For a long while now I've been using Giant Bomb's lists feature to keep track of my collection of games and provide a brief, ~100 word review of each game as I played it. Since I also used to maintain a blog on a private website, I would carbon-copy a lot of the articles I wrote there onto the GB profile blog for the sake of completeness and discoverability. Well, the private blog site has shut...
If you’re uninitiated, Metal Gear Scanlon is the Giant Bomb premium video series in which Dan guides Drew through the MGS games. Drew is unutterably abominable at them, so the videos are oft painful to watch, but they have provided me with a special opportunity to develop unwarranted opinions about games I have never played. Somehow, I’ve managed to figure out why the series has achieved critic...
Extra Credits posted a follow-up video to that earlier collaboration where I thought some of their observations were getting things backwards. Here, EC covers a lot of the same ideas (and explores some other ones), and I feel tremendously vindicated. Alright, so, I said most of what I wanted to about this back then, so I’ll try not to just repeat myself. Instead, I’d like to point out that desi...
Extra Credits did a collaboration with Idea Channel to make this video about the weird phenomenon in games where people completely forget “what the game is about” (i.e. the narrative, subtext, et cetera), because they only engage with the mechanics (since those are fun, elaborate and demanding). It’s a really great and important thing to realize, but he goes awry by suggesting that mechanics ar...
As much as I adore Slender: The Eight Pages and Slender: The Arrival , and consider their core mechanic a masterwork of horror, the fact that there’s relatively little to them other than that mechanic (or variations thereon) leaves something to be desired. The missing component of those games, featured in most other Slender mythos stories, is investigation: the protagonist’s attempts to underst...
As an artform, games have more in common with music than they do with cinema. If you’re making a tabletop RPG, you’re often creating a set of guidelines that will let a group of people tell a story together. The rules of these games help decide what’s canon and not, and often provide a little creative input, but the real power of tabletop RPGs is the ability of the players and game masters to t...
I enjoyed doing me earlier Let's Play of Amnesia, and since I had another "horror" game on my to-play list, I figured I might as well do the same for Dead Space. I fucked up and lost the first episode, then later fucked up again and lost the final episode, but the bulk of the game is still contained herein. Part 1 is not the beginning, but I never intend to fix this, because Dead Space is prett...
This article is a response to this one written by Carolyn Petit . A lot of people, including, of particular note, a lot of women, have said that Bayonetta is a feminist sort of character – an empowered, powerful woman in control of her sexuality. I find this deeply confusing, because, by all appearances, she’s a generic sex object, made noteworthy perhaps only because she’s such an extreme exam...
There’s a difference between criticism and censorship. This is something that I did not always understand, even as it seems obvious to me now, so I fathom that it can be a confusing distinction. To be clear: censorship is an attempt to prevent artwork from existing (or from reaching its audience, which is functionally the same thing); and criticism is the assertion that artwork has flaws or pro...
Today’s Penny Arcade isn’t anything exceptional; Tycho’s newspost starts with a brief acknowledgement of it, and ends with an announcement RE: the PA Scholarship, but it’s the meat of the post that I want to talk about, so hit the link, have a read, and then join me back here. Referring to this idea as the Final Game is very interesting – in my youth I called them “perfect” games, but “final” m...
My good buddy Avery said that he would gladly watch a stream of me playing Amnesia, and encouraged me to record myself for that reason. After the gang and I all made fun of him, 'cause none of us really partake of the whole streaming thing, I figured why the hell not, and downloaded the required software. Since no one else is going to watch the show (well, no one's going to watch it, not even A...
Minecraft is actually a really messy game. I think I would rate it much more poorly if there were anything else worthwhile in the same gameplay genre – as it stands, the other available games are messier still (titles like Dwarf Fortress and The Forest). Which would you rank better, BioShock Infinite, or Bastion? They’re both linear, story-focused combat games with customization elements. I ten...
GamerGate consumes more of my time, lately, than PLAYING GAMES does, and I find that notion almost as offensive as the movement itself. All I want is to enjoy my games in peace. But I can’t, because GamerGate insists on butting in. It’s spread across the sites I frequent, it harasses the developers making the games I love, and it’s trying to silence the critics and analysts that I trust. I’d ra...
My beloved has taken a year-long trip overseas to study at Oxford, and I’m attempting to ease the transition with a little extra distraction for the first month by participating in Patrick Klepek's “Shocktober” month-long horror movie marathon. Accordingly, I’ve prepared a list of 31 horror films – old and new, classics and crap – to watch. Theoretically, that’d be one per night, but given that...
Frictional Games: The last name “Grip” is strangely apt for a horror game designer. I recently wrapped up Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and, like many, I have almost exclusively good things to say about it. The atmosphere of Amnesia is pretty much perfect, and while the pacing of the game effectively switches gears from moments of calmer investigation or puzzle solving to moments of excitement and...
