Moving Pixels Podcast: Recent Episodes
PopMatters
This month, Nick and Eric talk about the epic and dense high concept sci-fi/fantasy of Torment: Tides of Numenera and end with an important announcement about the future of the podcast.
Nick and Eric got sent to detention and missed Halloween, but they escaped their classroom just in time to talk about the Taiwanese horror game Detention.
This week, Nick and Eric dig into the detective point-and-click text adventure A Case of Distrust, and investigate what makes it good, but not great.
This week we discuss self-consciousness, self-identification, and awful puzzle design in The Fall: Part 2 - Unbound.
This week Nick and Eric discuss The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, and how its status as a prequel/promo for Life Is Strange 2 makes it less awesome.
This month Nick and Eric discuss the economics of robot sentience in Subsurface Circular and the tricky trust issues of alien first-contact in Quarantine Circular.
This week, Nick and Eric discuss the optimistic and mythic post-post-apocalypse of Horizon: Zero Dawn.
Nick and Eric brave the depths of Helheim to talk about the art, craft, and representation of psychosis in 'Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice'.
This month, Nick and Eric spend a Night in the Woods facing down the cosmic horrors of economic disenfranchisement.
This week, Nick and Eric take up arms in order to free America from the Nazi regime, and occasionally talk about Wolfenstein: The New Colossus.
Nick and Eric count down their top seven games of 2017, and look back at what was a pretty great year for gaming.
This week, Nick and Eric talk about the joy and frustration of killing Nazis in Wolfenstein: The New Order.
This week, the Moving Pixels podcast delves into the experimental horror text adventure anthology Stories Untold.
This week Nick and Eric travel into space and plan an elaborate heist to steal Tales from the Borderlands - Episode 4.
This week Nick and Eric finishing discussing 'Knee Deep' by asking if a game can be so bad it's good.
This week Nick and Eric are joined by Max Bernard of YouTube's 'Great Levels of Gaming' to talk about giant mechs, the intelligence level of artificial intelligence, and of course some great level design.
We've reached the middle of Telltale's effort to blend the point-and-click adventure with a First Person Shooter.
This week we discuss more hijinks from Tales from the Borderlands
This week the Moving Pixels podcast begins a three-part discussion of Knee Deep, a "swamp noir" we all agree has a great setting. However, we can't agree on much more than that.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast continues a five-part discussion of Telltale Games' Tales from the Borderlands.
So, our foray into the adventure-game-style version of the Borderlands continues.
Often regarded as one of the best adventure games of the 1990s, Full Thottle is a classic that mixes the violence and bravado of biker culture with the careful logic of the adventure game.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast begins a five-part discussion of Telltales' Tales from the Borderlands.
Tales from the Borderlands tests whether or not Telltale's conversation-driven adventure game can work as a comedy.
Finji's Night in the Woods is one of this year's most talked about indie games.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast takes a look at the precursor to that game, Lost Constellation.
It's easy to think that we would never be complicit with the dictates of an authoritarian regime, but Beholder reveals how complicated such choices can become.
This week, Nick and Eric play the long awaited The Last Guardian. Does the game live up to our expectations? What were our expectations? Is Trico more of a cat-bird or a dog-bird? We consider these questions and more in this episode.
This week we talk about the unusual card game/roguelike Reigns and how it reduces politics to a left or right swipe.
It's back to the '80s with Steve Jackson's Sorcery!. This week we consider how a game book fares as a video game.
This Is the Police is a police management sim boiled about as hard as they come.
This week we take a look at the themes and politics of the game.
Reminiscent of text adventures and experiments with natural language processing, Event [0] is a game that feels both modern and retro. It's a game that forces the player into a relationship with an AI, becoming an exploration of both identity and language itself.
This week we explore the game's experiment with language as a form of gameplay.
As is our tradition, this year we count down our top five games of 2016. Spoiler alert: there's a whole lot of indies and oddities on this list.
Following our discussion of last year's smash cut heavy Virginia, the Moving Pixels podcast decided to take a look back at one of Virginia's gaming inspirations, Thirty Flights of Loving.
This week the podcast looks at the avant-garde games of indie developer Blendo Games.
Virginia is a surrealist crime procedural set in a state adjoining the seat of American power, Washington D.C.
This week we discuss how Virginia explores themes of power, corruption and identity through its cinematic gameplay.
Following up on our discussions of Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, we are now discussing the slow burn sci fi horror of Soma.
Soma considers philosophical questions concerning the relationship between the body and the mind, a topic we dive into head first this week.
Following up on our discussion from last week of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, this week we discuss that game's follow up A Machine for Pigs.
Machine for Pigs was handed off from Frictional Games to The Chinese Room. As a result, we consider how the new developer handles a classic property and reconsiders what kind of horror the Amnesia franchise can offer.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent was one of the more well regarded games of 2010, but we recently discovered that none of our regular Moving Pixels podcasters had played it at the time.
So, this week we catch ourselves up and take a look at one of the most critically acclaimed horror games of the past ten years, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, discussing (among other things) its unique approach to provoking horror and player vulnerability along with its commitment to environmental storytelling.
The Deed's conceit is that it is a murder mystery in reverse, a kind of anti-procedural, in which you plot a crime, rather than solve it.
By playing The Deed we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of inhabiting the mind of a murderer. This week, we consider the implications of this role reversal.
Love it or hate it, No Man's Sky was one of the most anticipated game releases of the year.
This week, Nick Dinicola and Erik Kersting consider the possible successes and perceived failures of No Man's Sky.
As is our habit on the podcast, we occasionally like to sample what is going on in the free-to-play gaming.
This week we discuss three games available on Steam, A Date in the Park, Mandagon, and The Lion's Songs as examples of lowbrow, middle brow, and high brow offerings within the free-to-play market.
Fans of Kentucky Route Zero have waited two years for the penultimate chapter in the episodic game series.
This week we discuss the slow winding journey of The Mucky Mammoth down the Echo River, the slow dissolve of the game's former protagonist, and speculate on where this journey to 5 Dogwood Drive will end.
While the mania has begun to ebb in the remaining days of summer, Pokemon Go was the biggest gaming event of the last two months, both a cultural and cross cultural phenomenon.
While our own experiences of the game are localized, this week we discuss our own experiences with Pokemon Go and how they may reflect on the larger phenomenon surrounding its release.
Inside is Playdead's follow up to the now cult classic Limbo.
The game is haunting, both in its beauty and in its presentation of body horror, exploring collectivism and control through its weird world and silent protagonist. This week we attempt to get under the hood and toy around with what lurks beneath its often inscrutable surface.
Jotun arrived quietly last year, but the game is all about going big, reveling as it does in grandiosity and big, big boss fights.
This week we discuss Jotun's presentation of Norse mythology through scale and grandeur.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast returns to search for treasure with the rogue with a heart of gold, Nathan Drake.
This week we discuss the minimalistic combat of One Finger Death Punch. We discuss the game, but our conversation also strays into a discussion of the design philosophy of Silver Dollar Games, punk game design, and video games that troll their players.
SUPERHOT isn't the first reconsideration of the first person shooter, but its slow motion violence and methodical approach to murder certainly has made an impression.
Too often video game critics find themselves responding to cinematic versions of video game properties, from Super Mario Bros. to Tomb Raider. Hardcore Henry, however, gives us a chance to consider not how well a video game translates to film, but how well a video game experience and a video game point of view translates to film.
This week we delve into the smartly written, character-driven story of Oxenfree, an early 2016 adventure game release. From high school drama to ghostly hauntings, we peel back the layers of this simple, but elegantly designed indie release.
Firewatch was developed by game development veterans associated with Telltale's The Walking Dead and with the popular indie Mark of the Ninja. Set in Shoshone National Park in 1989, it tells the story of a newly recruited fire lookout named Henry, a man looking to escape from his recent past.
This week we discuss Henry and his experiences in this lonely role alongside the growing intimacy he develops with another lookout, a woman named Delilah. We consider the beautiful world that Campo Santo has built for Henry to explore and the way that the game explores human relationships through Henry's experiences within that world.
Pony Island sounds like a happy place, but David Mullins' game is about what lurks beneath the surface of virtual worlds.
This week we discuss the game as meta-game that makes up the experience of Pony Island.
Following a year of availability in early access, Darkest Dungeon was released on Steam in January 2016. Set in a Lovecraftian universe, the game is about twisted family lineages, unspeakable and otherworldly horrors, and the cruel psychological and physical consequences of attempting a campaign against unwinnable opposition.
This week we discuss our own sadistic and masochistic experiences in the Darkest Dungeon and how penalties and pain became a source of twisted pleasure in games like this one.
This week we consider the multicultural mash up in this indie from last year, a game that includes concerns about robots and body augmentation alongside passages from The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Cradle asks questions about the soul, the body, and the relationship between those two things and advanced technology. In the podcast, we discuss its concern with incarnation and reincarnation in a culture in which science and reason are ascendant.
Metal Gear Solid V marks the end of nearly 30 years of the Metal Gear saga, one of the longest running series in video gaming history-at least with its creator Hideo Kojima at the helm. It seems important to consider the game given Kojima's effort to wrap up the series by connecting its latter day iterations with its origins, but also how even now how inventive Kojima is in reconsidering the game's mechanics and gameplay.
So, this week we consider this fresh, but final take by Kojima on the world of Solid Snake and Big Boss, a stealth game executed astonishingly well within an open world setting.
Cibele is Nina Freeman's autobiographical look at a first experience of love in an online space.
So, it seems somewhat fitting on the day after Valentine's Day for the Moving Pixels podcast to consider what we can learn about romance and courtship through a video game.
We're a tad late to the station when it comes to the hype train that is Undertale.
But this week we discuss the game that every indie fan was talking about last year. It's one part whimsy, mixed with one part social commentary, mixed with even more whimsy, and to top it off a zany sense of humor and a bucket full of self awareness.
This episode we discuss, well, our picks for the best games of 2015.
