Monday, March 23, 2015

Gaming Round-Up: March 23, 2015

Among the dead by TheRafa

"Among the dead" by Thailand-based TheRafa


Interview: Al Lowe, creator of the Leisure Suit Larry games from Sierre talks about the early days of PC game development and the hostile takeover of Sierra.

News: Two years after the disastrous release of the much-hyped SimCity 2013 and just weeks after its legendary development studio Maxis was shut down by parent company Electronic Arts a new contender has arisen to stake its claim to the city sim crown. Cities: Skylines was released last week and has already garnered record-breaking sales and almost universally positive reviews.

The 50 best interactive fiction games ever made, as voted by intfiction.org.

Although he's been out of the games industry for years, Keiji Yamagishi (known as the original composer for Ninja Gaiden[YT] and Tecmo Bowl[YT] among other soundtracks) has kept busy with work on ringtones and other music compositions. After contributing to a compilation put out by the game music label Brave Wave, he decided to put out a full album with label founder Mohammed Taher. You can listen to the first track on Soundcloud. (warning, may melt speakers/face)

Anita Sarkeesian recently delivered a four and a half minute talk at the "What I Couldn’t Say" panel at the All About Women Festival in Sydney to give herself an outlet for everything she’s been holding inside. She talks about accusations of "playing the gender card," "first-world problems," jokes made too soon, and why some topics are still too hard to talk about.

Ario Barzan argues that difficulty wasn't the point of Dark Souls and goes on to offer an interesting analysis of Dark Souls' level design and what Dark Souls 2 got wrong.

Baymax and Go Go Tomago fight it out as a mod puts the characters of Big Hero 6 into Street Fighter.

Clint Hocking responds to recent article in The Atlanic in which Ian Bogost discusses the limiting nature of narratives and characters in games, arguing that to juxtapose them with the analysis of systems is to create a false dichotomyTadhg Kelly also responds to Bogost, arguing that it's the culture surrounding big-V Videogames that is stifling how we talk about games in a wider sense.

Emm of FemHype interviews the anonymous creator of a Dragon Age Inquisition mod which enables female characters to date heterosexual female party members.  The mod created an immense backlash in and out of the Dragon Age community.

Fare Forward offers an analysis of The Last of Us from a Judeo-Christian theological perspective.

How Sonic the Hedgehog Helped Me Beat Cancer

I disagree with Luke Holland's argument that PlayStation vs. Nintendo 64 Was the Last Console War That Mattered, but the article is a nice walk down memory lane.

“I presented this game to people from both Palestine and Israel, and for both sides, it was a game about them.” Check out this war game about terrified civilians, that benefits victims of conflict around the world.

It looks like the PlayStation 4 is getting some pretty helpful accessibility features to help more people enjoy video games!

PBS Game/Show, Jamin Warren believes the Legend of Zelda franchise is overdue for a female protagonist.  While this is far from a new opinion, Warren makes a very interesting argument.

Troy Goodfellow looks at how faith is modeled in Rod Humble’s recent strategy game, Cults and Daggers. "the more I think on it, the more I think that Cults and Daggers is not about faith at all. It might be about religion, but it’s really about fear."

Zoe Quinn talks about altgames, the punk scene of game making, which aims to catalyze a movement to support the creation of games free from the pressure or assumption of commercial goals.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...