Post Tenebras Lux: The Jump from Majora's Mask to Wind Waker

Compared to the more earthy visuals of Ocarina of Time and the dark nuances of Majora’s Mask (recently discussed by Nightmare Mode’s own Daryl Heard) Wind Waker can seem an ocean away from its predecessors. The length and breadth of

On Entitlement: Are We Whiners, Or Just Passionate?

Image by Daniel Horacio Agostini, licensed under Creative Commons Just when you thought the word ‘fanboy’ had gone away and gamers could have conversations without throwing trite slurs at each other, there’s a new villain in town: ‘entitled’. It crops

After Pressing Start: Psychonauts’ Mental Dentist's Office

The human mind . . . six hundred miles of synaptic fiber . . . five and a half ounces of cranial fluid . . . 1500 grams of complex neural matter . . . a three-pound pile of dreams.

Psychonauts doesn’t even give you a chance to press start. Instead it says, “You don’t need to set up a profile or configure the look sensitivity and you already saw our logo when you looked at the box! Let’s get this show on the road!” I reserve a certain amount of praise for a game that just starts the moment you pop it in (or boot it up, since I played the Mac port from the Humble Indie Bundle V).

Indie Devs vs New Games Journalism [Feedback Loop]

The last year has seen the rise of the independent developer as hero. Does this growing consideration of the developer challenge an eight-year-running trend in game journalism?

The explosion of commercially accessible independent games on platforms like Steam or XBLA have introduced us to a new successful and far more accessible generation of game developers. These new indie game dev stars have induced a change in the approach of some game reviewers. A change brought to the forefront in Walter Garrett Mitchell’s piece on The Escapist, “Alfred Hitchcock Would Make Good Games.”

Mitchell’s focus on the developer is entirely unlike the experience-focused New Games Journalism style proposed in 2004 by Kieron Gillen. That experiential style has more recently been popularized by Zero Punctuation, the rest of The Escapist, @Play, and a variety of other reviews that approached games based on how they played, instead of how people created them.

After Pressing Start: Sonic Adventure 2

Our patience for entertainment wanes as we get older, leading to plenty of frustration from the inevitable “right in the childhood” moments when we open the ol’ nostalgia box only to discover that Kingdom Hearts wasn’t the narrative masterpiece we thought it was at age thirteen. Sometimes I wonder if it’s better that I don’t find out whether Austin Powers was actually funny or the possibility that Sonic Adventure 2 doesn’t deserve the praise I gave it as a kid. This is a story about the latter.

Our Games Are Not Depressing Enough [Feedback Loop]

An excess of violence has become a point of criticism for video games. The real problem isn’t the violence, but how games want us to feel about our stylized murder sprees.

In recent interviews David Cage and Warren Spector both addressed the need for games to be more emotive and less violent. However, it shouldn’t be an binary situation. Violent games could be a path to better art, if we deal with the violence in the correct way.

In Edge magazine, Cage’s interview centered around the recent E3 demo Kara. The demo by Quantic Dream showed a game character presenting subtleties of emotion only approcahable by the last Quantic Dream tech demo, ‘The Casting’.

While next-generation technology is not required for good games, Quantic’s demo shows the potential to create characters with greater emotional depth, a characteristic that does more to make them realistic than all the pixel resolution in the world.

Feedback Loop – Backward audio progress in Max Payne 3

A company that has a reputation for sparing no expenses spent 8 years in development producing Max Payne 3, a game with sound that belongs on the PS2. Instead of providing the cinematic sound spectacle I expected, Rockstar cut corners in ways

How Universities Are Helping Video Games Move Forward

In a recent interview with Electron Dance, Dr. Dan Pinchbeck explained how the development paradigm he works in actually finds values in failed games, “If you are a developer and you take a risk and it doesn’t pay off, you’re

Waiting to Respawn: The Five Tenets of Most Excellent Co-Op

Friends and loved ones, we have gathered here today to celebrate the joining of Player 1 and Player 2 in the bonds of broly matrimony. In these days of online games and randomly assigned partners, this agreement to enter co-op

Feedback Loop: Long Live the Shooter, the Shooter is Dead

The dispatches from E3 seem to indicate that the shooter remains the same. How long can its dominance last? What comes next?

Is it High Noon for shooters? In his latest post on Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott seems to think so. He compares the current generation of shooter games to Westerns in 1959, the last year before they started to disappear.