First up for This Week In Videogame Blogging, ask yourself whether a fully destructible city whose every door leads to a fully furnished room sounds exciting. Create Digital Motion does a bit of a look-see at some up and coming games tech that could do just that in ‘Ever Woke Up In A Procedurally Generated City?‘ I found that entry via an equally interesting post about locked door syndrome and how it applies to the game Prototype in the post ‘Prototype: Open World, Locked City‘ at the Serial Consign blog (via).
Trent Polack of the game design blog ‘Polycat’ compared the campaign portions of the Halo series of games to CLINT HOCKING’s excellent ‘composition/execution’ player flow from his GDC talk. An excellent read.
Speaking of CLINT HOCKING, he wrote an excellent piece this week discussing my ‘Permanent Death’ experiment, in which I’m writing about playing Far Cry 2 and treating death more seriosuly than usual. He draws a lot of interesting ideas out of my stories about Far Cry 2 and it’s more than a little humbling to be discussed by such an esteemed member of the Completely independently of my own series, blogger Omar Usuf talks about death and permanence in games too, after coming face-to-face with a near death experience.
Andrew Doull of the blog ASCII Dreams noted the response from Clint Hocking linked to above and responded with his own explanation of what makes rogue-like games compelling and interesting, talking about Spelunky and others.
Found via Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Sunday Papers last week, this feature at The Escapist argues that games writers/journalists aren’t, and shouldn’t be, real proper journalists while there is such a shortage of them covering more important topics. I’m inclined to agree, but I’d idealistically wish to believe there would be room for both.
A new videogame blog called ‘Play Like A Girl’ has just recently been started by a pair of female gamers. Cary and Lynsey talk about all sorts of games and bring to the table their own angle on videogames and what it’s like to be a female gamer. Cary’s post ‘Playing Like A Girl‘ is an illuminating anecdote about the perception that women gamers are only into ‘casual games’. She says
So as I try to convince [a co-worker] to give Dead Space a chance this customer starts laughing, looks and me and says, “I can’t believe I’m hearing a girl talk about Dead Space!”.
On a rather bittersweet note, we regret to inform you that Duncan Fyfe has gone and pressed the button and started the countdown to Self Destruction (sorry – couldn’t resist!). As of writing, we are only 5 posts from midnight – don’t forget to go pay your respects to one of the best and brightest game bloggers around.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun does an expose on the perils of Cross-Region pricing – an issue that is only looking to get worse as more developing nations get online and start buying games they can afford.
Adrian Werner of ‘Reasons Why It’s Good to be a PC Gamer’ talks about the uproar around Fez’s announcement as an XBLA exclusive. His point is basically that “we have to get rid of the “indie game = PC game” mentality as much as we hate to do so.” A good and timely read.
Michael Clarkson is a busy, busy man, but he apparently still finds time to blog occasionally. This week he talks about how narrative finds its way into Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri and, ultimately, how it’s a less than perfect approach.
The eminent Hardcasual ran a piece this week where they caught up with an aging “Inverted Y-axis” who is coming to grips with his own mortality. Shortly thereafter, David Wildgoose of Kotaku AU did a quick, informal polling of his readers about who uses what control scheme for PC/Console gaming and I got to call him a freak in the comments section.
Matthew Kaplan runs the game blog ‘Game in Mind’ and discusses a 1UP feature in which it is mooted that ‘Sandbox is not a genre’. Kaplan adds some interesting things to the discussion.
Steven O’Dell writes on his blog ‘Raptured Reality’ about videogame introductions and how they can capture a player’s excitement and attention. Specifically, he talks about Motor Storm, but his points apply to plenty of other games. He says,
The fact the introduction can get you excited to play is significant — How many games can get you into the mood to play them within minutes, hell, seconds of you putting the disc into the drive? It’s a good feeling.
Steve Gaynor picked up an original copy of Sim City from a local Goodwill store and uses it as a springboard to talk about changes in the games industry and how it has gone from being personal and having almost a ‘community’ feel in the 90’s, to the current impersonal state of industry. He makes the observation that the indie scene, so popular at the moment, has a similar feel – it is more community than industry.
Lastly, Nick Dinicola writing for the moving pixels blog asks, ‘Does the lack of a HUD make a game more immersive?‘ While I think his question implies that there is only one type of immersion, his post includes some interesting discussion of Far Cry 2, Uncharted, Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge for their individual approaches to HUD presentation.
And that’s it for This Week In Videogame Blogging. You may notice that we have disabled comments on this post, and that’s so that you, dear reader, will go forth and comment on the original posts. This is an initiative that we will be trailing for certain link-related posts. Here at Critical Distance we’re all about encouraging other blogs and bloggers.