There was a whole lot to love in 2015 from both the big publishers and from the indie scene. From iOS sims to big budget action games to narrative driven adventure games, we have a little something for everyone on our list.
In two weeks, we'll be talking about our picks for the best video games of 2015, but this week, we remain focused on one of the better reviewed iOS games of 2015, 80 Days.
Inspired by the Jules Verne novel, at once 80 Days takes the player on a tour of a prior century, but with its more overtly steampunk trappings and frequently more modern social attitudes, the game presents a branching narrative that allows the player to explore an ever changing world.
For our final podcast of the year, we end at a beginning of sorts, a discussion of Davey Wreden's The Beginner's Guide.
This is the developer's first game since the critically lauded Stanley Parable, Wreden changes focus from interrogating how we play games to how we interpret them.
This week we conclude our nearly year long discussion of Life Is Strange.
Delving into the nitty gritty of episode five, we consider the overall arc of this story, its final choice, and how the game has handled relating its seemingly disparate plot points into one unified whole.
While the concluding episode of Life Is Strange was recently released, we are only just nearing its conclusion with our discussion of the fourth episode of the series.
This week we continue to consider our commitments to certain choices made in the game and our revisions of reality and the consequences of both on the life of Max Caulfield.
Our resident horror game aficionado recommended this game for discussion this Halloween week.
David Szymanski's horror titles, like The Moon Sliver and Fingerbones, seem to be gaining a bit of a cult following among horror fans, and at least some of those games seem to be sketching out the basis for a larger mythos that Szymanski is developing. As part of this mythos, The Music Machine is presented through a high contrast aesthetic and within the context of a Lovecraftian universe. The game tells a story about evil, both of an intentional nature and of a more awful, more accidental kind.
Coinciding with their announcement of Fallout 4, Bethesda released a free iOS version of Fallout to whet their fans appetite for the retro futuristic vibe of the series.
While both games are about surviving in a post-apocalyptic future, Fallout Shelter is more about managing the resources of a community than it is about guiding a single individual's adventures. This week we chat about the game and its commitment to collectivist concern. The needs of the many, after all, outweigh the needs of the few (or so we've been told by a certain pointy eared philosopher from outer space).
With its third episode, "Chaos Theory", Life is Strange gets stranger. Sure, this is a coming of age story that just happens to include a teenager that can time travel and has visions of an impending apocalypse, but the story so far has remained fairly focused on the difficulties of growing up and attending high school.
While that focus continues to be significant to this choice-driven, episodic point-and-click adventure, Max's power in this episode begins to develop in new ways, opening up the game's interest in choices and consequences on an even larger scale.
This episode of the podcast we crawl into the second episode of Life Is Strange.
Last time, we discussed a lot of the mechanics in the game, especially the rewind mechanic, that allows one to revise one's actions in a young girl's life. This time out we get into more of the characters that populate this world and also learn that some of the uglier events of adolescence just can't be revised, much as we might like them to be sometimes. Sometimes we just have to figure out how to cope with what is, no matter how much we would like to rewind.
This week we begin a series of five episodes about the episodic choice-driven point-and-click adventure game Life Is Strange.
By way of introduction, this week we're talking about the first episode but focusing mainly on how the game's mechanics work in contrast to other games in the genre, like Telltale's The Walking Dead, and how the mechanics support the coming of age story that seems to be the game's central focus.
A game whose dominant activity is searching a database may sound terrible. However, Sam Barlow's Her Story manages to use what would seem like basic database management skills to weave an intriguing mystery that explores the nature of storytelling, fairy tales, and identity.
This week we discuss the tactics and strategies of searching databases, solving mysteries, and how to determine the veracity of the stories that we tell ourselves and the stories that we tell each other.
Following up on our recent discussion of The Swapper and the questions that that game raises about the self, the soul, and the body, this week we take a look at another science fiction game with somewhat similar concerns, The Fall.
Instead of using cloning as a means of exploring the meaning of self identity, The Fall raises similar questions as The Swapper does through its consideration of how an artificial intelligence governs itself.
This week, the podcast revisits one of last year's critically acclaimed indie games, The Swapper.
Even through its game mechanics, The Swapper
With the arrival of a number of successful and interesting episodic games, this approach to gaming seems to be growing more and more common.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast discusses the possibilities and limitations of a crime drama in episodic game form, The Detail.
This week, the Moving Pixels podcast crew discuss the high contrast world of White Night.
White Night tells the story of a haunted house and a decaying American economy.
Context matters, or so we are told.
So, this week we consider how thematic, aesthetic, and narrative contexts effect how we understand the mechanics of the games that we play.
Last October on our Halloween themed episode, we briefly alluded to a 20 minute indie horror point-and-click game by Owl Creek Games called Sepulchre.
We admired the game for its moody tone and understated horror, but it seemed too brief an experience to devote a whole podcast to. With the release of The Charnel House Trilogy, Owl Creek decided to build upwards and outwards from that central story into a new triptych of tales in which Sepulchre serves as the centerpiece.
So, this week we spend a little time chatting about what Sepulchre has blossomed into in this new expanded version of the original.
It's a style. It's interactive comedy. It's a game.
Maybe?
Even after playing it, it's hard to even begin to describe Jazzpunk.
But we'll do our best.
Action is most often the word that one expects to hear when talking about console games released by big publishers.
Square Enix's effort to release a game focused on investigation rather than on gunplay resulted in what is generally considered a failure, the ghost detective game Murdered: Soul Suspect. This week we consider what went right and went wrong in the resulting product.
For a video game designed within a game genre known for its often less spectacle-driven storytelling, The Cat Lady is surprisingly brutal, violent, and often appalling.
That being said, it is also a horror game that is more interested in the horrors of real life, depression and anxiety, than it is in its gorier and terrifying backdrop. This week we discuss the 2012 indie game and what it might have to say about the kind of horrors that real people grapple with everyday.
Valiant Hearts is not another first person shooter set in World War II. Instead, Valiant Hearts makes players puzzle through the oft forgotten significance of World War I to European history.
This week we discuss its choice of presenting the Great Conflict through cartoon aesthetics along with its puzzles and how these still manage to express the very serious events and consequences of World War I.
The Sims meets nihilism in this life simulator set within a war torn urban center.
This War of Mine is provocative, and this week we discuss the emergent narratives that arise from playing this indie from 11 bit Studios.
Shadow of Mordor features some beautifully designed mechanics, combat, and an innovative and interesting system, the Nemesis system, that approaches the development of your opponents in an innovative way.
It also tells a really stupid story.
Nevertheless, we can't stop playing it.
What with all the shooting and the lopping off of heads, romance and video games are not often concepts that gamers think of first when they think of their favorite medium.
Nevertheless, from Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man to Master Chief and Cortana, their are some pretty significant couples that remain central to the history of video games.
This week we discuss the much hyped and very pretty 2014 release, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.
This is a puzzle game about storytelling, and we consider whether the sum of the game's stories is worth more than its parts.
As we do each year, we discuss what was for us the standout video games of last year.
We are now a year into the next generation of consoles, but many of our favorites of 2014 remain the smaller, quieter indie title.
Using RPG Maker XP, To the Moon was fashioned out of the imagery and basic exploration mechanics of the sprite-based era of RPG games.
Less an RPG game, though, and perhaps more honestly a piece of interactive fiction with some light puzzle mechanics, what it does have in common with RPGs of that era is a commitment to telling a very human story despite its simple graphics and character sprites.
Join us for a discussion of To the Moon.
We have written a bit about Spec-Ops: The Line here at PopMatters, but we have never explored this 2012 game on our podcast.
It's hard to understand why as The Line may be the best antiwar war game ever made, rife as it is with atrocities, tragedies, and a thoughtful approach to considering the choices we make in video games and in those more impactful real life "games," wars themselves.
Yes, I know the image above is one of Clementine at the beginning of this season of The Walking Dead. However, this is the episode in which it all comes back to that moment in which Clementine ponders her past and then considers her future.
The final episode of Season Two allows the player to finally decide who they want their Clementine to be by offering multiple paths to conclude this episode. This week we each discuss the Clementine that we have decided will resolve this season of The Walking Dead.
This week we confront the penultimate episode of Telltale's The Walking Dead Season Two in which our erstwhile band of survivors narrows down to the remaining few that will make their way into the finale.
Set against the backdrop of a museum dedicated to the Civil War, Clementine and her companions experience their own house dividing.
October is the month that traditionally big publishers have attempted to get something horrific out on the shelves for gamers to play (see, for example, offerings like this year's Alien Isolation or The Evil Within.
This year in anticipation of Halloween, we decided to take a look at a few games that currently have no publishers attached to them that may have flown under your radar, The Cursed Forest and One Late Night.
Both of these games are available for download for free at IndieDB and ModDB respectively.
The hardboiled detective genre is not known for its subtlety or complication. A good hardboiled tale simply hits you like a right to the jaw.
This week we discuss how Gunpoint presents a hardboiled fiction through simple, straightforward puzzle mechanics and with surprisingly little gunplay.
The mystery of The Wolf Among Us has concluded with an interest in exploring the consequences of crime and its effects on a community.
This week, then, we discuss the politics and justice of a fairy tale world that manages to present these issues in a manner more familiar to us than fantastic.
As we are wont to do on occasion on the podcast, we decided to play through a few little indie titles that are available for free online, which you can find through the following links: Serena, Glitchhikers, and A Dark Room.
Not everything free is good, of course, but at least one of these titles may be a game of the year contender.
Supergiant Games created an indie sensation with its 2011 game, Bastion. As a result, this year's follow up, Transistor, had to contend with some big expectations from fans of the first game.
This week we discuss Transistor and how it measures up to its older sibling.
In truth, there is very little that is happy in the neon noir fairy tale world of The Wolf Among Us. However, the penultimate chapter of Telltale's adaptation of the Fables comic book series to video game form is a quieter and more subdued one.
