Archive for category Gamiary
Skullgirls: This is What Love Feels Like!
Posted by digital love child in Adam Burch, Gamiary on May 16, 2012
I’ve been playing fighting games competitively for about 3 years now; I started with Street Fighter 4, and have moved on into Skullgirls. I’ve played hours and hours of the SF4 series. I’ve gone to local tournaments, and even a major. I’ve gone on forums, argued about tiers and techniques, and spent still more time in practice mode refining and discovering my technique.
I’m not a very big fan of the Street Fighter 4 series.
Killzone 2: War Sucks and War Games Suck Too
Posted by digital love child in Gamiary, Reid McCarter on April 18, 2012
Killzone 2 exists in a strange place where the Michael Bay inspired bombast of Modern Warfare shares space with the gore-soaked dialectics of The Iliad. For all of its surface problems (and there are many), it is a game about shooting dudes that frequently attempts to impart something far different than the mindless jingoism of its brethren. Killzone 2 has a generic science-fiction plot — the “good guys” of the Interplanatary Strategic Alliance (ISA) are fighting a war against the “bad” Helghast army — but it is also a story about the futility of assigning values to combat fuelled by nationalism and historical injustice.
War is hell, it says, and not just for our team.
Journey, Abstraction and the Invention of Language
Posted by digital love child in Gamiary, Reid McCarter on March 28, 2012
I’ve spent the last five Christmas Eves having dinner with a table full of people speaking a language I don’t understand. My partner was born and raised in Canada, but her parents were born and raised in Warsaw, Poland, leaving several decades ago when the country was still under the thumb of the USSR. She, her brother and her cousins are (frustratingly, perfectly) multilingual while I only speak English fluently and can somewhat passably read and understand spoken French. At Christmas family gatherings with only two or three others who can’t speak/understand Polish it’s only natural that conversations eventually shift away from English. The older members of the family are most comfortable speaking in their first language after all and, especially after several bottles of wine and vodka have been emptied, their usual consideration for including everyone in every conversation starts to dissipate. The first year I came to the big Christmas Eve dinner I felt extremely awkward because of this. I imagine a lot of people surrounded by a language they don’t understand get to wondering what the hell is being said and, most anxiety-inducing of all, if they’re being talked about without understanding it.
The next year it seemed a bit better. I knew these people, had grown more comfortable drinking my wine and sort of drifting out when the conversations turned to Polish. The Christmas after that I barely noticed a thing and now, all these years and several failed attempts to learn the language (it is goddamned impenetrable, but I’ll keep trying until I die) later, I find that I can follow the gist of my in-laws’ Polish dialogue despite only recognizing a handful of words. It is possible to intuit the rhythm of a sentence, to understand how changes in tone and volume communicate a joke or sarcastic remark without a proper understanding of the complexities of the language. This is, I think, a common phenomenon. In lieu of properly interpreting a language, those regularly surrounded by it will at least learn to “feel” how it works.
By the end of two hours with Journey a similar thing had happened.
Communication Breakdown in Dragon Age: Origins
Posted by digital love child in Gamiary, Reid McCarter on March 14, 2012
My first experience with a Bioware game was Dragon Age: Origins. At the time I didn’t know much of anything about the studio, what their “return to roots” project meant to people or, really, what I was getting into at all. I just read a lot of really good things about a game — namely, the amount of narrative choice it offered players — and thought it would be worth trying out. Now, having played two Mass Effects, two Fallouts and Skyrim, I’ve gone back into the first Dragon Age with, maybe, a bit more of an understanding of how to approach these kind of massively customizable RPGs (MCRPG?) and a better grasp on how to play off their shortcomings.
In short, I’ve learned how to communicate with a videogame by speaking its own language.
