"Where is all the good writing about games?"
Critical Distance is proud to present this Critical Compilation of BioWare’s critically polarizing Dragon Age II by Rollin Bishop, as part of our new series of commissioned features. Dragon Age II is a divisive video game, but not so much within critical…
Critical Distance is proud to present this Critical Compilation of cult classic Deadly Premonition by Robert Hughes, which represents the first in our new series of commissioned features. Since its staggered transcontinental release in 2010, Deadly Premonition has been a source of…
Critical Distance is proud to present this Critical Compilation on Nier, put together by Michael Hancock, book review editor for First Person Scholar. You can visit First Person Scholar here, and visit Michael’s personal blog here. Cavia’s 2010 Nier is not a…
Editor’s note: This compilation has remained unscheduled in Critical Distance’s backlogs for going on three years and is no doubt out of date. We’ve elected to publish it so as to not let Sparky’s hard work to go to waste but we…
Depending on who you ask, Yager’s military-themed cover-shooter Spec Ops: The Line is either the most exciting game of recent time, or the most disappointing. Some argue that it is incredibly insightful and provoking, challenging many of the most rigid and ingrained…
Editors note: This is the first Critical Compilation we’ve hosted in a long while, and it comes to us from our newest contributor, John Kilhefner. It’s been called visually stunning, a revelation in character writing and the greatest movie ever played. Regardless,…
At the 2010 D.I.C.E. Summit [mirror], Jesse Schell gave a talk entitled ‘Design outside the Box’ that set the gaming blog world on fire. Now that the pace of resulting conversation has slowed, we’d like to take the time to gather links…
“You confront the Abstract Art and its cohorts.” EarthBound was released in North America on June 1st, 1995. In other words, it was mainly played in the mid-90s by young Generation-Y gamers approaching adolescence (Maybe acquired on Christmas ’95, or a birthday…
At the time of its release, Grand Theft Auto IV was hailed as the most important moment in the development of games as art, and their mainstream acceptance as such. It had the usual controversies, from reactionary conservatives as well as genuinely-offended…
Imagine the enormity of the task: to take one of the most fondly-remembered role-playing games ever made, a game developed by another studio, and craft a sequel with vastly different gameplay, advancing the world design and graphics for a new era of…