Month: June 2014

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Critical Distance Confab – The Blogfather

Two years ago, I did a handful of interviews with critics that laid much of the foundation of what we consider modern independent video game criticism. They were intended to be the next few episode of the Critical Distance Confab. For various reasons they got back burned (mostly because I couldn’t stand listening to my own voice in editing) and we weren’t going to use them. Since then, I’ve moved my position to pure background technical monkey regarding the podcast. It’s for the best. | more

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More Thoughts on a More Complex Form of Moral Choice in Video Games

I felt I needed to pick up on a thread regarding video game morality and clarify some things from last week’s PopMatters column. For some reason when I was expressing my love for the complexity in a moral choice in The Wolf Among Us against the normal bland good/evil dichotomy, it was confused for me saying that it was great that that one dichotomy was replace with a law/chaos dichotomy and that was somehow commendable. Especially when I said that this particular choice went against the grain of how we think of law vs. | more

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The Fairy Tale of the Economic Downturn

We continue our podcast discussions of The Wolf Among Us with episode 3: A Crooked Mile. We felt that this episode really picked up the pace as the story finally came into its own. The themes seem more palpaple than ever and we get to talking more on the nature of the choices in The Wolf Among Us. Plus, I get to drop a few tidbits on some of the small craftsmanship stuff that is done. We talk about a lot of different subjects in this episode and yet the podcast itself is much shorter than our usual fare as of late. | more

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Towards a More Complex Form of Moral Choice in Video Games: ‘The Wolf Among Us’

And I’m back in my Tuesday slot with my PopMatters column, looking a little in depth on a single choice from The Wolf Among Us. On the podcast all three of us have been a little down on the choices in The Wolf Among Us as they don’t feel as debatable or as in depth as we would like. I’ve heard this sentiment echoed elsewhere on the internet. And for the most part it does seem that The Wolf Among Us isn’t providing the same if not quality then style of choice we quickly became accustomed to in The Walking Dead. | more

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The Size and Wisdom of ‘Myst’

For this week’s PopMatter’s column I look back 21 years to the original CD-ROM game: Myst. The opening sentence of that piece was the main thought running through my head during my recent playthrough of the 1993 adventure game. “Myst is a lot smaller than I remember.” I realize that time takes a toll on memory and we look back on things with rose tinted glasses. But it wasn’t a difference in the measure of quality I was taken aback by, but the size of the game world. | more

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The Agony and the Allure of the Side Quest

Maybe a poor week to release a podcast with so much attention elsewhere in the gaming scene, but we have a schedule. This week we aren’t talking about a video game, but a part of video games – the side quest. We start talking about what they are useful for and what they do in games, but once it gets to me, I changed the conversation to something more fundamental. I didn’t know how to answer Chris’ question because I wasn’t sure how to define what a side quest was in the first place. | more

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The Change Economics Wrought on Design: ‘Magic: The Gathering’ and ‘Hearthstone’

And I’m back to writing my PopMatters column, though a few days late thanks to a mixup in the backend, but what can you expect when I don’t write anything for over two months. Hearthstone has been taking up a lot of my gaming time in recent months, so I figured I should speak to my feeling about it. I was really into it starting out. Every day I would play for quite a long time. But then I hit the free-to-play wall. | more

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Reviews for March/April/May

I stopped writing PopMatters columns back in March for a number of reasons, all of which have to do with being super busy trying to get technical things to work and those things refusing to. I really want to get back to writing again instead of staring at code sheets, but at least I kept up with the reviews at any rate. I love Shadowrun: Dragonfall. When I finished the game, I exclaimed on twitter that I hoped I wouldn’t even up being hyperbolic when I say it is the front runner for my game of the year. | more