Papa Madden
Posted by digital love child in Gamiary, John Law on March 9, 2012
When I am one day forced to admit my most horrific crimes to St. Peter, one of them will be that I enjoy playing Madden games. I don’t really care which. I play the 2011 one, but if you’re going to try to convince me that it is different than, say, the previous ten or the subsequent one then you care more than I have the energy for. It is important for you to understand that I am not the type of person who would easily admit to a love of football video games. I certainly don’t follow the sport in real time and I certainly do have the body of a stick insect with weak knees. I have little to relate to football and especially the culture around the game. All that aside, have you heard of this thing called a “Hail Mary”? If not, have you ever wondered what it feels like to be in that last scene of Remember the Titans? Well, just successfully throw a Hail Mary in a game of Madden NFL and the next thing you know you’ll be holding up the game ball with Coach Boone saying things like, “You’re hall of fame in my books!”
Everquest: You Can’t Go Home Again
Posted by digital love child in Gamiary, Tom Auxier on February 17, 2012
If you were to ask me which video game I’ve played the most, I’d have to answer Everquest. It would be with a hint of embarrassment, like you just caught me in a devious trap. Everquest: that most reviled of video games, that most hated of subjects. You could probably find someone who claims Everquest ruined videogames, and you can definitely find people who say Everquest ruined their lives.
I loved it with a passion reserved for only my favorite games, though. It’s the game that most irrevocably shaped my gaming opinions. Its best feature was how it absolutely didn’t give a shit about you, and how that opened up possibilities: removed from the spotlight that younger sibling World of Warcraft would thrust on you, you were free to develop yourself, develop your story.
Renegade Ops or; Blowing Shit Up: The Game
Posted by digital love child in Gamiary, Reid McCarter on February 15, 2012
Developers spend a lot of time trying to make things as pretty as possible in videogames and sometimes that effort kind of misses the point. While fantastic visuals are easy to talk about in a preview or review — and translate well to short promotional videos and screenshots — they aren’t nearly as important as how a game actually feels. So subjective, but so important, the minute details of play contribute much more to how enjoyable a title is than any breathtaking vista or lovingly animated character.
Describing how this works is difficult (unless, I suppose, you create your own critical vocabulary), but is well worth the effort. It’s also essential that critics of any stripe point out good examples of videogames that just plain feel good to play.
This, I think, is the best way to start talking about Renegade Ops.
Isaac Unbound
Posted by digital love child in Gamiary, Tom Auxier on February 8, 2012
So here I am. Again. Judas in Sheol (that’s Hell), all his stats maxed, more than half a dozen hearts, enough followers to make Jesus blush. And here I go, dead in four rooms due to sheer, dumb luck. This time I’m killed by a floating eyeball leech, one that explodes. This was a statistically unlikely occurrence: the room had four Knights with Isaac’s face on the back, too, and a betting man would have put it to one of them to kill me.
Dead, killed by some strange monster in a horrible basement, there’s only one thing left for me to do: restart and try again. That is the nature of the genre.
The Saboteur: What’s With All the Tits?
Posted by digital love child in Gamiary, John Law on February 6, 2012
I love a good boob as much as most (I even love a bad boob if it’s got character), but there are other things in the world that I can love as well. For example, avocados are nice. Let us also not forget the pleasure one gets from a game of badminton. All these are things that can get a rise out of me. However, if I were to ready myself for a tasty avocado treat and it was just an avocado — I’m talking just an avocado — I wouldn’t be upset (I don’t think) by its lack of cleavage. Indeed, it might make me suspicious if it did. “Where’d this avocado get these boobs?” I’d ask.
What I’m trying to say is I was just playing the game The Saboteur on my PS3.
Space Giraffe: The Final Frontier
Posted by digital love child in Adam Burch, Gamiary on February 1, 2012
What is the defining feature of Super Mario Brothers? Not in the boring terms of cultural cachet, but in the actually interesting terms of game design? What is it that sets SMB apart? We talk and wave our hands about, and mumble words of “gameplay” and “level design”, but what is the core, the glue, the absolute center around which they revolve? Does such a center even exist?
I propose that it does, and that it has a real name: Clear Visual Language.
