Call for Columnists: Brainy, Artful Generalists, Rejoice!

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It's Hard to Play the Right Way
When the best way to experience a game is reliant on other people, it’s harder to get that best experience. [24.May.13]
It's a Merciless World in 'Metro: Last Light'
Last Light slow pace is always building towards something, whether in the gameplay or narrative, and in this, way the game strikes a better balance between action and horror than the Dead Space series. . [24.May.13]
The Creation of Need for Next-Gen Consoles
I have never been so struck by a combined effort of console makers to construct the very future they profess to herald. These conferences are framed as though they have some answer to a solution for a problem that has never existed. They seek to create the audience they want to sell this to. [23.May.13]
Call for Papers: Anachronism in Art - Pros and Cons
Why do modern adaptations of Shakespeare work? Yet Baz Luhrmann's adaptations of period pieces don't? [23.May.13]
Two Steps Down the Interactive Fiction Road
Photopia and Galatea are not iterations on interactive fiction, but something entirely new that happen to use the same form. [22.May.13]
Reviews
Last Light slow pace is always building towards something, whether in the gameplay or narrative, and in this, way the game strikes a better balance between action and horror than the Dead Space series. . [24.May.13]
Monaco is a stylish heist game that’ll make you wonder why there are so few heist games. [20.May.13]
Papo & Yo is an exorcism of sorts, a way for a survivor of childhood abuse to deal with his demons. This is a game as therapy. [17.May.13]
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. [15.May.13]
Daud's change of heart is disingenuous and a tool used to force the moral system into the downloadable content. Daud is an assassin and an agent of extreme chaos in the world of Dunwall. Players shouldn't feel guilty or be punished for acting as such. [13.May.13]
Riptide is good in spite of itself, but it could be so much better. [10.May.13]
The game drove me to complete it. Rest up and play a little more. Crack the safe, open the box, solve the… thing. [07.May.13]
Your heart will ache over the fate of a collection of rectangles. [06.May.13]
These characters are nothing but an assemblage of a ludicrous number of action movie clichés and references, creating an iconographic superimposition of a character that comes from no narrative or definable place but that could fit into any of them. [03.May.13]
The Darkstalkers series allowed Capcom to experiment without the risk of sullying its flagship fighting franchise. [01.May.13]
Even when it’s approachable and tempting, it’s still frustrating. However, its frustrations are born out of a consistent design philosophy, and its world is filled with such unexpected interactive depth and variety that I can’t help but respect it. [26.Apr.13]
There's an uncomfortable dissonance between the way the developers seem to want us to feel about the game and what we're actually feeling as we play through it. [24.Apr.13]
From The Blogs
Columns
Moving Pixels
I have found myself struck with admiration recently by games that I have played that have put me in less than empowering positions, games that celebrate difficulty and hardship, struggling and deprivation, rather than empowerment and excess. [24.Apr.13]
Moving Pixels
Even voiceless and often invisible, the characters of Little Inferno manage to ooze more personality than most video game characters. [02.Apr.13]
Features
By William Sims Bainbridge
"If humans are by nature lovers of fantasy, then little may be lost if they consider all their gods to be fantasies." [12.Apr.13]
By Stephanie Carmichael
What makes SHODAN so fearful to men and, to a lesser extent, women is that her vulnerabilities lie in code, not physicality. Her "body" cannot be dominated, abused, or battered, and she cannot be intimidated. For that reason, she eludes many of the methods men have used to control women. [10.Apr.13]
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