Mark Filipowich is a freelance journalist based out of London, Ontario. He has a Bachelor’s degree in English and psychology. He writes about video games, television, film and other areas of pop culture around the internet. You can read more of his work at big-tall-words.com
Reviews
Wednesday, May 15 2013
Eador: Masters of the Broken World
Eador's design is functional, but flawed, and the troubling subtext can feel alienating. However, there aren’t many games that fill its niche, so it’s worth a look at the very least.
Monday, March 11 2013
Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage 2
Shallow, boring, pointless, and forgettable. Also, there's punching.
Monday, February 18 2013
Expeditions Conquistador
Expeditions Conquistador is an alternate history, in which the player is put in the position of South America’s conquerors. Most of the game is centered on exploration and resource management with some sparse but important combat and dialogue trees mixed in. To say the least, it’s extraordinarily bold to handle such sensitive material in such a “game-like” fashion.
Wednesday, January 23 2013
The Journey Down: Chapter One
At just over two hours of gameplay, The Journey Down: Chapter One just a flicker of a game, but it’s brilliant enough and leaves behind an appealing ghost when it’s finished.
Friday, December 14 2012
Dragon Ball Z: Budokai HD Collection
The Budokai series deserves an HD remake, but the one that it got is an incomplete experience. The decision not to include some key components makes it feel like only a partial look at the series.
Blogs
Tuesday, May 7 2013
Killing Spree: The Inconsistency of Video Game Violence
Bioshock Infinite is problematic because, unlike the battle for Hyrule or Jacinto, the massacre at Wounded Knee actually happened, as did violence against interracial couples. It becomes extraordinarily uncomfortable for a game to treat enemies as obstacles to be removed with a gun in the context of actual, still relevant wars.
Tuesday, April 23 2013
"A Game of Chess": 'Breath of Death' Is 'The Waste Land' of Video Games
In part, the wasteland of The Waste Land is high culture. It’s the sprawling tradition of genius texts that have been shredded and strewn about by an increasingly shallow popular culture. T.S. Eliot would have hated video games.
Tuesday, April 2 2013
We Are One: JRPGs, the Group Journey, and the Mechanics of Cooperation
One of the core mechanics of JRPGs is party management, which has interesting implications for how the game conveys the journey of a cohesive group over that of an individual. In the JRPG, the player doesn’t control a single character. They’re in control of the whole party all at once.
Tuesday, March 12 2013
Where the Heart Is: The Use of Home in Video Games
Home is where we see characters in a state of normalcy. We get to know what the protagonist does between adventures, and for a medium that depends so much on empathizing with the lead character, seeing who they are at home, away from it all, is a significant experience that more developers should consider investigating.
Tuesday, March 5 2013
The Playstation Is Dead. Long Live Playstation
The day that the Playsation 4 was unveiled, Japanese developer Kenji Eno passed away, leaving behind a body of critically lauded work that is now mostly inaccessible.