Lucas Pope: who would’ve thought Naughty Dog ever employed people with original ideas? I think the most impressive achievement of Papers, Please is not the fact that it took a mind-numbingly boring task and somehow turned it into a legitimately entertaining, flow-inducing activity – it is the fact that this may be one of the first games I have ever played in which the core mechanical systems of...
Game where you are a dice who judges the players based on good/bad deeds that they do throughout the day and lands on the side of justice — petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) September 23, 2013 The game I ended up with is a mobile app with two games in one: an asynchronous, turn-based, menu-operated, multiplayer RPG with a major ethics/morality emphasis (lots of Fable-like aesthetic consequences fo...
Left 4 Dead & Left 4 Dead 2 are among my all-time most favourite video games, thanks to their unique and ingenious design: a series of short, story-driven campaigns featuring relatable, interesting characters and mountains of apocalyptic window dressing; a four-player cooperative multiplayer format with incredible interdependence between players necessitating effective teamwork; endless replaya...
Game where you must maintain your vacuum shop whilst also harboring criminals at the same time. — petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) September 24, 2013 It’s a tycoon game! You need to operate your vacuum shop to the best of your abilities in the classic vein of games like Lemonade Stand, but with a twist: the vacuum shop is just the commercial front for what is actually a mob den. The basics of man...
What if you played as a letter of the alphabet that could jump into speech bubbles to either help people or get them into deep trouble? — petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) February 7, 2013 I think that playing as a single letter of the alphabet severely limits the gameplay options and puts an awkward constraint on puzzle creation, so instead, while maintaining the spirit of the idea, I would give...
Irrational Games: Thinking deep thoughts and brutally murdering people at the same time. I discovered, in the aftermath of BioShock Infinite, that I have relatively little to say about it that is interesting without criticizing it or defending it against criticism, which is a shame, because Infinite is a great game that is both fun to play and features an intense, moving story. If Infinite were...
Imagine a game where you instantly die if you see yourself? The enemy is reflection. — petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) October 22, 2012 For this one, I think the player needs to literally be Medusa. Aside from the fact that using a well-known myth reduces the need for exposition, this sets up an amazing horror story that I would really love to tell, and can really only be told through the eyes o...
Game where you play a day that lasts 1 second. Need to find elements that stretch time by 1 second. You win when you live a 24 hour day. — petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) March 12, 2013 This one is an iPhone balancing game in which the player must guide (by tilting the phone) a sphere that moves at its own, constant speed along a precarious system of narrow rails, and if the sphere falls off the...
Yager Development: Because shooting dudes should… wait, who? I had a wonderful time with Spec Ops: The Line, both because I have no problems at all with the fairly basic shooter formula it follows, and because I love Heart of Darkness . Like its primary influence , Spec Ops tells a story about the brutality of which humans are capable when stripped of any sense of restraint; when we are freed f...
Game about an assassin trying to make a hit on a target. You control everyone else in the area, finding creative ways of keeping them apart — petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) March 5, 2013 I'm reminded, funnily enough, of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, where the player is able to possess objects in order to create changes in the environment. Supposing, say, that the player can suddenly cause the...
If you die your last body turns into a brick. You can then pick that brick up with new body and use it towards making a bridge. Repeat — petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) January 25, 2013 I adore the notion of having insurmountable obstacles where dying is part of progressing, but if all we're doing with this is building a bridge, I don't see a lot of gameplay variety on the horizon. Maintaining t...
Welcome to "Gratis Amateur Molydeux Elaborations", a series of articles wherein I take a game design idea from a tweet by @PeterMolydeux and elaborate on it, fleshing out the core concept into a very brief design document of sorts. It's "amateur" because I have minimal game design experience, and it's "gratis" because I'm offering these ideas free of charge! I don't have the time, dedication or...
Obsidian Entertainment: Because fuck you, they'll shit on whatever IP they like. Having finished Fallout: New Vegas, I have trouble deciding whether I dislike the game on its own merits, or whether a combination of being burned out on this style of game after Skyrim and my seething hatred for Obsidian spoiled me on it in advance. I had a good time with it on occasion, especially after I got my...
Telltale: Keeping adventure games alive since 2004. I've recently finished the Walking Dead video game, and I have high hopes that it indicates a turning point for the adventure genre: moving away from the irritating "combine inventory object A with B and then rub it on stationary environmental object C" style of puzzles, and toward a more straightforward form of interactive storytelling where...
If you are a Zero Punctuation regular, you have probably noted Yahtzee's aversion to "spunkgargleweewee", the modern genre of FPS with inordinate focus on cinematic, heavily-guided play instead of player-driven expression and freedom of choice. Guidance vs. freedom seems like a frequently occurring design problem – it's at the core of any Mac vs. Linux debate, for instance. Calling back to idea...
Why aren't there more games built around microbiology and chemistry? I may be a little biased in this regard, being a biochemistry major and all, but I've played great games about warfare, finance, medicine, and even ecology, and yet the only chemistry game I've played is actually a robot-programming game in a cheap disguise. You find the occasiona educational title, or shitty product that mean...
