"Where is all the good writing about games?"
…recounts, through interview and anecdote, the history of an off-beat, personality-driven gaming magazine that outlived its home platform.
“Indiepocalypse is a narrative that, I believe, starts with the AAA industry and ends with you and me. Everything from what our shared understanding of what “good” and “bad” are to the kinds of…
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“Woolsey’s clever alterations to Final Fantasy 6’s script and his dedication to the game’s characters still echo in ways he never expected. As Woolsey himself admits, parts of Final Fantasy 6’s translation are odd. Sentences often feel truncated, no doubt because of the strict memory limitations Woolsey worked with. Despite these problems, Woolsey’s Final Fantasy 6 translation built up
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“The Sims franchise has never been marketed as “queer” or “liberal” or “progressive” or any other politically-coded term. Queerness is just a built-in feature of the life simulation game, not unlike the way it is for
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…look closely at the world around us we can see the factors and influences that fanned those flames: a disregard for the facts of climate change, a ruling government that refused to properly resource firefighters, and a system of literal scorched earth policies. All those invisible factors that led to disaster become visible if we look close enough.”
A trio of retrospectives this week delve deeply into the titles of yesteryear… yesterdecade?
…examines the last, rarest, and purportedly worst game for the ill-fated Virtual Boy, as well as the curious developer who made it live.
“Most folk inclined to cover the Virtual Boy’s history are simply content to write off Virtual Lab as unfinished, borderline unplayable, and unworthy of any other further comment. But here on the Bad Game Hall of Fame, we take our studies very seriously. What this scientific paper sets out to demonstrate are the known circumstances of Virtual Lab’s development, to describe the depths of its gameplay, and to measure its ultimate impact on the…
…for Polygon, RE2 Remake producer Tsuyoshi Kanda discussed having to bring “groundedness” to the game, since the realistic graphics would naturally throw the unbelievable parts of the game into sharp relief. This point is echoed by Ed Smith, who points out that the realism of the game extends only to the graphics and not the plot, which can lead to player discontent.
The graphical realism of the game naturally lends itself to the idea of the game holding a mirror up to reality in some way. Nic Reuben delves into the history of the zombie as metaphor and…
…isolated from: other people.
Samus Is Shrinking
Since her debut — almost unanimously described as a “breakthrough” — Samus has unfortunately been at the mercy of clueless developers. She has been quite literally diminished. Samus, who was once 6’3″ and 198 pounds, is now visibly shorter than the male characters in her games. In “Samus Is Slowly Shrinking,” written in 2010, Amanda Lange presents a detailed history of how Samus’ creators have brought her in line with stereotypically feminine characteristics. While she, like many others, criticizes Other M, she observes that Other M is not solely to blame….
…old DOS platformer, provoking tensions between its narrative framing and its constrained, secondhand game engine.
…into detail on game development cycles past and present with an angle on opening up games and play to underserved communities.
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…affairs. (Manual captions) [Contains embedded advertising]
Sid explains the accessibility problems he encounters in most third-person action games, as someone who has lost vision in one eye. (Manual captions) Dutchy delves into how her personal gaming genre preferences are shaped by a confluence of life-history circumstances, gatekeeping attitudes and design habits. (Autocaptions) Alexandra Orlando and DigitalMumbles chat about the evocations of the particular “one-note”
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