This video, from Extra Credits, does a terrific job assembling the case against cutscenes: they’re never as good as real movies, they take the player out of the game, they frequently violate the rules of the game, etc. The author’s point that it’s wrong to tell a designer to never use cutscenes is w
–Gail Tilden, Nintendo Power founding editor, in a wide-ranging conversation with Gamasutra. Power put out its last issue this month. It’s important to remember during the endless video game journalism debates that the defining magazine of early American games journalism was pure service and consume
Yes, the Angry Birds movie will probably be a Pixaresque CGI extravaganza, which will benefit from months if not years of pre-release eyerolling by exceeding extremely low expectations and will end up setting some box office records, if minor ones (say, biggest Tuesday opening featuring terrorist bi
Next Tuesday marks a quarter century since the release of the first Final Fantasy game in Japan. To put this amount of time in perspetive – the Final Fantasy era – if you travel back an equivalent amount of time before Final Fantasy existed, to 1962, John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were sti
Hotline Miami doesn’t seem like an easy sell. True, the first postmodern game is my favorite of the year, and its Drive-meets-Scarface-meets-Smash TV aesthetic scratches an itch for a lot of weird dudes like me. But come on: it’s a top-down, grotesque kill fest with a meta-meta plot and it’s only av
Despite an ambivalent intial reception, Metro 2033, the cult-favorite Russian shooter set in a postapocalyptic Moscow subway system, received 2010 game of the year discussion from no less an authority than Tom Bissell. THQ’s financial misfortune – which has already led to that publisher’s great humb
Though many games develop themes of environmental preservation (and in fact, in one of the most beloved games of all time, Final Fantasy VII, you actually begin the game as an environmental terrorist. How weird is that??? Ok.), the crossover between gaming and the environmental movmenet isn’t notabl