DJ Hero treads the line between authentic and artificial in terms of its grasp on DJ culture to a degree that's almost comical.
It's always a risk when a video game attempts to appropriate a certain segment of culture for the sake of enhancing the gaming experience. Given that the chances of an intersection between some perceived outsider segment of culture and the community of software developers and publishers responsible for the creation of said game tends to be somewhat small, there is an element of research that has to go into involving said culture. "Experts" in that…]]>Despite being a simulation about soldiers, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 calls into question our tendency to blindly follow rules in general.
This discussion of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 contains spoilers for this game as well as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Bioshock. The most compelling thing about the use of the first person perspective in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was how it victimized the player. From the opening scene in which the player was forced to take on the role of the victim of an execution to the sequence in…]]>At this point, Pokémon is less a franchise than it is a media juggernaut.
At this point, Pokémon is less a franchise than it is a media juggernaut. The sales success of anything Pokémon related is virtually assumed. In fact, there has been such a media assault of all things Pokémon in the past several years that it's sometimes almost difficult to remember that it started its life as (and somewhat remains) a well regarded video game series. It's arguable that the success of Pokémon helped to sustain Nintendo…]]>Mini Ninjas doesn’t live up to its own ambitions, but it succeeds where it matters.
There's been an interesting trend over the last few years of American cartoons mimicking the style of Japanese anime, big eyes, speed lines, and all. But despite this new style, the content hasn't changed much. It's all still superheroes and frantic comedies. Mini Ninjas tries to buck this trend of simple mimicry by embracing its chosen subject, finding a way to incorporate as many ninja myths into its gameplay as it can, but it still…]]>This could have been the place to really explore issues surrounding the blind following of orders and the terrors of war. But this game plays it safe in every way possible.
Magna Carta 2 strikes a delicate balance between irrelevance, competency, and mediocrity. It does this from the midst of a slowly growing batch of semi-interesting games: XBox 360-exclusive Japanese RPGs. Still, it is dissimilar to many such titles in that it uses a real-time battle system. Aside from that, it plays and feels about as you expect it would. Unfortunately, like so many recent JRPGs, it uses the Unreal 3 engine. There can be no…]]>The Oedipal drama that would normally ensue in father-son stories is inverted, though, perhaps as a result of Tony's homosexuality.
Your brand of charming homosexuality, Tony, it's kind of run out of steam.--Rocco Pelosi, Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony This discussion of The Ballad of Gay Tony does contain spoilers. The Ballad of Gay Tony is the straightest Grand Theft Auto ever. Okay, well not exactly (or perhaps, what my title implies isn't exactly what I mean). Nevertheless, despite its title, heterosexual sex acts are considerably more common than homosexual ones in…]]>Every character in the game is the epitome of a JRPG stereotype because they never do anything to distinguish themselves from it.
As a genre, the JRPG has always been able to juggle complex content. Gorgeous visuals and interesting stories even if intended for younger audiences are easily managed in any game design that is inherently familiar to the player. The problem is that when it comes to video games, strong content does not make up for a dull design. You’ve got to have a strong foundation for the rest of it to work. Hit Maker’s A…]]>Mad love for Mariah Carey's artistry, exhibited through her "Fly Like a Bird" performance on American Idol.
Damn! Mariah is just all that. When watching Mariah perform "Fly Like a Bird" before this audience of idols, notice how much stronger her voice becomes once the choir comes out and pumps her up; she raises that hand up high, high, and higher, as if to say Amen! I love how Mariah doesn't compete with her back-up singers, and can hold her own with that massive choir. Only Phil Spector has created a more…]]>Combine lifelike faces with the expansive crowd and referee animations, and you’ve got the most real-to-life sports sim made.
Full disclosure, NBA 2K10 is my first foray into the 2K10 hoops world. For this, I apologize. To whom, I’m not particularly sure. Maybe myself. But it should be publicly noted that NBA 2K10 is far and away, the best basketball sim on the market. Gameplay aside, the most recent 2K installment is the most graphically detailed and realistic sports game ever. After a few minutes with the game, the first thing that sticks out…]]>Can Gen X parents bond with the newest generation of gamers given the ways that cooperative gameplay has changed over the years?
No one needs to convince kids to play video games. The Millenials are a group that easily embraces the medium of video games. But since there are quite a few 30-somethings that play games targeted towards mature audiences, there isn't necessarily a clear bridge between the games that we like to play and the ones that our kids are playing. Worse, most modern multiplayer games are not designed to play alongside a small human in…]]>Brütal Legend might actually be the best use of Jack Black yet, affording him a starring role that caters to his comedic roots and sensibilities while allowing everything around him to be more over the top than he is.
Long a hero to gamers familiar with his seminal LucasArts PC titles, developer Tim Schafer's first foray into console gaming came in 2005 with the wildly creative Psychonauts. The main conceit of platforming inside the minds of other characters in order to combat physical representations of emotional issues or memories was immensely enjoyable for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the thoroughly unique presentation and gameplay elements of each level. Further,…]]>Despite being a simulation of dictatorship, Tropico 3 is largely about questioning authority.
