There’s no nice way to say this, but it needs to be said: video games, with very few exceptions, are dumb. And they’re not just dumb in the gleeful, winking way that a big Hollywood movie is dumb; they’re dumb in the puerile, excruciatingly serious way that a grown man in latex elf ears reciting an epic poem about Gandalf is dumb. Aside from a handful of truly smart games, tentpole titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Call of Duty: Black Ops tend to be so silly and so poorly written that they make Michael Bay movies look like the Godfather series. Taylor Clark's Atlantic profile of Braid creator Jonathan Blow has prompted some strong reactions.
Are videogames dumb? Is hard to make them not dumb? Are most things dumb anyway?
posted by Artw
on May 6, 2012 -
179 comments
"The days when you could buy a videogame one day and get an expansion a year later are, sadly, lost in time. Instead, it seems there's a constant bombardment of DLC and microtransaction items all vying for our credit card numbers. They're in everything, from MMORPGs through to singleplayer shooters, and it's only getting worse as time goes on." -
An investigation into microtransactions and gaming.
posted by Artw
on Oct 17, 2011 -
114 comments
Start with the over-sized armor and bodybuilder physiques of the marines. When you aim a gun in Space Marine, the target reticle is huge, just like the target reticle in Gears of War. The guns are huge and they feature a chainsaw blade that can be used to slice enemies in half, execution style, similar to the “chainsaw bayonet” of the Gears soldiers... The blood spatters are also quite similar. The guns shoot in a similar fashion and the Space Marines wield a big giant hammer that resembles the blasting hammers not from Gears of War but from Microsoft’s other sci-fi franchise, Halo... The bad guys are the green Ork enemies from the Warhammer world, and they bear no resemblance to the enemies in Gears of War, except that they make loud grunts. Of course, their very name does bear resemblance to the “orcs” in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but we’ll ignore that for now. Dean Takahashi, lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat,
on how Warhammer 40K: Space Marine is a big rip off of Gears of War. That would be
Warhammer 40k, the first rulebook for which was released in 1987, and Gears of War, the relentlessly brown X-Box game released in 2006 to an
emo-tastic advertising campaign. Oops. Dean has since backed down and said that he was only talking about gameplay aspects (he wasn't) that are similar (
not particularly). Previously he was
forced to retract a bad review of Mass Effect when it emerged that he had no idea how to play it. Should videogame journalists be expected to vaguely know what they are talking about, or are we just
petty and vindictive for expecting that? (
via)
posted by Artw
on May 30, 2011 -
129 comments
The biggest literary influence on my approach to game design, however, was one of the writers I worshipped as a teenager: Alice Sheldon, aka James Tiptree, Jr. Tiptree had one particular recommendation for starting a story: “Start from the end and preferably 5,000 feet underground on a dark day and then don’t tell them.” This is precisely how we begin Half-Life. It was a deliberate antidote to the many game openings that involved pages and pages of backstory presented in scrolling text. - An
interview with Marc Laidlaw, writer for the Half Life series.
posted by Artw
on Oct 13, 2010 -
65 comments
The
Wired Vaporware Awards, an institution since
1999 has taken some
heavy hits this year, and has had to resort to some pretty naked padding to make a list (products in late beta whose release date has merely slipped? come on) – however, if there is anything that remains constant in these uncertain times we live in it is that
one game rules the list, debuting in the No 2. slot in
2000, it then latched on to the top spot, with only
editorial edict able to to shift it. Ladies and gentlemen, Duke Nukem -
FOREVER.
posted by Artw
on Dec 29, 2008 -
72 comments
Ten years ago Valve released
Half Life, to the delight of gamers,
modders,
critics and people who hate cut scenes. Marc Laidlaw, writer for Valve,
talks about the genesis of
scientist turned crowbar wielding survivor, Gordon Freeman. Somehow avoided playing it in all these years? You can
buy it on Steam for less than a dollar until midnight November 21st.
posted by Artw
on Nov 20, 2008 -
86 comments
Did you grow up anticipating sports where death would be likely, if not certain? Almost certainly played by convicts, possibly with robot limbs? And which would be even more likely to have chainsaws and flamethrowers not usually found in the sports of today?
Those We Left Behind’s look at Future-sports of the past, in
videogames,
movies and
comics is for you!
posted by Artw
on Sep 11, 2008 -
41 comments