I have no intention to ever play League of Legends , regardless of continuing prompts to change this policy. The primary reason I cannot be bothered, other than a general lack of satisfaction with online competitive environments , is the lack of apparent context in the game: The fiction and setting of LoL is a thin veneer to that exists only to justify the digital sporting event contained there...
It would make a lot of sense for me to enjoy MMORPGs. I like other games that feature open worlds, character customization, and cooperative multiplayer, but the whole of the MMO genre can fuck right off. Even were I to generously ignore the absurd monthly tithe that playing such a game entails, the games themselves consist chiefly of experiments in behavioural conditioning; an unending, vicious...
Since starting Brink: - I've had to forward ports to be able to host games - My characters now all speak with the same accent regardless of which one I chose during creation - The game has crashed during server or menu loading - I've been unable to join games for no clear reason - The sound has vanished entirely for entire matches - Enemy bots have turned invisible for entire matches - AI teamm...
I am, however, a Dungeon Master. There was a time I wished I could be a game designer. Several unfinished projects later, and I am reasonably confident that I lack the patience and dedication for the job, but I still like to learn about game design and study the mechanics that make my favourite games so fun. If I am not cut out for actually building a game, though, what motivates me to absorb t...
There are times I feel like an asshole for my appreciation of the aesthetics of darkness and grit, and fondness of shooter games above all others. I have listened to plenty of complaints about the epidemic of grey-brown shooters and action games clogging up the market, and I sympathize. No one wants the gaming medium to stagnate, innovation and new gameplay styles are great, and I certainly wou...
Aiming is better with a mouse than an analog stick. The movements of a mouse are directly correlated with the movements of the crosshairs: moving the mouse farther moves the view farther, and moving faster moves the view faster. The movements of an analog stick, by contrast, operate like a throttle: moving the stick farther moves the view faster, and (here is the important part) holding the sti...
The inclusion of re-spec's has been the single greatest improvement in modern RPGs. I downloaded a free copy of MechWarrior 4 recently and had a go at tinkering in the old MechLab. I fondly remember the MechWarrior video game series because I spent hours at a time in there, tweaking my load outs to match my conception of an ideal war machine. There is no best way to deal with the barrage of opt...
Video games teach life lessons. Left 4 Dead: Teamwork On its higher difficulties, Left 4 Dead may be the greatest team-building exercise yet conceived. In crews of four we strategized to overcome complex obstacles, assigned one another responsibilities according to our talents, communicated to adapt our tactics on the fly, and developed rules of conduct such that no one would disrupt the progre...
Video games often come with some kind of copy-protection software - typically an obstructive, pain in the ass load of bloatware. The copy-protection software attempts to ensure that only legitimate copies of the game are in use, which means that pirates are forced to first remove the copy protection from the game before playing and distributing it. The tragic irony of the whole situation is tha...
BioWare: because you need a doctorate to be that awesome. Discussion of Mass Effect 2 is long overdue, I feel, but a general review is hardly necessary. It's a fantastic title, improving over its predecessor in every way, including the emotional intensity of its story. As with Dragon Age, the main plot is disappointingly simple, involving an unambiguously evil bad guy with an unambiguously evil...
Some pirates are just pragmatic. Some pirates are just total assholes. A report came in from the host website of the Humble Indie Bundle that more than 25% of the downloaded copies of the 5 game bundle were pirated. One can only hope that the number is inaccurate and inflated by legitimate repeat downloads. The Humble Bundle was pay-what-you-want with a minimum price of one USA penny. All profi...
I'm sure Dead Space would be lots of fun...right up until I finished it. If you use the duration spent playing a game as a metric for its quality, the best game I ever played was Neverwinter Nights, the play time for which I cannot track in hours because I spent the better part of four years often playing little else. I like to think that was a good return on my investment, and I often find mys...
BioWare: because Edmonton is too boring without video games. I finally finished Dragon Age: Origins (about six months after everybody else) and I've come to agree that yes, BioWare is still up to their normal tight standard of moral screwery. A BioWare game is never short of awkward situations that cause the player to have to carefully consider the outcomes and significance of his or her action...
Old school RPGs are 100% only good for their stories, never for their gameplay. Back in my reflection on Borderlands, I clued in to the fact that character growth is by no means exclusive to games featuring RPG mechanics (not the role-play ones, but the character aggrandizement ones), which has left me wondering, since, what it is that makes those same mechanics still so attractive in a video g...
Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb. That's actually only true in video games, though. In reality, evil is firstly incredibly hard to define (what with the specifics of morality varying from culture to culture and person to person) and secondly, typically antisocial. Refusing to cooperate with your peers forces you into a serious handicap, while others can draw on the resources of th...
Character aggrandizement is for nerds. Borderlands has been the source of much discussion lately in my circle (or at least it used to be prior to the recent release of Left 4 Dead 2) and as such I had planned to write a reflection of sorts on it. I wanted to write said reflection because I considered Borderlands a rather important game. You see, while it's a first person shooter through and thr...