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Monday, December 14 2009

Madden NFL Arcade

By Nick Dinicola

The learning curve is prohibitively high for newcomers, and there’s no depth to attract the normal Madden fan, which is a shame because Madden NFL Arcade can be pretty fun if given the chance.

Friday, December 11 2009

Need For Speed: Nitro

By Thomas Cross

With no Wii histrionics, this game has to stand on its own.

Wednesday, December 9 2009

Space Invaders Extreme 2

By Azmol Meah

While many rightfully credit Super Mario Bros. as the saviour of the games industry following the crash of ’83, Space Invaders influence on popular culture and on the modern shooter should not be forgotten.

Monday, December 7 2009

Spore Hero

By Mike Schiller

Battle amounts to a strange little dance that just happens to involve bodily harm.

Friday, December 4 2009

A Boy and His Blob

By Arun Subramanian

A Boy and His Blob features a relationship that is immediately warm without much exposition explaining why, existing almost independent of the narrative.

Wednesday, December 2 2009

Astro Boy: The Video Game

By G. Christopher Williams

Sometimes retro can suggest a quaint charm, but sometimes retro just means old.

Monday, November 30 2009

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

By Nick Dinicola

The biggest example of the developer’s new confidence can be seen in their desire to depict modern warfare without glorifying it.

Wednesday, November 25 2009

Where the Wild Things Are

By Mike Schiller

Developer Griptonite devised an entirely new narrative, whose sole purpose is to allow Where the Wild Things Are a clear conflict, quest, and resolution, for the sake of fitting it into the typical pseudo-platformer licensed game template.

Monday, November 23 2009

Marvel Super Hero Squad

By L.B. Jeffries

Deciding whether or not to buy this game is mostly a decision based on who you want to play the game with.

Friday, November 20 2009

DJ Hero

By Mike Schiller

DJ Hero treads the line between authentic and artificial in terms of its grasp on DJ culture to a degree that's almost comical.

more Columns

Tuesday, December 8 2009

Farmville: Fetch Me My Manure Boots

By Jennifer Byrne

The surging popularity of the virtual farming game 'FarmVille' seems to imply dissatisfaction with almost every aspect of modern life -- except maybe virtual reality.

(more Pop Osmosis)

Monday, December 7 2009

Philip K. Dick’s Defense of Video Games

By L.B. Jeffries

Philip K. Dick’s fiction is a defense of the validity of video games because despite the fact that they are not real, his stories argue that there is still something valid in the artificial.

(more Moving Pixels)

Friday, November 6 2009

Parent-Child Bonding: Video Games that Bridge the Generation Gap

By G. Christopher Williams

Can Gen X parents bond with the newest generation of gamers given the ways that cooperative gameplay has changed over the years?

(more Moving Pixels)

more Features

Wednesday, September 30 2009

The New American Spook Country

By L.B. Jeffries

Spook Country is about America’s loss of innocence, its various ways of remembering the past, and an attempt to find a way of reconciling those memories with the present.

Thursday, June 18 2009

The New Games Journalism

By L.B. Jeffries

The most useful moments for New Games Journalists are ones that occur in multiplayer, describing experiences that could never occur during just a general session of play.

Wednesday, May 27 2009

Remembering the Orphan: Final Fantasy VIII

By Jack Patrick Rodgers

Warts and all, the ambitious push to expand video game storytelling found in Final Fantasy VIII deserves a closer look at this too-often neglected franchise entry.