"Where is all the good writing about games?"
…– Haywire Magazine April Tyack reads Monster Hunter: Worlds through philosophical thought about colonialism and the construction of identity.
“It’s vital we think of alternatives that challenge the myth of perpetual growth, instead of uncritically repeating it, not simply to create variety in strategy design, but also because that…
Videogames: where frustration and inconvenience can be enjoyable. This week’s roundup features writing on the design and portrayal of economic systems, emotional loops, and physical structures for human bodies.
First, this week brought us three pieces about dad games, children, and conservative fantasies.
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…of diverse representation in videogame characters.
“Time and time again, Blizzard’s fans have had to do the heavy lifting with their own
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…Williams looks at ‘Brutalizing Children in Limbo’ and, um, stares longingly at Chun Li’s thighs.
Chun-Li’s sexuality becomes something more than an incidental quality to be admired merely because she inherently possesses an extraordinary physical trait. Chun-Li’s thighs might be eroticized, but they represent an earned physical extraordinariness.
Williams’ blogger-mate Nick Dinicola comes back with another piece on Limbo in ‘Dreaming in Limbo’.
Mark Cullinane at the No Added Sugar blog has a rather different reaction to Limbo, turning his attention to the critical response to the indie XBLA title and finds its reception unwarrantedly…
…between negative moods and nostalgia also came up when the researchers looked at what triggers bouts of the emotion. They found that feeling down in the dumps or displeasure over current circumstances is likely to prompt people to reminisce about some uplifting experience in the past.”
Finally, Mitch Krpata skewers videogame writing in his piece on Insult Swordfighting by asking readers to match each of the year’s ten most popular games with a quotation from its review.
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…entertainment without dragging out the same tired stereotypes. And perhaps abandoning those stereotypes is one of the touches that is the difference between a good game and a great one.
At Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, Elizabeth LaPensée wrote:
[AC3] remedies several typical missteps of past Indigenous representations in videogames […] Most importantly, Ubisoft collaborated with Indigenous peoples. […] Thomas Deer, a cultural liaison officer at the Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center, directly consulted with Ubisoft on Iroquois traditional knowledge to inform game assets like buildings, music, and non-player character behavior. [With respect to female agency…
…most prominent, hotly-discussed games of years past. When we last opened a call for pitches in 2018 (yes, we know), we ended up with some absolutely astonishing compilations for games like Kentucky Route Zero, Assassin’s Creed II, and the Mass Effect trilogy.
What will we see when we open pitches this time? We’re excited to find out! Critical Distance has decided to commission ten new Critical Compilations. Here are some of the games we’re looking for:
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…The remake updated the controls to a third-person, over-the-shoulder view, similar to Resident Evil 4, which is often considered a tidal shift in the tone of the series, to some people’s chagrin.
The debate about the camera angles is a wide-ranging one, but critical consensus seems to be that, while the fixed angles were originally the produce of technological constraints, treating them as simply a product of a bygone era that can be written out of a remake takes away something very special about the original game. Kent Aardse at First Person Scholar pointed out that the original camera…
…day before the game’s public launch, major reviews ran in several publications. Evan Narcisse, at Kotaku. Kevin Van Ord, at Gamespot. Tom Francis, at PCGamer. Arthur Gies, at Polygon. Joe Juba, at GameInformer. As a general rule, these reviews were positive, although Juba criticized the game’s underutilization of the Songbird, and Gies remarked that the game’s political ambitions seemed unmet by the game’s execution:
By the end of BioShock Infinite my understanding of its world had been blown so wide-open that it was all I could do to navigate the final twenty minutes in stunned silence, which followed
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…struggle through the same title. A Kotaku blog entry by user Raw Danger expounds upon the idea and suggests, much like Dinicola, that the key element is socialisation. That a bad game alone is a bad game but sharing the misery can elevate the experience to real enjoyment. Victor De La Cruz at Gamemoir suggests that it is the reversal of scorn that is the reason for the absence of a prominent ‘B-grade’ game culture outside of Let’s Plays. That is to say, it is no longer enjoyable when we are not laughing at the creator — or individual artist…