as the smaller game, has a different solution. It lets the narrator completely diverge from the player and makes its points with that dissonance.

And, who knows? Perhaps rebuilt civilization will have a proper appreciation for Okami, such as that of Jeffrey Matulef’s retrospective and Johannes Koski’s studies on its localization.

Future generations and/or slavers might also appreciate the nuance we game bloggers had in appraising our own cultural creations. Such as Nick Dinicola’s critique of Arkham City, which he…

UPDATED: Blogs of the Round Table: January ’12 Roundup

…With Story, talking about how the more constrained characters of Mass Effect and Deus Ex: Human Revolution gave him more of a sense of empathy and connection than the blank slate of Fallout 3.

Rainer Sigl at the delightfully named ‘Video Game Tourism’ blog explains that ‘Being a criminal psychopath sucks – but what did you expect?‘. So apparently it can suck to be ‘other’ when that ‘other’ is a murderous psychopath. Who knew?!

Mark Serrels at Kotaku Australia has a touching and poignant piece on meeting his daughter for the first time (in the sims) and how…

September 23rd

…– but now there is a whole branch of popular culture devoted to the end times. Mad Max, In the Mouth of Madness, Fallout, Mass Effect, I Am Legend, Dawn of the Dead; all our genre stories seem increasingly concerned with Armageddon.

[After the apocalypse] it will be quiet. A man, his dog and his shotgun, living off the land. It may not be safe and it may not be easy, but at least I saw you all burn first, right? I survived. The math of everyday living is easier without you. Now it’s my world to mess up or…

October 21st

…with and alongside his father.

Dan Whitehead pays affectionate tribute to the recently departed Mike Singleton and his impact on games, noting: “If you’ve enjoyed an epic open world role-playing adventure in recent years, from Skyrim to Fallout, from Dragon Age to Fable, you’ve benefited from Singleton’s prodigious imagination.”

Chris Donlan takes his elderly father on a sight-seeing tour of the 1940s Los Angeles of his father’s boyhood, via L.A. Noire:

I’ll never forget the moment we found [the Richfield Tower]. Dad could just about remember the cross-streets – 6th and Flower – and I had

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November 11th

…and/or overlooked titles. Let’s have a look.

Over on Unwinnable, Tanner Higgin muses on Red Dead Redemption‘s location between space and ideology:

I think of RDR as meditation on the American politics of space and territory. With keen attentiveness to what the U.S. and Mexico border region landscape signifies historically and culturally, RDR reveals itself to be not only about exploration and the achievement of a pastoral individualistic ideal, but the human cost required to maintain that myth.

Edward Smith shares a compelling tale of one man’s time spent “going mental” in Fallout 3. And…

November 18th

…cooperation was always-already closed off, though I can’t articulate why. I just knew. There is no question. The ethical question, then, is a beautiful failure. Why have the debate in game? Why pretend like there is some kind of grey area that the player is having to navigate? Is is supposed to make me ask questions?

Ethics are also on the mind of Daniel Starkey, who describes how Fallout 3 gave the act of theft some real gravity.

Mattie Brice recently completed her first game, Mainichi. On The Border House, she offers up her post-partum on the…

November 25th

…Fallout 2 in their Gaming Made Me series. It is a powerfully personal piece on how she grew disillusioned with the American dream and the game that was responsible for it. I would insert a quote, but I’d end up copy pasting the whole thing.

Over at Nightmare Mode a trio of articles caught our eye. First, Jordan Rivas calls the depiction of religion in games awful for both the non-religious and religious alike. Then Merritt Kopas talks about using games in the classroom to help the students understand the systems behind the oppression rather than anecdotal stories in…