This week we discuss the possible success or failure of that quiet as the drama of the game moves towards its final act.
While Telltale Games released the fourth episode of the second season of The Walking Dead a couple of weeks ago, we want to spare you spoilers for the most recent episode. Instead, we're talking about the middle episode "In Harm's Way" this week.
So, take a look back with us at Clementine's confrontation with the villainous Carver and his totalitarian approach to the zombie apocalypse.
The surreal world of Kentucky Route Zero continues to fascinate and confound with the release of its third act.
This episode we discuss this act along with the interlude between it and the previous one, The Entertainment.
Not since Sid Meier's Pirates! has there been a pirate game as engrossing as Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.
This week we discuss the most recent Assassin's Creed, its place in the history of the Assassin's Creed series, and why sailing the Caribbean with Edward Kenway has reinvigorated our interest in this annual series.
Having reached its midway point, The Wolf Among Us forces its protagonist to confront his relationship to the economic forces that are causing Fabletown society to unravel.
This episode we discuss Bigby's and our own complicity with those forces.
We hate them. We love them. We complete them, except when we don't complete them. What makes the side quest so agonizing, yet so alluring?
Following up on our previous discussion of Simogo's quirky iOS title, Device 6, this week we take a look at Simogo's other little game about exploration, Year Walk.
While the two games share an interest in how players are presented with and interact with virtual spaces, a commitment to to a unique aesthetic, and a quirky and unusual world marked by puzzles and riddles, the two games definitely do not so obviously resemble one another in other ways. Gone is the maze of textuality that defines Device 6. Instead, the player explores a barren Northern European landscape in an effort to perform a ritual ages old.
This week we discuss the similarities and differences between the two games as well as what makes Year Walk a particularly compelling game world to explore in its own right.
This week we take a look at the twisty textual passages of Device 6. Device 6 treats text as a location and loses its players in the puzzling act of interpretation.
This season of Telltale's The Walking Dead has offered players a way into the story via a familiar character, Lee Everett's ward Clementine.
This week-among other issues raised this time out-we consider the strangeness of "being Clementine" as opposed to what would normally be the case in a video game with such a serious tone, a less vulnerable, more adult character.
Another day, another free-to-play release, but this one has been launched by a developer with a long history of bringing virtual addiction to the masses.
This week we play a few hands of Blizzard's collectible card game, Hearthstone, while considering its place in the free-to-play gaming landscape.
If Telltale Games's latest episodic game, The Wolf Among Us, was already based on the dark vision of the fairy tale universe of Bill Willingham's Fables, this episode gets even seamier and more hard boiled.
On this episode of the Moving Pixels Podcast, we explore just how bad the game allows us to make the Big Bad Wolf.
With its unique control scheme, I like to think of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons as a "rubbing your belly, while patting you head" simulator.
A kind of co-operative single player game, Brothers manages to represent a sibling relationship through the controller itself. Two characters can be controlled using each half of a controller, thus creating both a sense of unity between the brothers at the same time as representing the autonomy of each character simply through the act of controlling them as individuals and as a unit.
This week we explore how this 2-in-1 control scheme plays out mechanically and narratively in this indie darling from last year.
The Stanley Parable is a game about games. While parables are usually straightforward little tales that have a clear and singular meaning, though, as noted, this is a game about games. Thus it is also a parable about paths, paths that expand, branch out, and loop back on themselves.
This week we explore the branching narratives of The Stanley Parable to see if there can be a singular and straightforward way of understanding Stanley's plight.
Your mom already hates GTA V and now it seems like a fair amount of video game critics do too.
That's why we're spending much of our time discussing the endings of GTA V this episode. We want to explore what GTA V has to say about the United States in 2014. And we're pretty convinced that it has more than a few things to say about the current state of the American economy.
It may seem unlikely, but nothing evokes terror more than a game of hide-and-seek. Hiding out and deciding when to put yourself at risk is the core of that game, and Ice-Pick Lodge have cashed in on that familiar childhood terror in its own version of the game, Knock-Knock.
Nick, Eric, and I consider the game's successes and failures in porting childhood play into video game form. We also consider its bizarre and avant garde presentation and whether or not it amounts to much more than a disquieting mood.
By all accounts, it was the best game of 2012. So, we're back to chat about the newest complications and moral conundrums of the second season of The Walking Dead.
2013 was a year full of familiar franchises and little indie gems. However, as we discuss our own favorites from this year, we find it hard to pick a clear standout title from among the rest.
Thus, we consider: it was a year of good games, but was it a year of great games?
Known for innovation in mechanics and storytelling, an interest in games that ally themselves with the language and beats of cinema, and a sometimes greater commitment to artistic ambition than to perfect execution, David Cage and Quantic Dream have returned with another somewhat controversial title built on their vision of the modern adventure game, Beyond: Two Souls.
This episode Nick Dinicola, Eric Swain, and Jorge Albor discuss the game and how it might be "an evolution of of the point-and-click adventure game that never happened".
Telltale Games returns with a game of choices and consequences, but this time out those hard decisions are embedded in the completely fantastic world of Fables, not the relative social realism of a zombie apocalypse. The question is does this formula work with new material?
The Wolf Among Us is a bit more action oriented than Telltale's version of The Walking Dead. It is at once made familiar through its use of fairy tale and folklore and less familiar due to its heavy reliance on a media property with a complex background and back story that is less familiar to the casual player new to the game's source material.
This week we dive in with both feet to see what we make of the first major episodic game since Telltale delivered what may have been the best game of last year.
They may never be financial successes, but Suda51 titles rarely fail to leave an impression. Killer Is Dead is a little punk, a little noir, a little James Bond, and a whole lot of crazy.
This week we consider the relative value and possible meanings of Suda51's most recent digital provocation.
Nick Dinicola and Eric Swain return this week to October 1995 to revisit a horror classic, The Dreamers Guild's expansion of Harlan Ellison's short story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream."
The game, co-written by Ellison himself, develops the back stories of five victims tortured for over a century by the malevolent super computer AM. Its horrors develop in the game, not so much via gore or titillating jump scares, but around what it suggests might really lurk in the human heart, a malevolence and cruelty that matches that of the horrific super computer that humanity is responsible for designing.
The Moving Pixels blog has committed its share of virtual ink to the discussion of this summer's "It game," Gone Home. So, we figured it was time to discuss as a group our impressions of this study in environmental storytelling and exploration.
A strange little indie release early this year took us all by surprise. Mesmerizing in its absurd presentation and deeply indebted to text adventures of days past, Kentucky Route Zero presents a world in decay, begging to be excavated.
Of course, the first episode of the game's mines, maps, and madness all beg to be explored in some depth, which is exactly what we intend to attempt in this week's podcast.
Rogue Legacy initially feels merely like a blast from the past with its 16-but sensibilities and imagery.
This week, though, we talk about the game and the possible implications of its economic systems and financially motivated play.
Another day, another zombie apocalypse, and 400 Days gives Telltale Games another chance to test our humanity within the context of said apocalypse.
Join our podcasters as we consider the right and the wrong of interacting with hungry zombies and maybe even hungrier humans-and, of course, when it might be most appropriate to shoot another guy's leg off.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast revisits the muddled, half crazed genius of Suda 51's Killer 7. Well, at least some of us revisit it. For Eric Swain and Nick Dinicola this is their first go round with what might be the quintessential Suda 51 title.
We'll consider the madness, the vulgarity, the downright frustrating mechanics, and also how Suda provokes and interrogates gaming through what was most Americans first glimpse of one of video games' most colorful auteurs.
This week most of our regular bloggers take a peek at the zombie apocalypse as translated by Uncharted developer Naughty Dog. This episode Nick, Eric, Scott, and Jorge discuss The Last of Us.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast considers how we take the supposed "meta" elements of gaming for granted. But then considers how these elements contribute or detract from the drama and realism of the gaming experience.
Monaco is a multiplayer stealth action game oozing with retro style with a touch of neon noir flair.
This week Nick Dinicola and I discuss both the single player and multiplayer experience of a game that features a nod to the meticulous planning of the heist and all the frenetic pleasure produced by getting the chance to play out that moment when all that planning goes terribly wrong. Ironically, it is this lat bit that makes the game great. Monaco reveals the pleasure of making mistakes.
This week Nick and I talk minimally-about minimalism in video games.
What more can we say?
Normally, we don't concern ourselves too terribly with spoilers on the podcast. However, given the rather essential and emotional twists and turns of Bioshock Infinite, we did make an effort to save most of the spoilers until the end of our discussion.
This episode we will be discussing Columbia, Elizabeth, Comstock, Booker, and what that infinite in Bioshock Infinite signifies. However, we'll give you fair warning as we approach discussion of the bigger potential spoilers.
As a remake, the 2013 release of Tomb Raider has truly remade an iconic image. But by beating her down, has Crystal Dynamics successfully created a reasonable image of a survivor?
In this week's episode, we look at the re-imagining of Lara Croft in this year's Tomb Raider reboot.
One of the more interesting indie releases of last year was Tomorrow Corporation's Little Inferno, a puzzle game, a parody of casual gaming, and an opportunity to burn everything in sight.
The game has been interpreted as a critique of capitalism, an environmental warning, and as a consideration of childhood and its endings. This week Nick, Eric, and I trot out our own personal theories about and personal experiences with the fireplace that burns at 100 billion degrees.
With a holiday season stuffed with sequels, it was nice to see a new IP arrive alongside other AAA releases.
The development team behind Dishonored has an impressive pedigree. The game offers a fresh take on stealth mechanics and character building, as well as a fairly fresh looking universe to play in. This episode, though, we consider if Dishonored has a soul?
This week Nick, Jorge, and I revisit one of the bigger holiday releases of 2012, Assassin's Creed 3, the conclusion of the game's first story arc and the introduction of an assassin that we aren't quite sure that we've figured out.
With Assassin's Creed 3, Ubisoft presents their vision of an American Revolution. But is the fifth time out all that revolutionary?
