The Game Critique

In Defense of Ludonarrative Dissonance

First off, no this is not a retraction of my opinion (which I was apparently the sole defender of) that Ludonarrative Dissonance is a bad thing for a game to have. Instead this is a response to the growing antagonism towards the term itself. There is plenty of it about, most recently from a post [...]

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I’m Done and Now I’m Back

I’ve been only lightly using the internet and got pretty much away from the site due to my summer class. The last class I needed to graduate. Well I passed it this week and minus all the bureaucratic nonsense it will take to transfer the credits to Boston University I am a college graduate. Hurray [...]

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So How Did I Do on TWIVGB

Well Ben Abraham was away from the internet last week, something to do with spelunking I think, and asked me to step in as writer of the This Week In Video Game Blogging feature again. I don’t know what it is, but every time I take up the task the internet decides that this is [...]

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Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter – A Book Review

I haven’t done video game reviews on this site. I also don’t intend to. I have only done video game critiques or criticism. The name in the top banner should be enough of a clue. So it is interesting that the first review I do for a blog about video games is really about a [...]

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What I got from E3

I know it’s kind of pointless to write anything on E3, especially after this pretty much summarizes the whole thing, but it’s my blog and I want to. Going into E3 I wanted to see only a few things: Beyond Good and Evil 2, The Last Guardian, Dragon Age 2, Mirror’s Edge 2 and anything that [...]

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The Morality of inFamous

Probably the most talked about part of inFamous is the moral choice mechanic. The idea is to split the choice between good and evil options, which can be interesting, but the criticism has been leveled at how it is handled. Reasoning in later choices makes less and less sense as you continue on. The options [...]

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The Propaganda of inFamous

(*minor spoilers*) While the story of inFamous is told through the standard methods of cutscenes, found messages and calls from allies and mission handlers, it adds aftermath commentary. In the form of propaganda the game provides story related and world building feedback on your actions. The messages only relate to the main story missions so the [...]

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The Milieu of inFamous

I would place the introduction of inFamous as one of the better opening levels in open world gaming. I say this because it sets the stage to not just for the game, but also more importantly for the milieu. Milieu is the French word for environment or setting, but it means more in literary theory [...]

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The Ebert Response

For those of you are utterly sick of this issue, bear with me. I am with you. I am tired of people questioning whether video games are art or not. Yes they are, now move on. But when someone like Roger Ebert brings it up and declares that opinion loudly to the rest of the [...]

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Games are Structure

(Forget it, this is going up as is. – Eric Swain) My last post was really only the first half of a longer first draft I wrote on paper. When transcribing it I realized it started to meander and connect too many points, so I cut it down and resettled everything else into another post where it [...]

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