In Tropico 3, you take on the role of a Latin American dictator on a fictitious island in the Caribbean. Sounds like fun, right? Well, as anyone who likes to play god in simulation games by taking on the role of managing cities, zoos, movie studios, or amusement parks can tell you, doing so is generally a fairly complex undertaking that generally tests your own abilities in administrating but rarely tests your authority. Despite being…]]>If you’re going to claim that a game is about observing animals and taking pictures, there are certain things a person is going to impulsively want to do.
In a game, there is always a difficult balance between meeting expectations about the experience that it is claiming to give us and handling the technical realities that hold it back. If you’re going to claim that a game is about observing animals and taking pictures, there are certain things a person is going to impulsively want to do. Get close to the animals, be able to sneak around to get clever shots, explore a…]]>It is as if a Saturday morning cartoon had been spun through some kind of faux-intellectual blender.
Tornado Outbreak is a game that feels strangely, exuberantly inadequate. It plays like some kind of odd take on the (admittedly already odd) Katamari Damacy franchise and is possessed of a bizarrely out of place tone. Or, it could be a completely brilliant and subversive tone. It is hard to say which one is accurate after playing through the game’s smallish campaign. In Tornado Outbreak, you play as a Zephyr, taking on the role of…]]>The more blood there is in a game, the more unrealistic it becomes; it ceases to have any real meaning and becomes a joke.
Whenever a critic of the gaming industry starts to decry the level of violence in games, the response is generally the same. It's standard to point out that violence in games pales when compared to the more explicit violence and gore in movies. While that may be true when comparing a game like GTA IV (the mass media's favorite whipping boy) to a movie like Hostel, it doesn't hold up for games versus movies in…]]>NHL 2K10 feels like a game made by people who have never played the game of hockey or even watch much of it.
In 2009, to make the grave mistakes that 2K Sports’ NHL 2K10 does is unforgivable. One example that typifies the game’s myriad problems is in one of the basics of the game of hockey: line changes. When attempting to change lines on the fly during the flow of play, you are presented with your various line options and each one’s corresponding button. Unfortunately, one of the lines is associated with the pass button, and when…]]>The game is less interested in presenting a building simulation (as the previous games in the series were) as it is in presenting a world of mystery where persistence, not problem solving, is key to resolving a mystery.
There are also a few badly-scared champions of the formal or the classic mystery who think no story is a detective story which does not pose a formal and exact problem and arrange the clues around it with neat labels on them. Such would point out, for example, that in reading The Maltese Falcon no one concerns himself with who killed Spade’s partner, Archer (which is the only formal problem of the story) because the…]]>The biggest disappointment about the game is how much it fails to actually be an engaging Home Depot commercial.
Making a video game that advertises a product is nothing new. Whether it is being released to support a movie or build on a successful IP, games that are little more than glorified advertisements for other products have always been around. Eventually people started to notice the effectiveness of these games for spreading brand awareness and you began to see products like Burger King’s Sneak King that built on their bizarre mascot. To my knowledge,…]]>Forced retirement is a lot better off than the dishonorable discharge many face under DADT, and the gap in pay and benefits is huge.
We should all just be plain ole Americans, right? And we could all just get along because we all have the same fair chances, right? Just consider how many men and women in service suffer in silence. In his interview given to YouthRadio.org, young veteran Joseph Christopher Rocha comes out about how during his Middle East war tour, he suffered everything from “being duct-taped and locked in a dog kennel to being forced to simulate…]]>As much as is possible in this cartoony world, it's difficult not to sympathize with Bowser.
It seems quite common that there are overall fans of a particular medium who have certain genres they've never quite gotten a handle on. Perhaps it's a music fan who seems to like everything except for jazz, or a film connoisseur that doesn't quite see the appeal of gangster movies. Personally, despite my affection for video games at large, I've rarely been swept off my feet by a traditional RPG. I never really had the…]]>Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 is one of the first games in which immersion is actually a strike against it.
This review contains mild story-related spoilers. There's a moment toward the end of Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 in which Sonia, the in-over-her-head stereotypical female who constantly insists on tagging along and being captured by baddies (a completely unnecessary subplot to an appropriately epic primary narrative) can't help herself anymore and leaps into a hug with her (and our) hero, Ryu Hayabusa. Ryu is taken aback by this sudden infringement into the personal space that he…]]>Unlike the radical individualism that marks and perhaps romanticizes the protagonists of Grand Theft Auto, Saint's Row succeeds in creating a positive response to the Saints through their representation of them as a gang of slightly more thoughtful, slightly more opened minded thugs.
Most games based on the Grand Theft Auto formula of creating an open world, in which a player in the form of a criminal is allowed free reign to explore and dominate a world, have a tendency to attempt to distinguish themselves from this forerunner in some fundamental kind of way. Games like The Godfather or Scarface have attempted various ways of changing up the open world formula by grafting area control and economic development…]]>The game is clearly written by someone who thinks that they’re producing a TV episode or book.