One of the more interesting indie titles of 2012 is the often unsettling, but often equally alluring and lurid Hotline Miami.
Does the game have anything to say about video game violence or does it just allow us to further exercise our own grossest tendencies?
This week Moving Pixels Podcast gets together to discuss our best gaming experiences of 2012.
We decided that we would not allow anyone to repeat any picks from anyone else's lists, so there may be a few inclusions that surprise you.
We also want to thank Rick Dakan, who has been with us since the beginning of the Moving Pixels podcast, for regularly hosting for us. This will be Rick's final episode with us, as he moves forward with another job in the gaming industry. We appreciate having had his perspective for the last few years. Thanks, Rick!
One of the best (if not the best) game of 2012 wrapped up its final episode late last year. The Moving Pixels podcast crew is on hand to discuss the decisions and consequences of a game that challenges our sensibilities and those things we find most valuable in human life, despite the presence of the walking dead.
Of, course, spoilers abound.
Over the summer, we took a look back at the well regarded original, cult classic XCOM.
So, with Firaxis giving the series a fresh coat of paint and introducing it to a new generation, we felt it imperative to consider the translation of a decades old system to today's next gen consoles.
With the final episode of The Walking Dead slated to appear this week, it seemed a good time to discuss the penultimate episode in preparation for that impending release.
Despite all of us ending up in Savannah in episode four, this episode Nick, Jorge, and I discover that each of our versions of the game's protagonist Lee are really in very different places from our own perspectives. A lot of decisions have defined this character and his relationship to the group in very different ways. So, we consider how we each have arrived via different character paths at this near final destination.
Of, course, spoilers abound.
Gearbox hasn't reinvented the wheel with Borderlands 2, but they have managed to improve the wheel in just about every way.
This week our podcast crew discusses how tweaking a title in even the smallest ways can result in some generally pretty appreciable advances.
A successful Kickstarter campaign drove the making of this brutally difficult sci-fi roguelike.
This episode of the Moving Pixels podcast explores what FTL does to us and considers whether this is a universe too arbitrary and cruel to be fair to its players.
The new episode of The Walking Dead suggests that, perhaps, we have less control over the outcomes of this game known now for its commitment to player choice. We consider this week what the impact of losing control is on the player's experience.
In many ways, 2012 seems to be shaping up as the year of the little game. While the holiday glut from the big publishers has yet to be seen, those games that build massive worlds to play around in have largely been absent from the shelves this year.
We decided this week to take a look at one of the few games of the summer that attempted to fill the open world void, United Front Games's Sleeping Dogs.
Offering a potentially unique urban sandbox for play through its Hong Kong setting, Sleeping Dogs still largely adheres to the formula established for open worlds by Western gamemakers. However, this week we explore how the game reconsiders how open world combat might play out in a culture with more limited access to guns and question whether or not this is enough to set Sleeping Dogs up as a sufficiently unique experience by comparison to its forerunners.
When is a game a clone and when is it simply an example of a genre? In some sense, this is the question that begins our discussion of that ubiquitous example of the medium: the game clone.
From Torchlight to Saints Row and beyond, some games seem like a deliberate aping of intellectual properties that have gone before. What makes a clone a clone? And why do we sometimes really feel a kinship to clones despite their cloying adherence to a formula created by someone else?
Almost 10 years after its release, gamers are still talking about X-Com. This week, so are we.
The formula is simple, a turn-based strategy game mixed with an economic simulation. And yet, is there any other game that is quite like X-Com?
That is the question that we begin our discussion with.
Wolfenstein and Doom made them essential, but the shooter has been with us almost since the advent of the video game. Space Invaders, Contra, light gun games, the variations on how we can murder pixels on a screen seems nearly limitless.
Thia week the Moving Pixels podcast focuses on our obsession with this form of the video game and asks why we love this particular virtual activity so very dearly.
We aren't talking about how games test your reflexes. What we discuss this week is how games simulate physical experiences and how those experiences add to our immersion in game worlds and heighten the drama in video game storytelling.
Despite games often being thought of as a mental exercpoise, they certainly have a physical component too. We aren't talking about how games test your reflexes, though. Instead, what we are interested in is how games simulate physical experiences and how those experiences add to our immersion in game worlds and heighten the drama in video game storytelling.
The second episode of The Walking Dead, "Starved for Help", has finally arrived, and we could hardly wait to sink our teeth into more of the innovations that Telltale has brought to the adventure genre.
If you are at all interested in the creative process, in what makes creators tick, and how they deal with their creation once it is out there, you should see Indie Game: The Movie.
Of course, our Moving Pixels podcasters are interested in video games, but this week we discuss why Indie Game: The Movie should probably be seen by anyone interested in the creative arts.
We often discuss the complex economic systems generated by multiplayer games, in which players buy, sell, and trade with one another. So why simulate an economy in a single player game?
This episode we discuss the economies of single player games, how they motivate action, how they provide players additional goals, and how they can just spiral out of control, simulating nothing that we can recognize from real life economics.
Following the success of Double Fine's kickstarter for their adventure game, interest in what the web site can do for video game development has grown.
A host of potential games, some classic remakes and promised sequels along with new independent projects, are looking at Kickstarter as a viable new way to finance gaming projects. This week we consider the influence of crowd sourcing on game development.
And, of course, since our own Rick Dakan has been working on a game of his own that will in part be funded by a kickstarter, Rick has some direct insights of his own on how crowd sourcing works.
After a long hiatus, Max Payne is back. The voice of dirty neonoir is similar, but not all of the oft celebrated gameplay is.
This episode we consider Max's transition from the darkened streets of New York to the sun splashed swanky penthouses and seamy favelas of Brazil. We consider how Max Payne 3 may or may not carry on the themes of loss and redemption of the previous episodes and whether or not a cover-based system is a benefit to a more modern version of the franchise.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast crew takes a look at the latest adaptation of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead.
While the familiar trappings of a zombie-filled setting might be at risk of oversaturating the American media landscape, Telltale's latest episodic adventure game proves this video game genre might not quite as dead as some have pronounced it to be.
At the suggestion of a listener, Andrew Grech, Nick and I decided to revisit (for the first time for both of us) the cult classic FPS, No One Lives Forever.
The game has a great reputation for its clever parody of spy thrillers and for its forward thinking game design. We decided to put that reputation to the test and see if No One Lives Forever has anything to offer gamers over a decade after its initial release.
The Witcher 2's release on console seemed an appropriate enough reason for the Moving Pixels podcast crew to have a look at last year's well regarded PC RPG.
To call the The Witcher 2 ambitious is an understatement, as it is a game that approaches the question of how much control the player has in crafting the story by offering expansive branching paths rarely seen before in games. We are of differing opinions regarding the success that CDProjekt has had in doing this, though, and in their presentation of the politics and pathos in the game's narrative.
As an escapist medium, video games offer an experience that other mediums do not. You can imagine being Luke Skywalker or Spider-Man or any one of countless super humanly powerful or charming or interesting individuals from the movies or books or comics. However, you can only play witness to their heroic acts.
Video games allow you to be these people, though, not just thrill to their amazing feats from afar. What happens, though, when those people in video games are people that we would never want to be?
Fez is an amazing phenomenon, generating a unique community that both works together to solve its many perspective driven puzzles but also shares in its appreciation of secrecy with its and tehir desire to maintain the mystery of the game. Keeping hush hush on anything in the Internet Age is a rather unlikely feat, but Fez enthusiasts seem committed to the cause.
This week we discuss that community, the game itself, and, well, spoil a few of those mysteries. So, listeners, be warned (though, for a change, we actually announce when the spoiler section is coming up in deference to those committed to encouraging players to experience how Fez's mysteries unravel from your own perspective).
This week Nick and I are joined by Jorge Albor and Scott Juster of the Experience Points podcast to discuss how video games fare as live action properties.
Some of these films are homages, some are there to support their franchise, some are both. Most are better than what we have seen on the big screen.
We're all pretty enamored with the simple mechanics and smart reversal of the tower defense genre that serve as the foundations of Anomaly: Warzone Earth.
We decided to attack a discussion of the game from a variety of angles by choosing to play it across platforms in order to see how the game fares as it shifts from bigger to smaller screens.
This week, the Moving Pixels podcast considers their personal picks for the top five arcade games of all time.
In doing so, we look back to the arcade and the various spaces that game cabinets existed to occupy our time and extract our quarters. What is the place of the arcade machine in the history of a gamer culture, a culture that has largely moved towards home consoles rather than remained gaming in public spaces?
Part parody, part loving homage to the Silver Age of comic books, Freedom Force was the best superhero video game that we played before the advent of Arkham. This episode, the Moving Pixels podcast turns back the clock to revisit a title by Irrational Games that really holds up despite its age.
Having spent last week discussing the manner in which our personal playthoughs have affected our sense of Mass Effect on the whole through the series's seemingly consequential storytelling, this week we move on to a discussion of Mass Effect 3 more specifically.
We begin at the end by discussing the controversy surrounding the game's ending and the notion of requesting (or demanding) that some changes might be in order to a game in which player choice has always seemed to be of some importance to the developer. However, we also get into the game as a whole, considering some of the other moments that mattered to us in the trilogy's concluding 40 hours.
Last week our podcast crew had all only gotten started playing through Mass Effect 3, so the three of us got together to discuss our initial impressions of the game as well as how we have played through the trilogy.
So, this week's podcast concerns our sense of the significance of how the ability to carry over story data from one game to the next affects the way we play the game and how much control we assert over getting "our" Mass Effect experience just right.
Never fear, though, next week we will get into the full game, including the controversy surrounding its endings. So, stay tuned for that.
In the meantime, we submit for your consideration: The Mass Effect Effect.
Stoic lone gunmen? Check.
Delicate and sensitive female healer? Check.
Rogue with a heart of gold? Check.
