Tag: Podcast

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Ghouls, Ghosts and Gaming

As has become a staple of the Moving Pixels podcast, we try to do something special for Halloween week by checking out horror games. This time we looked to two free indie games. Both are first person walker games set at night in a mostly open style creepy outdoor environment. However, the two games seemed to be illustrative of how to do it right and how to do it wrong. Haunted Memories is an episodic game on Steam that never seemed to move passed its first episode and is pretty terrible on all counts. | more

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Hardboiled Hijinks

The summer doldrums ticked away and so we went back to talk about an indie game from 2013: Gunpoint. As we found there was little to grab onto with regards of our usual in-depth discussion about craft and theme, but we still managed to find things to say about style and tone. Overall, I think Gunpoint is a fine game. Not an exceptional game, not one I’d leap up and down and say you have to play it right now, but a fine enough game that leaves a pleasant feeling after having played it. | more

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Fairy Tales of Politics, Fairy Tales of Justice

And with this podcast, we finish up our in-depth discussion on Telltale’s The Wolf Among Us. It’s been a long journey. Our first podcast on the game came out almost a year ago. It’s been a long road for what is just a few in game days of investigation. Our … (This post is lost beyond this point.) "When we suffer, we do it in silence. And the world likes it that way. We just fade, like we never existed." | more

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Little Money, Little Games

What to do when waiting for releases? Why look towards the free, arty games of course. In this podcast we look at Serena, Glitchhikers and A Dark Room. Serena is a game that was a free point-and-click adventure game on Steam, so of course I tried it. I didn’t think it was very good, but had some interesting formal elements that I figured could add to the genre as a whole. I still do, but since then I’ve played Jurassic Park: The Game which does some similar things, only much better. | more

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Transitioning to ‘Transistor’

This week’s podcast we delved into Supergiant Games’ more complicated follow up to Bastion, Transistor. Transistor isn’t a game that got nearly the discussion it deserved. It’s a difficult game to parse and requires a lot of effort on the part of the player to tease out its meaning. Much of the plot and conflict is obscured early on and only slowly reveals itself over the course of making your way through the crumbling city, add on a deep combat system that yields its secrets only to experimentation and not pre-planning and the larger themes and craftsmanship of the narrative can end up taking a backseat. | more

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Nearly Happily Ever After

So, after the whole game is out, we finally got around to releasing our discussion on episode 4 of The Wolf Among Us. It’s strange to go back and listen to it given that I now know how it all turns out. The Wolf Among Us has turned out to be a rather polarizing game and there’s a lot of reasons why. Episode 4 itself feels like a plot necessary segment of the story to get the last few things in place and a few threads wrapped up, but it does feel like it’s the game spinning its wheels a bit. | more

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Critical Distance Confab – A Critic By His Window

I didn’t know it at the time, but my first ever encounter with the wider world of video game criticism was through a post by L.B. Jefferies. That post led me to the Brainygamer, Mitch Krpata and the rest is history. In those early days, the scene was a small one. Small enough that ‘Mapping the Brainysphere‘ didn’t seem like an ironic or ludicrous title for a post. I didn’t quite realize it at the time of trying to reorient the CDC podcast along with the then new direction of the site what I was doing in my choice of guests. | more

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Dictators and Dead Guys

Continuing on with our episodic Telltale series we talk about The Walking Dead season 2 episode 3 on PopMatter’s Moving Pixels podcast. Last night we just recorded the podcast episode on The Walking Dead episode 4, so listening to this, its kind of surprising to hear some of the comments we made and our opinion on how the season was progressing. Due to the publishing schedule these tend to get recorded far in advance and we quite remember what we’ve said previously. | more

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Even More Mines, Maps and Madness

In Xanadu, did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree: so, begins this episode of the Moving Pixels podcast on Kentucky Route Zero Act 3. Ever since this episode was recorded back in May (good lord, are we ahead of the curve) I’ve been anticipating this podcast’s release. I really like this game and that definitely comes across in our discussion, but after recording it I felt like we had managed to do better than our usual fare, if I may be a braggart for a moment. | more