As games begin to come into their own, people who specialize in producing dialogue and narrative that works well for the medium are becoming more prevalent. There are certain tropes, such as the story progressing in different ways based on player input, that you just need practice and experience before you can really write well. Expectations vary for this, a linear sequence of cutscenes mixed up with gameplay is still a fun way to play,…]]>I couldn't help but notice that one puzzle in which you must fit four different shaped blocks in four identically shaped holes in order to open a door was eerily similar to a Fisher-Price puzzle that I once solved at age four.
When making Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, developer Vicarious Visions seemed to have the old adage “if it ain't broke, don't fix it” in mind. However, they probably should have considered another: “Familiarity breeds contempt.” The sequel to Raven Software's 2006 action role-playing game is so slavishly devoted to keeping things pretty much the same that its sequel borders on expansion pack material or, at the very least, resembles something like an update similar to what…]]>Dead Space: Extraction breathes new creative life into what was one of the most derivative genres in gaming, the "on-rails shooter," turning it from a mindless virtual shooting gallery into a valid avenue for storytelling.
Dring the build up to the release of Dead Space: Extraction, developer Visceral Games never described their game as a "rail shooter," which is a kind of shooter, typically in first-person, in which the player doesn't have direct control over their avatar, who instead moves along a set path as if on rails. The term has long been associated with arcade shoot-‘em-ups to differentiate these two different types of games. Dead Space: Extraction, though, had…]]>We may have to reconsider who we are as we play out the sexual experiences of someone else.
Only one thing could've dragged me away from the soft glow of electric sex gleaming in the window.--Ralphie, A Christmas Story (1983), MGM/UA Entertainment Much like the “major award” won by Ralphie's father in A Christmas Story, contemporary video games with “the snap of a few sparks, and a quick whiff of ozone” tend to offer rather ideal, if incomplete images of lurid matter to their audience. Indeed, sexuality tends to get treated in one…]]>You can drive as messily or cautiously as you want, and the game will reward you. It goes a long way toward making the game feel like your racing experience.
The Need for Speed series has been the home to great games, good games, and absolutely awful games. It’s also the first title (that I ever played) that introduced the aggressive AI driver, in the form of a police car, designed to take you down at all costs. Since the arrival of Hot Pursuit on the scene, Need for Speed has struggled to reattain its brilliance. Porsche Unleashed was a fun racer, but the hemmed…]]>Trine is a platformer of obligation.
There are myriad reasons to recommend Trine. It's beautiful, for one. Playing through Trine is like gazing at a gorgeous oil-painted landscape that just keeps moving, keeps developing, and keeps finding new ways to make your jaw drop in silent awe. Few games have been produced that have this sort of richness of color and aesthetic, enough so that one would almost rather watch than play simply so that the details of it all won't…]]>Summary: Early this week, our Moving Pixels writers decided to play a game of telephone. Leading off with some observations about considering whether or not the idea of “ganking” can be applied to single player experiences, L.B. Jeffries began a discussion that has considered what rules mean to players. G. Christopher Williams continued this discussion that has focused on the differences between playing and gaming and what limits we may want to place on ourselves as players of games. Nick Dinicola concludes our series today with some final thoughts on whether or not we can earn the right to gank the system.
Over the past week on Moving Pixels, L.B. Jeffries and G. Christopher William have written about system gank in games, a term that describes “a situation in which a player is still operating legitimately in the confines of the game but has broken the system.” They wrote mostly about the negative consequences of “breaking the game,” but I think ganking the game can be a good thing, at least in single player games. On a…]]>If any pleasure is to be derived from Fatale, it is likely the pleasure that one derives from the activities of looking and observing, which is in itself a problem if it is about Salome. The Biblical story indicates that being looked at and observed is the catalyst for potential nastiness and ultimately an ending.
This review contains some spoilers. This is not a game. You will die. But that should go without saying, since you should know what you're getting into in the first place with a game whose subtitle indicates an interest in “exploring Salome.” The story of Salome and her connection to the execution of John the Baptist already suggests the terminal as a theme, both in its biblical version and its revision by Oscar Wilde. However,…]]>This week our Moving Pixels writers decided to play a game of telephone. Leading off with some observations about considering whether or not the idea of “ganking” can be applied to single player experiences, L.B. Jeffries began a discussion that has considered what rules mean to players. G. Christopher Williams is now continuing this discussion by considering the differences between what we mean by playing and gaming and how those ideas relate to rules and the freedom of violating them. Nick Dinicola will conclude our series on Friday, so please do stop by for the discussion's conclusion.
In yesterday's Moving Pixels Column, L.B. Jeffries considered the concept of “ganking”, a term commonly applied to multiplayer gaming experiences and how the problematic concept of players finding loopholes to circumvent rules in a game might additionally apply to single player experiences. Jeffries began his essay with a kind of real life example of how a system might be “ganked”, which I guess is a good enough place as any to respond to some of…]]>A player can make mistakes with dire consequences that are absolutely irreversible.
Demon’s Souls is without a doubt one of the most vexing, frustrating, exhilarating, unique experiences that it has been my pleasure to play through this console generation. The tenacity of Japanese developer From Software and its publisher Atlus has resulted in the creation of a game that perfectly idolizes the design philosophies of the Japanese Role-Playing Game and retains the infamous staples that have led gamers to both attraction to and repulsion from the genre.…]]>