Video games, like most media, draw on some fairly stock types to build their characters. However, since so much of games' plots and characterization just feel tacked on in spots, sometimes these stock types remain just that-never given the opportunity to grow as characters that we can relate to or representing ideas that we might, likewise, relate to.
Archetypal characters and stereotypical ones populate games, and it may be a fine line that developers walk between characters that personify an idea and characters that are merely simplistic placeholders for more legitimately developed ideas.
Theology, horror, and an old school console aesthetic combine in Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl's The Binding of Isaac.
Nick Dinicola and G. Christopher Williams return from Isaac's basement with stories to tell and more than one observation about this troubling, provocative, and madly additictive roguelike shooter.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast is joined by former Digital Cowboy and current host of the Digital Gonzo podcast Alex Shaw to discuss the changing face of the gamer.
When a game full of dungeons and dragons can sell to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars on release (yes, we're looking at you, Skyrim), it seems that what was once perceived as a hobby for freaks and geeks may "belong" to a slightly broader slice of the general culture than it used to. We consider generational shifts in attitudes towards gamers, the advent of social gaming, and the inclusivity and exclusivity that gaming as a past time may or may not have come to represent as a cultural practice as we have moved into the twenty-first century.
While those of us who write in the Multimedia section focus a good deal of our time on video games, quite a number of us also have a certain fondness for games of a non-digital sort.
Rick Dakan, Jorge Albor, and myself got together a few weekends ago to discuss our boardgaming habits, the difference between the Eurogame and Ameritrash (sorry, Rick), and how being a computer gamer might relate to being a board gamer.
This week Jorge Albor and I are joined by game designer Matthew Gallant to discuss Riot Games's free-to-play sensation, League of Legends.
There is much to talk about here, from Riot's successful business model to its varied gameplay offerings to its management of its very large and (ahem) very complicated community.
We consider this video game and the nature of such "eSports" from just about every angle.
Between them, hundreds and hundreds of hours committed to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Rick Dakan, Nick Dinicola, and Mattie Brice get together to discuss the varied approaches that they took to exploring Skyrim.
Saints Row: The Third is a title that arrived at the close of the year to a surprising amount of fanfare. Most often seen as a Grand Theft Auto clone, though sometimes admired for some of the polish that it brought to the open-world, crime game, the Saints Row series has often been treated as a competent, but not especially exceptional alternative to GTA.
By ratcheting up the general insanity of its world (way, way up) and embracing extreme stupidity and the extremely puerile, though, Saints Row has seemed to have drawn much acclaim. Our podcast crew debates the merits of this over-the-top aesthetic and considers the relative value of "just plain fun."
This is a weird episode. Because while all three of our podcast regulars appreciate Arkham City on some level, boy, do we all have some criticism to level at this sequel to what many feel was one of the best games of 2009.
In view of our topic, this episode of the Moving Pixels podcast is expansive. In other words, this is quite a long episode.
Nick Dinicola, Mattie Brice, and I found quite a lot to discuss about the open world genre this week. It is a genre that has become widespread across the medium over the past decade (thanks in no part to a little game called Grand Theft Auto III). Worlds of all kinds have been built for players to explore, telling stories in genres as diverse as crime, the western, fantasy, science fiction, and even schoolhouse drama.
We talk a little about what the genre means to this last decade in gaming and what kinds of worlds most compel players to explore them.
This week Nick Dinicola and I are joined by our fellow blogger Mattie Brice to discuss, in part, the games of the year.
However, with PopMatters posting a forthcoming list of the best games of the year, we discuss more specifically that list, our writers' tastes here at PopMatters, and also what Game of the Year might mean in general to gaming.
Battlefield 3, Gears of War 3, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Saints Row: The Third, Uncharted 3. That's a whole lot of 3s.
While focused especially on the "trilogies" being concluded in 2011, this episode Rick, Nick, and I discuss the year in gaming on the whole, while considering whether or not the glut of sequels at year's end is a blessing or a curse.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a game that closed out the usual doldrums of summer gaming. We actually recorded this episode just a week or two after the release of the game, but due to a number of scheduling conflicts, the episode just slipped for some reason into this, the closing moments of the holiday game season.
Nevertheless, the release of this new Deus Ex is one of the more memorable gaming moments of the year, so while you may be crawling through Skyrim or reuniting with Drake or Ezio Auditore, take a break and return with us just a couple of months to consider the success or failure of a prequel to one of the most admired games of ten years ago.
Due to some technical difficulties on my end, Jorge Albor quite graciously (and quite last minute) filled in as host for this episode. This is probably for the best, as he probably did a better job at moderating this conversation than I ever could have. (For those unfamiliar with Jorge, you really should check out he and Scott Juster's weekly gaming podcast at ExperiencePoints.net-it's well worth your time.)
So, this week features a host of new voices alongside Jorge, some of whom identify as gamers and some of whom do not, as the Moving Pixels podcast attempts to explore the concept of the so-called "girlfriend on a couch game." As a phrase coined by journalists to describe a particular kind of game, the "girlfriend on a couch game" seems like one in need of some discussion. We decided, though, not to discuss "girlfriend on a couch games" but instead to see if we could find out what kind of spectators these supposed games are geared for by talking to some "girlfriends on couches" themselves.
Not all of the folks here are technically "girlfriends," though, some are wives on couches, little sisters on couches, partners on couches, friends on couches, and we were even joined by a husband on a couch. What resulted was a lively and interesting discussion of participation and spectatorship (and how they might intersect) in video games.
Many thanks to all of our guests, who include: Dawna Perry, Jamie Dunston, Adrian Dunston, Nicole Martin, Jean McLachlin, and Sarra Williams. And, as always, thanks to Nick Dinicola for producing the podcast. It was a fun and enlightening afternoon of gaming discussion, as you will soon discover below.
The cutscene in games has arguably taken many forms, from the simple and minimal narrative vignettes of Ms. Pac-Man to the lushly animated FMVs that were once one of the prime selling points of the Final Fantasy series. Many now view these experiences as intrusive moments in a game world that disrupt visual consistency or serve as storytelling short cuts that don't do the medium justice.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast crew discuss the history of the cutscene in video games, what they may or may not have evolved into, and whether or not they still have a place in video game storytelling.
The boss fight has been a part of gaming since very near to the time of its inception. Serving a variety of roles in offering greater challenge, suggesting the climax of a game and plot, and just simply creating a spectacle for the player, has the boss fight merely become a cliched and expected "requirement" of games?
This week we consider the history and evolution of the boss fight in gaming, as well as the possibility of alternatives to this most expected of medium conventions.
With the holiday game season upon us, the Moving Pixels blog and podcast crew have turned their atention to some of the biggest releases of the year. The ostensible "final chapter" of the Gears of War saga is, of course, one of these most anticipated of titles.
Given Gears importance in this console generation, as one of the titles associated with the Xbox 360's early days, the crew discusses how the trilogy has been brought to an end, its approach to multiplayer play, and speculates a bit on where this franchise may be headed in the future.
So, as my colleague in podcasting, Rick Dakan, observed, this week's episode is a little self indulgent (but that's okay, I guess, as I just wrote a little about the relationship between self indulgence and gaming last week).
We have been wanting to discuss a bit about how it is that "the gamer" identity is formed, so we spent some time chatting a bit about our own relationship to games and gaming and how we came to play the ways that we do. We consider our relationship to chess, sports, board games, and RPGs and what these things might have to do with who we are. Confessional as some of this discussion might be, there are some interesting similarities that emerge between our experience of growing up as gamers.
High scores, achievements, leveling up. The system runs on points, measures us in points, validates us in points.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast considers the value of points. What points matter to us? Why do we want them? Why do they matter?
Nothing says vacation quite like a beach full of zombies.
After the controversy and excitement surrounding the release of its trailer earlier in the year, many gamers wondered whether that possibly exploitative, possibly sophisticated bit of a teaser for Dead Island was really representative of what this open world, survival horror hybrid would be.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast attempts to answer that question as well as considers other elements of the zombie-infested beach fronts of Dead Island.
So, our Moving Pixels podcast crew spent a couple of weeks playing in fits and starts (well, because that's the way you have to play social games) the beta version of Sid Meier's CivWorld.
The game seems an effort to capture a narrower audience of Facebook gamers, a more hardcore crowd, or possibly to introduce casual players to the Civilization universe. We consider the game's success at doing so and whether or not social games can legitimately appeal to a hardcore audience.
Maybe serving as a follow up to our discussion of difficulty in games comes a discussion of something that usually makes gaming "easier", cheating.
We consider whether cheating matters in both single and multiplayer gaming as our discussion strays from the most malicious hacking and griefing to even the seemingly benign use of FAQs and video walkthroughs to help us "get through".
Difficulty can be frustrating. It can also create challenge for the player.
This week the Moving Pixels Podcast considers how difficulty contributes to the pleasure and pain of gaming.
This week regular podcast contributors G. Christopher Williams and Nick Dinicola are joined by veteran podcaster Scott Juster of ExperiencePoints.net for a discussion of auteur theory and how it may or not apply to a discussion of video game development.
Playing fast and loose with the concept of the auteur, we consider both some aesthetic concerns, issues of intentionality in communicating such a "signature" of self in a game, and how marketing and commerce might be affected by the way that game developers present themselves to the public.
This week G. Christopher Williams and Nick Dinicola form a dynamic duo of flash game playin', flash game analyzin', and flash game discussin' excitement.
We take a look at three of 2011's more interesting releases, Jonas Kyratzes's Alphaland, Thomas Brush's Skinny, and Sarah Northway's Rebuild. Two of the titles are platformers and one is a turn-based strategy game, and they feature anxious video game worlds in progress, scary mommy AIs, and, of course, the hungry zombie hordes.
If you want to play along as you listen (or better yet, before you listen), you can find Alphaland and Skinny at New Grounds. Look for Rebuild over at Kongregate.
