Romancing the silicon wafer

Kim Moss recently penned an article here at Nightmare Mode entitled “You Know What’s Gross? We Often Play Nice Guys™ In Games With Romance Options.” In it, she makes a brief comparison between the capitalist lens through which “NiceGuys” view

You Know What's Gross? We Often Play Nice Guys™ In Games With Romance Options

A wise person once said, “Women aren’t vending machines you put kindness coins into until sex falls out.”

The Lost Words of Mass Effect 3

“You have messages at your private terminal.” In Mass Effect 3, this single quote is repeated more than any other sentence to the player. Just approaching the the galaxy map will prompt Specialist Traynor to dutifully tell Shepard when new

Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut is a Watershed Moment in Videogame Narrative

(Note: Just to be clear, there are some light spoilers regarding the ending of Mass Effect 3. If you haven’t played through it, I recommend going through and experiencing the “disappointing” ending before Tuesday so you can know what all

Blizzard and Bioware's MMOs: Telling Stories From Opposite Directions

There’s a lot of presumption out there that MMORPGs can’t or don’t tell stories like their single-player counterparts. Me, I think it’s nonsense. Maybe that was true in the past. It isn’t now.

In fact, I’ve been amazed at how much they’ve evolved from oldschool monster-clubbing. Somehow, some way, MMOs started telling stories. Final Fantasy XI has character-focused missions bound together into a grand narrative, Age of Conan has its early-game switches between single-player and multiplayer, and Guild Wars has its hub-and-instance structure. Dungeons and Dragons Online actually has a narrator. Storytelling’s gotten big, and storytelling choices has become key to differentiation within the genre.

Even World of Warcraft (WoW) has evolved into a story-focused game.

The Paragon Homunculus in ME

Over the course of seven days I fell in and out of love, only to find it again in the arms of another.  I stopped a genocide, only to cause two others; I talked people off ledges, helped mend broken

In defense of boring

As games move towards noise and thunder, I’m inclined to retreat back into the eye of the storm. I’m retreating to boring games. The action movie palette, often robbed by games, gives us bright lights, flashing pictures, and melodramatic scenes,

Allegory of the Citadel

(Mass Effect 3 Spoilers Ahead) “…when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and

Fans, Capitalism, and Mass Effect 3’s Ending. Oh My.

How can something like this happen? My finger begins to cramp from scrolling through all the screaming and virtual facepalming over the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle on Twitter. I eventually felt pressured to race through the game just to

Soundscapes – Why Mass Effect 3 might be the best sounding game of all time

Mass Effect 3 might just be the best sounding game of all time. This is quite an achievement for Bioware when you consider how the series started out. The audio in Mass Effect 1 was barely passable and in some