Search Results for “adam%20saltsman” – Page 3

December 18th

…musing on why more games are not set in it.

Bah, feelings! Who needs them? Not Brad Gallaway. At least, not when they apply to game reviews.

On the subject of reviews, Adam Smith takes a glance back at 2011 in roguelikes. And on the more technical end of things, Gamasutra expert blogger speculates that we may be approaching a bottleneck in cloudgaming: “The Cloud isn’t as elastic as you think.”

I see no better way to cap off this week’s offerings than to refer you, dear reader, to Eric Lockaby’s latest. Lockaby, who knows damn well…

UPDATED: Blogs of the Round Table: January ’12 Roundup

…on the theme of the Blogs of the Round Table itself, as well as raising the point that there are very few games in which he identifies with the protagonist.

Tami Baribeau at The Border House writes that ‘In games, I’m always someone I’m not because I’m fat’, with a particularly illuminating story of a former coworker who encountered online incredulity that they would create a ‘fat’ avatar.

Adam Burch at Thus Spoke Pi writes about the collision between Brave New World’s ‘feelies’ and a story about an acquaintance of his experiencing the effects of racism.

Amanda…

May 20th

…ourselves at the end of play.

RockPaperShotgun’s Adam Smith takes issue with the term ‘cinematic.’ Meanwhile, throwing ludology to the wind, Eric Lockaby stomps back in from the cold this week with the first chapter of his ‘playable critique’ of The Great Gatsby. While his design is still a little rough, Lockaby’s work is, as always, worth investigating simply for the strangeness of it.

Cody Steffen breaks down the portrayal of sex and gender in The Witcher 2 and finds it wanting. On a more high profile subject, we could not go this week without mentioning Brandon…

June 3rd

…Kill Screen piece by Michael Thomsen. Also of interest is Gaming as Women’s wundergeek’s documentation on the portrayal of rape and violence against women across geek media.

Less on the subject of Hitman and more on pulled Kickstarter project Tentacle Bento, Medium Difficulty’s Adam Maresca calls the discussion surrounding the game a “Pandora’s Lunchbox” of questionable priorities:

The fuss is minimal when award-winning Pakistani student filmmakers are denied visas for depicting the bloody truths of “drone warfare”. But get in Tentacle Bento’s way, and you have one of the figureheads of “gamer culture” taking up the sword

…

June 10th

…failed to find an audience and then how surrogate ruins the otherwise grand Diablo 3.

Ah, no no. You want something more substantial, something more meaningful, something more political? You are in luck, madam! Thanks to a shipping error I have an abundance of just such a thing from Medium Difficulty. I have a Kyle Carpenter unpacking of the polemics of Tentacle Bento and examining all of the unsaid assumptions of such a thing. Also, a certain Megan Townsend bit on where Harvest Moon goes wrong with female representation. But far more bombastic is this Adam Maresca piece on…

July 9th

…puts up a good rebuttal of the attacks Day constantly faces.

Videogames often invite us to reach outside our comfort zones, so why is it that some gamers feel so uncomfortable to share their hobby? Unwinnable’s Gus Mastrapa has the word on Spelunky as a game that encourages us to try new things.

I’ll leave you with two interesting curios to wrap up this edition of TWIVGB.

First up is Adam Ruch’s kidnapping adventure in DayZ, which is a game you should be playing if you aren’t already.

And last, but not least, is You Chose…

August 19th

…current military themed games for contributing to the idea that endless war is normal. “War is routinized, war is a spectacle, war is sanitized, war is surveillance.”

Tadhg Kelly compares video games to porn and the lessons it can learn from it when bigger/better/faster/harder is no longer enough. Zoya writing for The Border House asks, “Should game developers avoid triggering players’ PTSD?”

Meanwhile, Adam Maresca, at Medium Difficulty, talks about the real price of game violence and how we talk about them matters, “not because they dictate how is going to go on a rampage, but because they’re…

August 26th

…more practical question, namely: can we methodically arrive at a universal definition for the indie game?

Enough on the games themselves; what about the folks who make them tick? Alan Williamson of Nightmare Mode says “entitled” isn’t the word you’re looking for to describe gamers; Adam Ruch of Kotaku Australia believes “elite” isn’t fitting either:

In reality, the elitist notion of a pure, hardcore games culture is a fantasy. There is no such thing as a video game culture hermetically sealed-off from the rest of the world. Of course there are concentrations, where or when individuals focus

…

September 2nd

…Johannes Koski takes us through the streets of Shibuya while extrapolating on concepts from Isaac Lenhart, and what it all has to do with The World Ends With You.

As a matter of fact, this was a good week for JRPG commentary all around, as Pixels or Death’s Adam Harshberger reveals that he liked Xenoblade Chronicles enough to confide a few dark secrets in us. And GameInformer’s Kimberley Wallace explores several design lessons we can still learn the grand old genre.

Josh Bycer writes of the plot holes of Diablo 3. Meanwhile, Unwinnable’s Sam Machkovech swaps out plot…

September 16th

…asks, “Is a Scary Game Scarier If You Don’t Know How to Play?” He says that lacking experience with WASD controls only serves to make a game like Amnesia: The Dark Decent even scarier.

Emily Payton explores her inner Lynch in looking at the dream like qualities of Deadly Premonition.

Input Satire

Michael “brainy gamer” Abbott skewers general complaints about service from gamers by entering the rhetoric into real life shops.

Error Error

Stu Horvath at Unwinnable has “Sympathy for the Universe” where he writes about giving life to fictional characters, avatars, Adam and God…