A new puzzle game from the Atlus Persona Team, Catherine blends surprisingly difficult puzzle platforming with a strong narrative on masculine anxieties and adult relationships. Most interestingly of all, the game asks players to voice their own opinions on love, marriage, and children, but does it really demand a truthful answer?
Moving Pixels podcast regulars G. Christopher Williams and Kris Ligman are joined this week by Skyler Moss from Gamepad Dojo to discuss the game's mechanics, characterization and gender representation. Disagreements over interpretation abound as we explore Catherine's morality system, multiple endings, and structural cohesion in attempting to marry gameplay to a very dissimilar plot-or is marriage even the appropriate metaphor to deploy here?
Secrets are revealed, plot twists are spoiled, and the titular Catherine receives a thorough deconstruction, along with several others of the game's colorful cast. Can Skyler decide whether to agree with Chris or Kris and escape the podcast unharmed? When the night sky turns to glamor, anything could happen.
With one Chris out and another Kris stealing his chair again, the members of the Moving Pixels podcast discuss the game which kicked off Xbox Live's 2011 Summer of Arcade, Bastion. This debut title from the small development team at Supergiant has garnered plenty of attention for its lush visuals, solid gameplay, and unique "dynamic narration."
Join us as we discuss Bastion's place within the Western genre, the role of its soundtrack and narrator, and how the player brings himself to the gameplay through the game's unique challenges. We also dig into the game's multiple endings, so those averse to spoilers should watch their step.
With G. Christopher Williams out this week for some much-deserved R&R, podcast regulars Nick Dinicola, Rick Dakan, and Kris Ligman are joined by frequent PopMatters.com contributor Mike Schiller to discuss Child of Eden, an eye-pleasing and unassuming little release that has unexpectedly torn the Moving Pixels blog right down the middle.
A smaller release that was by and large overlooked next to the torrential negative press of Duke Nukem Forever, Child of Eden is a first-person bullet hell game with unexpected nuance, which may or may not work for the player. We also debate what Kinect functionality adds or subtracts to the experience and whether the included "god mode" truly breaks the game or offers something richer.
Tempers flare, questionable textual interpretations are invoked, and a good time is had by all as our podcasters volley back and forth on Child of Eden's gameplay and aesthetic merits. Listen for yourself to see if we come up with a solution . . . or if all of us even come out alive.
With an intentionally provocative name, Fat, Ugly or Slutty? has become a hit among readers for highlighting the sort of over-the-top trashtalk women gamers experience. From the cliched to the farcical and even the truly sad, FUoS is one part Why Was I Banned?, one part Hollaback, and eight parts "you have to read it to believe it."
We managed to track down three of the four FUoS admins-gtz, likeOMGitsFEDAY and inklesspen-a few weeks before PAX Prime to talk about the origins of the site, their own gaming experiences, and some of their favorite submissions. We also ponder a few meaningful questions about the state of online gaming-and what a site like Fat, Ugly or Slutty? can mean for it.
If you are attending the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle at the end of the month, be sure to pay these fantastic ladies (and gentleman) a visit at their panel! Date, time and location forthcoming on the Fat, Ugly or Slutty? website.
Following last week's discussion of madness in the newest iteration of Alice, it only seemed fitting that we would consider the other "mad release" this summer, Suda51 and Shinji Mikami's Shadows of the Damned.
Between its juvenile humor and interesting shooting mechanics based on darkness and light lies a strange but compelling critique of classic video game tropes. Our discussion attempts to touch on as much of the madness as we can reasonably (or unreasonably) consider.
As a follow up to a game released over a decade ago, Alice: Madness Returns reimagines American McGee's Wonderland mythos as well as the somewhat retrograde genre of the action platformer. This week the Moving Pixels podcast crew discusses Alice's imagery, mechanics, and overall presentation of insanity.
Okay, you probably won't die too much in L.A. Noire, but there are a fair amount of corpses littered around Team Bondi's recreation of L.A. in the 1940s for your investigatory consideration. Detective Cole Phelps is on the case for one of the biggest early releases of the year, and the Moving Pixels crew discusses how successful Team Bondi and Rockstar are at presenting this tough and tough-to-like hardboiled hero.
Recorded just about a week after the game's release, much of our impressions of the game were fresh as we hashed out our initial impressions of this game that some claim is not quite a game.
The tower defense game is not a genre that is often given much attention in the critical discussion of video games. Usually light on the narrative qualities that game critics enjoy focusing on and often assumed to be a slightly more casual genre, there's still a lot to be considered in this type of game's appeal and in its most successful examples.
Our discussion, of course, touches on Plants Vs. Zombies, but we also look at a few other fresher titles like Anomaly: Warzone Earth and Defense Grid: the Awakening.
Last weekend the Moving Pixels podcast crew convened to discuss our impressions of E3 2011. While Rick Dakan, Nick Dinicola, and G. Christopher Williams all caught glimpses of the expo via the web or television, we are joined by Kris Ligman, who attended this year's event.
Like many others, we couldn't help but focus on some of the bigger announcements of this year, the previews of new hardware releases from Sony and Nintendo. Additionally, we spend a lot of time considering the revamping of Lara Croft in the new Tomb Raider. So, something old (kind of) and something new to consider in this year's big gaming event.
This week the podcast crew got together with writers from The Border House, Gay Gamer, and The Vorpal Bunny Ranch to discuss inclusivity in video games and these sites that provide a voice for gamers that exist on the margins.
With Chris recovering from a tonsillectomy, Kris graciously filled in to host our discussion with Alexandra Raymond of The Border House, faePuck of GayGamer.net, and Denis Farr who has worked at both sites and also writes at his own blog, Vorpal Bunny Ranch.
From campy exploitation to the exploitation of addiction, the Moving Pixels podcast discusses a few of this year's flash game releases.
You can find free-to-play versions of the three titles that we discuss in this episode below:
High Tea Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars The Man with the Invisible Trousers
Of course, we here at the Moving Pixels blog are fans of the work done over at the Critical Distance web site, a site interested in serving in a curatorial role in highlighting and maintaining various discussions in video game criticism. Conceived by Ben Abraham and launched in 2009, Critical Distance provides a weekly update of some of the best video game criticism published around the internet. Additionally, they provide a number of critical compilations of writings done by various critics, journalists, and academics on significant game titles.
We wanted to sit down and talk with Ben and fellow Critical Distance contributor, Eric Swain, to talk a little bit about the site, what purpose they see it serving in the emerging conversation about games, and how they manage the Herculean task of locating and managing such a vast array of voices.
A few weeks ago the Moving Pixels podcast crew revisited 2007's Portal in anticipation of the impending release of its sequel.
Well, the sequel has arrived, so we have gotten together once again to consider how well the follow up works in terms of its extended narrative and its various gameplay tweaks.
Given how much Dragon Age II occupied our thoughts on so many of our blogs in March, it seems inevitable that the Moving Pixels podcast crew would gather to discuss our varying takes on the game.
Despite its more limited geographical scope, Kirkwall is a game world well suited to an expanded discusssion. Bioware's ambitious efforts to tweak combat, experiment with narrative, and present one of the most inclusive casts in gaming are just a number of topics worth returning to in our expansive chat about the game.
Sometimes a tech problem requires a little strategy to resolve. With some trouble with a microphone among a few other snafus leaving us potentially unable to discuss our planned topic this week, gamers that we are, our solution was to turn this weeks show into a game by putting a little social media to work for us and treating this podcast as something a little more interactive than usual.
The result is this week's experiment in podcasting, a show based on utter miscellany about gaming and gaming culture. We sent a "voiceless" Kris Ligman out to Twitter to gather possible mini-topics for discussion this week related to gaming, and then, of course, arbitrarily assigned points to our podcasters ability for improvisationally riffing on said topics in short conversational bursts.
You will find that some of our intial efforts to shoot from the hip on topics like Lesbian Spider-Women from Mars or "books on video games" may not be all that exceptional, but as the podcast moves along and we bite into some other topics like "rewards in video games" and "spectacle in video games," I think that we gain some conversational momentum and that things get a bit more interesting.
Hopefully, you're willing to bear with us as we experiment a bit with the form. We still don't know if this is a format that we will ever play with again. We'll just have to see how response to the cast goes.
Many thanks though to those who submitted topics to Kris for the sake of this experiment (and apologies to those whose topics we just made a hash out of).
It was a shooter that was nothing like a shooter. Given the imminent release of its sequel, the Moving Pixels podcast crew felt that it was time to take a step back into 2007's Portal.
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We tried to spare ourselves from just revisiting the old "cake is a lie" memes and the like and instead found ourselves revisting the tight pacing, innovative gameplay, and, oh yeah, we talk about the rivalry between GLaDOS and Chell.
At Tom's suggestion, the Moving Pixels podcast crew decided to take a trip back in time to have a look at Jordan Mechner's 1997 game, The Last Express.
A thriller/mystery packaged within the structure of a kind of much more interactive Choose Your Own Adventure, this point-and-click adventure is really not exactly like any of the genre categories that I just listed. Featuring a very different approach to the concept of a video game script and some interesting ways of playing with time, The Last Express is quite unique, offering a very mature and very innovative approach to interactive storytelling worth mulling over even a decade later.
Dungeons & Dragons might be its low tech form, but video games have not strayed far from the formula of getting some friends together, killing some monsters, and collecting loot. From Gauntlet to Diablo to Torchlight, the hack and slash game is an experience both social and individualistic, steeped ironically in both greed and co-operation.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast looks at the evolution of the dungeon crawl from its social aspects and etiquette to its mechanics and playstyle.
An aborted effort to play retro classic Maniac Mansion leads to a discussion by the Moving Pixels crew about differences between older and newer games.
We wonder how well retro games hold up with rapidly changing platform generations, as well as higher expectations for graphics quality and overall accessibility.
Originally conceived of as a discussion of the best superhero video games of all time, the Moving Pixels Podcast crew quickly discovered that super powered games have been-for the most part-less than super.
