This is poster for game Halfway from Robotality.
News: The D.A. in Marin County, California is giving away free ice cream for turning in your “violent” video games. I'd love to see a list of the games they end up accepting.
News: In probably the biggest news of the week, Microsoft successfully purchased the Minecraft IP from owner Markus Persson for the tidy little sum of 2.5 billion dollars. That should put to rest any speculation about Microsoft killing off their gaming division anytime soon.
News: The Video Game History Museum — a traveling collection of over 20,000 items representing 25 years of games — has found a permanent home at an exhibition space in Frisco, Texas. The exhibit should be open by next April.
Review: Ctrl+Alt+Del offers a very concise explanation of the genre confusion surrounding the latest time-sucking AAA game addiction, Destiny. I have nothing to add, but if you check my post timeline, you'll see that there was a significant downturn in posts just about the time of Destiny's release.
Dan Stubbs writes about his attempts to create, what he calls, a “dynamic narrative system” in his horror game The Hit. Elsewhere, Edward Smith suggests that, by designing a horror game that subverts standard game rules, P.T. submerges players in a truly nightmarish experience.
Drew Mackie takes reviews the origin of Toad in the Mario Brothers franchise to reveal that our perceptions of Toad as a male may be the result of culture as some Japanese fans believed the original Toad to have been female. Personally, I always thought Toad was the Princess' hand maiden, but cartoon representations changed my mind. Now, I'm relieved that I'm not the only one.
Former New York mayor Giuliani explains why Noriega's Call of Duty lawsuit is 'absurd'
Jacob Saylor of Gameranx admonishes reviews not to be so quick to judge, arguing that Destiny is better than what people are saying about the game.
Jenn Frank was coaxed out of retirement this week to explain why she loves videogames, and the result is personal, relatable and uplifting.
Mattias Lehman looks back at the options for avatar customization he was offered in youth and how such customizations were ill-fitting to his own identity and experiences. "I realize what bothered me so much about never being able to create an appropriate avatar. All this time, I’d thought that I wanted to be able to see my character as me. What I really wanted was for ‘me’ to be a character."
Mike Eaton doubts that Raising a Daughter to Love Video Games is a Good Idea Nowadays
Minecraft Creator Explains Controversial $2.5 Billion Sale to Microsoft Someone offers me that much money to take that sort of headache off my hands? I’m taking it too. Running a something as popular as Minecraft has to be an incredibly draining task–especially when you haven’t anticipated its popularity.
Much of the past week’s games writing has been inevitably focused on Destiny, which is not on PC. Still, you should read this on how the game’s architecture inspires contemplation.
Over at Polygon, Liana Kerzner writes about the myriad of games that deal with mental illness. She discuss both those games which have focused on the negative aspects of mental illness and have, as a result, further stigmatized it, as well as those games which have given mental illness more relevance within increased character nuance.
Studying games from a sociological background, Joe Baxter-Webb examines PC gamer culture – how it’s discussed and portrayed online, and how this reflects back on games culture and perceptions of it from those who don’t identify as a part of it.
The term “interactivity” is thrown around frequently as a defining element of "game." This week Jess Joho of Kill Screen argues that we should be more careful with the term, as its misuse or misinterpretation overstates the “game worlds’ responsiveness to player input.” However, Andy Astruc analyzes Metal Gear Solid to suggest that, in games, there is no fourth wall to hit or to break precisely because of the interactivity of the medium.
Thanks to a massively successful KickStarter campaign, Wasteland 2 was was officially released Friday. A direct sequel to the 1988 cult-hit Wasteland and a spiritual sibling to Fallout 1, 2, 3, and Vegas, the game was developed by Brian Fargo who launched a the Kickstarter campaign with the initial goal of $900,000, but quickly raised US$2.9 million instead. Reviews have been pretty good, which is immensely exciting not just for campaign backers, but for classic game fans everywhere because Kickstarter has birthed a renaissance of classic games, including Double Fine, Shadowrun, and Ogre.
This week Kill Screen published Poly-Generational, a three-part look at the history of low-poly art. It starts with low-poly as-necessity and follows through to its resurgence as a deliberate aesthetic choice, and it’s a lovely example of how our medium has developed.
Time sent a war photographer into The Last Of Us: "None of the game’s characters show distress, and that to me was bizarre – it’s a post apocalyptic scenario, with a few remaining humans fighting for the survival of their race!"
We already think that Alien: Isolation looks amazing, but the more we hear about the game as launch nears, the more excited we get. This week we learned of the game’s Survivor Mode, which pits the player in a desperate one-on-one battle against the alien in a last-ditch attempt to escape playing host to a xenomorph.
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