Imagine yourself wearing a pair of latex gloves, scraping some dust off the surface of your favourite book or movie with a scalpel and tapping it into a glass vial of clear fluid. Now seal the vial and shake it, stare into its contents. When little Venus symbols to start floating in the solution you can declare to all … Continue reading On Evaluative Criticism
[Originally posted on PopMatters] Toren opens with a clarity of purpose but a mystery of place that I haven’t experienced in a game since Shadow of the Colossus. Like Ico, Vagrant Story or, more recently, Journey and Dark Souls, it tells a complex story with space, light, and movement. Like Dreamfall and The Legend of Zelda, … Continue reading Toren and the Art of Mythmaking
A Rashomon, named after Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film, is a story repeated several times from different characters’ perspectives. Each retelling adds more information from each character until, in the end, a full story emerges. The Rashomon effect is a psychological phenomenon wherein multiple witnesses view the same event but describe it with different or even … Continue reading The Ludic Rashomon
[Originally posted on PopMatters] The American Civil War caused more American deaths than any other conflict in the country’s history. It is remembered as a war between former neighbors and friends. It was a war between kids over a dispute that somehow got far out of hand. It was a war for the rights of people … Continue reading Reveiw: Brother Against Brother: The Drawing of the Sword
I can’t remember how many turn-based strategy games I’ve played in a row but these days it seems like the games that excite me the most involve commanding sprites along a grid in small, squad-sized skirmishes. Case in point, the most recent I played was The Banner Saga. In The Banner Saga, the player guides two separate caravans … Continue reading Resource Based Humanity
bigtallwords 