With that in mind, our discussion of the presentation of superheroes in video games became, instead, a discussion of the history of the superhero in video games-more particularly the refinements that have lead to more interesting gaming experiences within this genre.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast considers the ballet of blood choreographed by People Can Fly in their new game, Bulletstorm.
Is the game a perfect storm of masculinity and mayhem or just more boys and their bullets?
With one Chris out and another Kris in, this week the Moving Pixels crew travels to Ferelden to discuss the world of Dragon Age: Origins and its many expansions. Do these downloadable prologues, epilogues, and side stories add anything to the diverse and complex world of Origins? Or are they just recycled levels splashed together to make a quick buck? Join us as we dig into everything from the game itself to the demo for the sequel.
Last week the Moving Pixels podcast crew took a look at Dead Space as a transmedia phenomenon, considering the films, comics, and other spin offs that the series has generated.
This week we look at the games themselves, considering their innovative design decisions and gameplay, alongside their grotesquerie and some of their choice in presentation of issues like work and women.
More than just a video game, Electronic Arts has given Dead Space the full transmedia treatment, shipping movies, comics, and spin off titles with the same grisly themes. In anticipation of a discussion of the release of Dead Space 2, the Moving Pixels podcast explores the universe of Dead Space as a media phenomenon.
Is this all about marketing or do these additional properties flesh out the mythos or enliven the concepts of this action/horror hybrid?
Response to Enslaved has been divisive. Most agree that the game does not feature the most outstanding gameplay, but after acknowledging that, opinions vary a great deal.
Most divisions about Enslaved arise around its storytelling. With gameplay that may or may not do service to its plot but featuring some talented voice acting and direction alongside expressive motion capture and beautiful graphics, does Enslaved manage to tell a good story?
This week the Moving Pixels podcast crew discusses the success or failure of Enslaved's somewhat controversial storytelling.
Shifting settings from the mall to the casino, the Dead Rising series hasn't changed in its commitment to gross excess and superficiality.
In a similar sense, much of the approach to grappling with the zombie hordes has not been altered significantly in the 2010 follow up to Dead Rising. The player is still tasked with killing zombies and psychos, while ensuring the safety of as many of his fellow survivors as he can. The more subtle changes ("subtle" being a term that is normally very rarely applied to a Dead Rising title) come in terms of combat tweaks, some changes in difficulty, and some very different psycho fights.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast crew discusses the good and bad in those changes and whether or not the follow up is a worthy successor to one of the more popular early titles of this hardware generation.
As an experiential medium, it is often the little moments that mean so much in video games. This week we wrap up our discussion of gaming in 2010 by recapping some of the most emotionally affective and just plain cool moments in games like Red Dead Redemption, Bioshock 2, Amnesia, and Heavy Rain (to name just a few).
While Infinity Ward has take the franchise to more a contemporary setting, Black Ops developer Treyarch had yet to stray outside the boundaries of World War II with its Call of Duty installments until late last year. With a Cold War setting and a title suggestive more of espionage than traditional battle, the best selling game of last year attempted to tell a slightly different style of war story.
However, is there any real substance to Treyarch's style this time out?
The Moving Pixels podcast crew considers this and other questions by evaluating the phenomenon of Call of Duty: Black Ops.
This week, the Moving Pixels podcast crew trains their eyes on the direct sequel to Assassin's Creed II. This time the series returns to the story of the Italian Renaissance era assassin, Ezio.
However, this time Ezio has made a few new friends. So, among other aspects of the game, we discuss the "brotherhood" that this new Assassin's Creed has embraced in both its story and multiplayer options.
Certainly, it is time to usher in the new, but the Moving Pixels podcast crew decided to pause to reconsider gaming during the cusp of the last decade.
With that in mind, each of us are counting down our five favorite games of the PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, and the PC gaming era.
Bethesda's latest iteration of the Fallout series offers Sin City as one of the last remaining beacons of hope in their postapocalyptic American Wastleland. Despite the buggy quality of the game at release, many players still found themselves "all in" for this expansion of the retro-futuristic universe.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast crew discuss the subtleties of socialization, scrounging, and survival in New Vegas.
As you may have noticed in the last few weeks of November, nearly every writer at the Moving Pixels blog has had something to say about Fable III (and if you don't know this, feel free to check out the links below).
From the game's whimsical aesthetic to its politics to its possibly unfulfilled promises (within the game itself and from Lionhead about what the game offers as an experience), we all have some opinion on this newest iteration of the saga of the hero of Albion.
In this episode, we re-explore some of our isolated opinions about the game and try to suss out the effectiveness of the stranger design details, like the game's pretty unique re-envisioning of a menu system.
Oh, and Rick and I get pretty heated about Reaver-nasty little bugger that he is (that is Reaver, not Rick).
This week we seek to answer that age old question: is everything better with zombies?
Zombies have invaded Rockstar's version of the Old West in Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare. So, this week the Moving Pixels podcast crew consider the tweaked mechanics and otherworldly cast of this unexpected hybrid of genres.
While we like to put game mechanics in nice little boxes in order to describe to others how a video game plays, nevertheless, this generation of games has seen a lot of cross breeding between game genres, making it harder to easily describe what a game essentially "is".
From leveling up in an FPS to purchasing upgrades in platformers, the last decade seems one fixitated on hybridization as a form of innovation. In particular the pleasure derived from evolving characters, mechanically and narratively, seems to be one of the more popular means of appealing to players who want to have a hand in developing the role that they will play in a game.
This week we discuss such hybrids and what the strengths and weaknesses of taking a Frankenstein-like approach to design might be.
With all the furor surrounding Minecraft in the indie game community, the Moving Pixels podcast crew couldn't help but have a discussion of the game.
While a couple of us have only had a more limited experience with the browser version, nevertheless, this sandbox building experience is worth considering and raises questions about what motivates us to play.
What's a few Microsoft Points among friends?
From Activision to XSEED, it seems like every publisher these days is pressing developers to produce downloadable content, which raises some interesting questions for gamers looking to completely engage with their games.
Does seeing nipples improve the experience of The Saboteur? Does The Signal illuminate the murkier plot points of Alan Wake? This week the Moving Pixels podcast crew try to answer these questions through a discussion concerning what may or may not be added to the experience of a game through the inclusion of downloadable content.
The weekend probably saw its share of ghosts and goblins dropping by your doorstep. Those same little ghouls have inspired the Moving Pixels Podcast crew in a discussion of horror games.
Each of our contributors put together a list of their top five horror titles, judging them by their ability to scare, repel, and otherwise provoke. Our lists are surprisingly eclectic and may at times challenge what constitutes horror in games altogether. So, join us for a discussion of slashers, things that cannot be named, and other things that go bump in the night.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast crew discuss how gamers are taught to play. We discuss the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of game tutorials, revisit consideration of the game manual, and generally think about how game tutorials and other forms of learning effect the gameplay experience.
The Moving Pixels Podcast crew decided to follow up on last week's discussion of "Real Evil in Video Games" with a discussion of the various villains in games that are of a more idealized nature than the simulations of real life villainy that we had previously concerned ourselves with.
The resulting discussion took several different forms, including discussion of how gamers view conflicts within games themselves, the "evils" of various forms of antagonism within game narratives and also game mechanics themselves.
As a result, some of this discussion may be concerned with villains that represent more abstracted forms of evil but may also confront the more "malicious" obstacles embedded in the design of a game.
Hitler served as the final boss in World War II and also in Castle Wolfenstein, which is weird, right?
This week we consider a number of real life bad guys from the Nazis to the Mafia and the potential consequences of attempting to simulate such real life villainy in video games.
Death happens in games. A lot.
Well, or at least it used to. This episode of the Moving Pixels Podcast considers the changing face of death in video games as well as what kinds of roles death serves in games.
Is death about punishment, pleasure, pedagogy, or is it merely an immersion breaking illusion? We play around with a number of possibilities.
This week's podcast contributors, G. Christopher Williams, Nick Dinicola, and Thomas Cross, discuss some recent indie releases. Our review includes Thomas Brush's Coma, Alexander Ocias's Loved, and Digipen's Solace.
This series of games seem built more to engage and immerse than many similar titles of the Triple A variety. We discuss the virtues and vices of using games as a means to evoke emotion and whether they remain "games" in the familiar sense of the word at all.
Most gamers today probably don't remember that for a while in the 1980s the best-selling, most critically acclaimed computer games didn't have any graphics at all. They were text adventures and were some of the most innovative and challenging forms of entertainment ever conceived. Historian and documentary filmmaker Jason Scott has spent the last four years interviewing the men and women who created these games. The result is Get Lamp, a fascinating documentary about the history of these games-from the original Adventure, through the rise and fall of Infocom, and up to today's interactive fiction scene.
Jason Scott is the curator of TextFiles.com and is also the man behind BBS: The Documentary, a look at the computer bulletin board systems that pre-date mass usage of the internet. He's a regular speaker at hacker and technology conferences and his cat has well over a million followers on Twitter. Really.
Following up last week's podcast on "Femininity and the Female Body in Video Games", this week we decided to discuss masculinity and the male body in games.
This week's contributors include G. Christopher Williams, Nick Dinicola, Thomas Cross, and our guest from last week, Kris Ligman. We discuss a variety of male characters, their body types and personas, and how they relay messages about masculinity to players. In addition to traditional heterosexual constructions of male bodies, we also consider some of the presentations of homosexuality and the masculine.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast is a couple men down, but blogger Kris Ligman fills in as our guest for a discussion of femininity and the female body in video games.
The female body has been historically exaggerated in video games and questions arise about whether femininity is authentically represented at all in characters that very often appear to be reskinned versions of men. We consider why this might be, what sorts of characters might be more positive representations of women, and what messages female representations send to players of video games.
Join us next week when we turn the discussion around and consider masculinity and the male body in video games.
Like last week, the Moving Pixels podcast crew is focusing on a broader topic in gaming for the week, co-operative gameplay.
