Search Results for “mass effect” – Page 8

Achievement Unlocked: Sex!

…dehumanize its inhabitants. While this is in response to the recent MTV Multiplayer article on Alpha Protocol, she also takes a look at Mass Effect. As she points out:

In addition, it perpetuates the narrative of the Nice Guy (described in Millar’s essay, and elsewhere): that men are entitled to sex from women if they follow the rules and do the right things, or in the case of Alpha Protocol, “select your responses wisely.” It is not only dangerous but just plain unrealistic to portray a world in which every single woman is a potential sex partner: in

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…how the context in which he originally uttered them – a casual interview – became lost as online readers decided to read Croal’s comments as an accusation of racism on the part of Capcom, which wasn’t exactly the point he was trying to make.

Hit Self-Destruct writes about the confluence of Game and Real Life in ‘Photo Album‘. Duncan tells how he empathised particularly strongly with the protagonist in one particular situation in Mass Effect because it mirrored his own.

The ‘Gameology’ blog has been around for a long time now, but posting had fallen off recently. Being…

September 27th

Quick! It’s that day of the week again, which means it’s time for a decidedly laissez-faire overview of the game criticism blogosphere. And don’t forget: you can always send links to Critical Distance’s twitter account for inclusion in TWIVGB.

After last week’s acclaimed critique of The Joker and ludonarrative dissonance in Batman: Arkham Asylum, Michel McBride looks at the composition/execution cycle (as originally put forward by Clint Hocking in a GDC presentation) as played out in the game.

Alex Raymond had the pleasure of having her critique of gender issues in Mass Effect responded to by one

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November 15th

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And last for This Week In Videogame Blogging, Krystian Majewski has finished his epic (yes, epic) trilogy listing all of the interface design flaws of Mass Effect (which, coincidentally I’m replaying on PC at the moment). Just about everything Majewski says I find myself nodding along with and going “Yeah, it would have been awesome if…”, which is a sure sign that he’s on to something. The tagline for the first post in his series is “In a world of bad design choices and poor execution, there was one game that ruled them all…” It’s quite telling. It’s…

Ten Years of Penny Arcade

…of characters trying to realistically engage with these game’s scenarios. The long elevator trips in Mass Effect are questioned while the NPC’s offering you DLC-only quests in Dragon Age bring out the hilarity of someone trying to stay in-character in a video game. Even the reality of being a henchmen in a game like Ninja Gaiden or two colossi from Shadow of the Colossus chatting about their glowing weak points flesh out these perspectives. The joke being, if we’re all losing ourselves in these simulations, how much of this are we just blindly accepting? My personal favorite is still their…

February 28th

…like the sort of thing I was into with my undergrad thesis from 2008.

Justin Keverne writes about Mass Effect 2 this week in ‘living with your mistakes’ [mirror]; Radek Koncewicz also writes about the game, describing it as ‘A few steps forward and a few steps back’ [mirror].

Kotaku goes in search of the Videogame Auteurs whose existence is still hotly debated.

Brendan Keogh, a Brisbane based blogger writes about the old whipping-horse that is the ludology/narratology debate (or stalemate, as Keogh describes it). He suggests, ‘don’t ask what narrative can do for games, but what…

April 11th

…first Owen Good writes around ‘Religion in Games: Less a Leap of Faith, More a Suspension of Belief’, and then Brian Crecente looks at the modern movement away from undead zombies to fast, violent infected humans in ‘Infection vs. resurrection: the new science of the zombie’.

Jorge Albor writes about ‘Quarian Exiles’ and their place in the politics of the Mass Effect universe.

Greg Kasavin writing on his personal blog looks at some of videogaming’s proper villains.

At Pioneer Project, Michelle Baldwin writes about ‘Memories lost: the fear of saving’, saying

All of my most

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April 18th

…his new website The Game Beat has a short piece about the reader/writer value proposition (with thanks to Mitch Krpata for passing word of the new site).

HardCasual’s Filipe Salgado reports on a domestic dispute that erupted over a N64 [dead link, no mirror available].

Jorge Albor at the Experience Points blog writes about ‘Salarian Dilemmas’ in the second part of his series on the politics of the Mass Effect universe.

Jun Chen wrote to me to say that he thinks “Square Enix is laughing at us, [and] that Just Cause 2 is actually a smart game…

June 20th

…generation of gamers who are increasingly plugged into media that combines entertainment and cultural insight.

Kyle Orland on his blog ‘The Game Beat’ examines the lies told to make E3 reveals ‘more of a surprise’, and asks whether it’s okay to lie to maintain said surprise. In a post called “David Jaffe is a liar. Do we care?” Orland sums up the issues quite nicely.

Paul Sztajerat at PDYXS wrote about ‘Signalling the intent of the player character’ [mirror] in which he discusses the character of Shepherd in Mass Effect and what we are supposed to think…

November 21st

…that is where the soul is.

At Bitmob Christian Higley writes about why Mass Effect left him cold while Red Dead Redemption and Bioshock felt like the real frontier [mirror].

Some time ago, I read an article about the molten-diamond oceans of Neptune and Uranus. Imagine that for a moment: entire seas of liquefied diamonds, dotted by solid diamond icebergs. That right there is a case of fact being stranger than fiction. I can’t recall ever seeing something so amazing and unimaginable in a video-game world.

Staying with Bitmob for the moment, Omar Yusuf…