Fellow late sleepers, is it dark out before you even start to wake up? Is the sun rising too soon on your second consecutive Pokémon X/Y all-nighter?
Don’t feel S.A.D! C-D’s got your back with a hearty helping of warm, gooey, bloggy goodness:
This Week in Videogame Blogging!
As you might have heard around the watercooler or in unsolicited dubstepping pop-ups, one of the two Shiny New Boxes came out this week in North America. Polygon and quite a few others have posted thoughts on it. Mouse-wielding contrarians Rock, Paper, Shotgun took the opportunity to hoist the PC flag using MS Paint.
And, as is all but tradition with console launches, the initial lineup has been getting reviews that amount to an optimistic meh, with one exception.
In C-D’s second-ever reference and first-ever link to the badly animated kids from Colorado, South Park’s latest outing takes shots at said Shiny New Boxes, Black Friday, consumerism, and even the preorder numbers for their most recent game. (Content Warning: It’s South Park.)
FOND-ISH FAREWELLS
A number of publications ran rose-tinted and/or older-and-wiser reflections on the outgoing generation of consoles. Here’s Kotaku on their favorite characters and boxart from the seventh generation of game consoles. Joystiq also reminisced about the PS3.
LOOKING FORWARD
Sure, so-called next-gen consoles are a big deal, depending on who you’re talking to. A lot of major news organizations are running pieces on the rise of mobile and PC. Right or wrong, some bets are on that we’re entering “The Last Console Generation.” Or not.
Jonathan Blow, designer of Braid and The Witness, gave a talk about free-to-play:
Elsewhere, Jason Rice weaves together Sleep No More, The Stanley Parable, The Walking Dead, and player performance, looking toward the future of interactivity.
SOMETHING YOU ALREADY KNEW BUT THAT SCIENCE HAS NOW CONFIRMED
According to a new study by the Queensland University of Technology, playing video games improves children’s emotional, social, and psychological well-being. The study also finds that playing video games together as a family can help build stronger family bonds.
More at GamePolitics.
BIG GUNS
With new consoles comes the inevitable march of new shooters. Battlefield 4, Call of Duty: Ghosts, and Killzone: Shadowfall all dropped (the bass) recently.
At Critical Damage, Brendan Keogh has some kind-ish words for Ghosts’s campaign:
You’ve probably seen the video of how the intro of Ghosts uses an identical animation sequence to the end of Modern Warfare 2. It’s the most explicit example of it, but the same animations and moments are used throughout Ghosts. It’s either intended as laziness, apathy, or deliberate intertextuality—it functions as all three. The entire game feels like a collage of moments from the previous games. Not just the same mechanics or the same features but literally the same moments. The moment your bro looked into the distance then helped you up. The moment your bro was fighting the bad dude while you were crawling towards a gun. The moment an explosion knocked you off your feet in slow motion
[…]
Even if it is just laziness, I still find that fascinating. Like peeling back layers of wallpaper from an old
Luke Pullen also aired a few grievances about Ghosts surrounding CoD’s apocalyptic Schadenfreude.
On the topic of guns and war, enter Simon Parkin’s awesome feature at the New Yorker on videogames in Iraq. Note the unsettlingly realistic animation (or photo??) at the top.
Lastly, Alex Spencer tried to be a pacifist in GTA V, which worked about as well as you would expect:
Reader, I restarted the whole damn game
etc.
Fellow Spelunkers, all your efforts have been in vain: Bananasaurus Rex has completed the elusive solo eggplant run. If this means nothing to you, carry on as if none of these ridiculous words had ever appeared together.
Spike Jonze, cool-name-haver and eminent director, wants to make videogames.
If current modding trends continue, Skyrim may literally never get old. Check out Ether Dynamics’s video about AI problems in Skyrim and the mod that solves them.
SUNSET
Already?!?
PS4 down, Xbone to go. Come back next week for another barrage of links well-baited by another of C-D’s wonderful contributors.
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