Our regular contributors, G. Christopher Williams, Nick Dinicola, and Thomas Cross, discuss varying kinds of co-op style play from the living room to the arcade to multiplayer online and the kinds of dynamics that these experiences create among players.
Rick Dakan is on a short hiatus from the podacst, but he should be back with us in a few weeks. In the meantime, I am sitting in as host this week. So, be gentle, it's my first time.
We have been focusing on discussions of individual games for a number of weeks. This week we decided to consider some broader interests in games once again. In this case, we decided to talk about how character customization effects our experience of a game world.
As a result, our discussion considers how initial character creation as well as ways of modifying characters, like buying clothing in a game world, affects our sense of the characters that we inhabit when we play games.
Oh, we also wonder a bit about why we like to play as girls.
We will be focusing on a number of these broader topics in the next few weeks and should also be including a few guests from the PopMatters staff. So, be sure to tune us in in the coming weeks.
Well, if you have been following the Multimedia section of the site for the past few weeks (and if you haven't there are links below), you know that quite a few of our regular contributors have had a lot to say about Playdead's Limbo (and we aren't alone on the Internet). Having had our chance to have our say individually, the Moving Pixels podcast crew decided to hash out our thinking about the game collectively.
The resulting discussion considers the significance of the game from an artistic perspective, what we feel it gets right and gets wrong, and generally gets lost in the shadows and ambiguities of the game's haunting, little world.
Following up on our podcast from last month on "The World of Max Payne", our regular podcast contributors take a look at the less successful but critically acclaimed sequel to the 2001 game, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, and consider the evolution of Remedy Entertainment's approach to world building (culminating in their most recent release, Alan Wake).
We also discuss the evolution of the character Max Payne and the gameplay mechanisms that surround him. We also consider how a playable Mona Sax changes our sense of the series and whether Max (and the player) legitimately falls for her.
This week we have a special interview for you. We'll be doing more interviews as time goes on, talking with people who're not just gamers, but people who've been genuinely moved by their love of games.
Holly Conrad is a costume designer and an avid gamer. And by costume designer, I mean sculptor, engineer, seamstress, and designer. She recently became a minor internet celebrity with her audition video for a Joss Whedon produced documentary about Comic Con, in which she showed off the impressive set of Mass Effect 2 costumes that she's been creating.
She took time from her busy schedule to talk about games and how they inspire.
Warning: There are some spoilers for Mass Effect 2 in theis discussion.
Coming off a really solid half year of gaming and in the wake of E3, the Moving Pixels podcast considers the upcoming titles that publishers and developers have just given us a taste for. Based on screenshots, teasers, and gameplay demos we discuss titles that look exciting, disappointing, and just plain intimidating (I'm looking at you Portal 2 gameplay demo).
Playing the role of prophet is a tradition as old as video game criticism, so look no further for a heap of prognostication and plain ol' guesswork.
Turn around, walk away, blow town. That would have been the smart thing to do. Guess I wasn't that smart.-Max Payne
I guess the Moving Pixels crew isn't that smart either. Rather than bask in the warmth of the summer sun, our podcast crew revisits the darkened, snowed-in streets of Noir York City with a discussion of Max Payne.
Arriving in 2001 with stylish bullet time gunplay and an attitude boiled harder than any novel by Dashiell Hammett, Max Payne remains a significant influence on this decade's games. We consider why and whether it holds up nearly a decade after its release.
Last week Nick, Tom, and Rick discussed the world and game play of Red Dead Redemption in a spoiler-free episode.
This week, Chris is back with the posse, and we delve into the storytelling and overall plot of Red Dead Redemption. We look at the motives of John Marston, as well as those of the cavalcade of characters that make up Rockstar's western. Spoilers abound, so consider yourself warned.
This week we're a man down, but there's no stopping us now that we're hot on the trail. Nick, Tom, and Rick take on the world and game play of Red Dead Redemption in this spoiler-free episode. Does this Grand Theft Auto-influenced open world Old West extravaganza live up to its gaming pedigree? Or does it maybe exceed all expectations? Or does it depend on who you ask? As always, we don't all quite agree, but we've all got a lot to say about the world of Red Dead Redemption.
This week the Moving Pixels podcast explores the American Nightmare that is the Capital Wasteland. We consider how Bethesda merges a retro American ideal with their post-apocalyptic vision of an America "after the bomb" in Fallout 3.
From the birth of the player character into this American wilderness to the role of the first person perspective in seeing this new world, our regular podcast contributors analyze the quirks and curiosities of this kind of game world.
The town of Bright Falls is a pretty creepy place made creepier by the imagination of author, Alan Wake, but also by the player's own fears.
This week we discuss how effectively terror and fear are generated in the game Alan Wake and how the player is complicit in authoring such horror as well.
The worlds of the Assassin's Creed series are layered ones. Simulations of historical times and places are nested within a near future world of corporate intrigue and a broader vision of history defined by an ages old battle between templars and assassins.
Our podcast contributors spent this week unravelling these worlds within worlds as well as exploring their interelatedness. Join the Moving Pixels podcast for a discussion of simulations within simulations, historical recreations, and the presentation of worlds both familiar, mysterious, and most often brutally realized.
After last week's look at the vast reaches of outer space, we decided to change the focus of our discussion from the heavens to the depths of the ocean. Arguably one of the most fully realized spaces in contemporary gaming, Rapture is almost less a city than it is a mood, a tone, an atmosphere.
Our crew discusses our responses to the latest iteration of the terrifying but often sublime undersea city as it appears in Bioshock 2.
This week our discussion of game worlds moves from the claustrophobic halls of the asylum to the vast reaches of space.
Continuing our consideration of game worlds and their effect on our experience playing games, we consider both the broad galatic maps of Mass Effect as well as the narrower confines of intergalatic ports of call and the bridges of starships and how they impact on Bioware's collection of characters.
First things first, a number of readers have been requesting that the Moving Pixels podcast be made available via iTunes. Your wish has been granted, and you can now access the podcast through Apple's site. Please check us out there and any previous episodes that you may have missed.
This week we are changing gears. Following our six-part series on storytelling, we have decided to shift our focus to game worlds and how they contribute to our experience in gaming.
First up, this week is a discussion of a game that garnered a lot of buzz for its sharply drawn vision of madness and mayhem, Batman: Arkham Asylum.
Wrapping up our six week discussion of video games, we decided to consider what particular stories have stood out as some of the best that gaming has to offer. Each of us chose five games that we see as particularly notable in terms of the way that they tell stories.
While certainly any list of this sort has some subjective qualities (and, indeed, there was little overlap among our lists), the shared factors that emerged amongst our various groupings of games speak not so much to traditional qualities concerning plot but directly to some of the unique qualities of this medium in terms of how stories are told as interactive performances, are developed within immersive worlds, and feature very different kinds of relationships to characters.
There are the stories that developers want to tell us, but there are also those stories that just seem to crop up because of how we choose to play.
In our fifth episode of the the Moving Pixels Podcast's six part series on storytelling in video games, we move away from the more scripted experiences in video game stories and consider the way that stories emerge as a result of our interactions with game worlds. We consider how video games are seemingly partly plotted by the performance of their players.
Once again our particpants include PopMatters contributors, Rick Dakan, G. Christopher Williams, Nick Dinicola, and Thomas Cross.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Given the tendency for "solution" to be an end goal in video games, it is probably unsurprising that solving a mystery is at the heart of many games' plots. In this edition of our six part series on stories told in video games, we look at the centrality of mystery to many video game narratives, including games that may or may not be considered traditional fare of the mystery genre.
Once again our contributors to the discussion include Rick Dakan, G. Christopher Williams, Nick Dinicola, and Thomas Cross.
A lot of the discussion in the media on the kinds of relationships that video game characters foster can be boiled down to discussions of Tommy Vercetti beating up hookers and taking back his money following an "initmate encounter."
This week we continue in our series on storytelling in video games by discussing a broader sample of the kinds of relationships that are explored in the stories told by video games. We consider the centrality of "getting the girl" to player motivations in many gaming experiences and whether or not games can tell more complicated stories of love and romance.
Our contributors, Rick Dakan, G. Christopher Williams, Nick Dinicola, and Thomas Cross, confront issues of intimacy between plumbers and princesses, monkeys and maidens, and other lovestruck pixelated heroes and heroines.
War? Love? What's the difference?
Last week I mistakenly identified the topic for this second part of a six part series on storytelling as concerning love stories in video games. I'm just going to chalk up my confusion to my unmitigated faith in the philosopy of Pat Benatar. Thus, our focus will be on the battlefield this week and not so much on the love.
A focus on combat seems a reasonable enough one in beginning an exploration of the specific types of stories told in games. After all, given gaming's tendency towards competitiveness rather than co-operation, many modern games find the battlefield an apt enough place to tell stories.
Once again, our host will be Rick Dakan, and he will be joined by several PopMatters and Moving Pixels contributors, including G. Christopher Williams, Nick Dinicola, and Thomas Cross, as we consider what kinds of stories are told through players' experiences of warfare.
Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Moving Pixels Podcast. For the initial editions of this new feature at PopMatters, we will be hosting a mini-series of sorts. A number of regular contributors to our Multimedia Section and the Moving Pixels blog here at PopMatters, G. Christopher Williams, Rick Dakan, Nick Dinicola, and Thomas Cross, will be spending the next six weeks discussing the topic of storytelling in video games.
For our first episode, we decided to look at "The Role of Story in Video Games," focusing our discussion on the history of story in video games and how gaming has been transformed over the past few decades in light of narrative becoming an almost inseperable part of the game enthusiast's experience of the medium.
In the upcoming weeks, we will continue to look at storytelling, but we will be focusing on the types of stories that games tell and how they do so more or less successfully, including love stories, war stories, and stories involving mystery.
So, without further ado, we present this first episode. Please let us know what you think of this new feature, and we look forward to providing a number of weeks of interesting conversation about games and the kinds of stories that they tell.