"Where is all the good writing about games?"
…confront the empty reality of millennial capitalism, and calls for games that can help us to imagine an alternative.
“This system of gathering as much social media currency as possible, only for a vague sense of reward, reminds me of the pervasiveness numbness that comes with consumerism.” Three critics highlight games that challenge received genre conventions relating to zombies and the apocalypse.
Normal apocalyptic
…which to imagine alternative cities and political structures.”
Finally, two critics look at visual expression in games, with an eye towards things that feel familiar, whether that familiarity is comforting or creepy.
“FAITH‘s…
…– 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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…how the game has been unfairly maligned by reviewers as a God of War ripoff and how there’s room for more than one third person action game. I personally enjoyed Andrew’s critical dissection of Lords of Shadow as both a successor to the Castlevania series and a serious contender to the action game throne.
On GamerMelodico, Dan Apczynski writes about the experience of losing a match in Madden 2011 and how the loss is a necessary experience in playing the game [mirror]. He contrasts this with other games, where death is simply the loss of progress achieved and ultimately…
…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…