15 years of the best of game-based arts and culture
Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren
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The crazy games they played in the USSR because they couldn’t play ours
Today, Russia makes atmospheric and weird games like Metro 2033, still available for free by liking THQ’s page on Facebook. Back in the wine-stain birthmark days, when playing American games was niche-niche, they played an arcade submarine-battle game called Morskoi Boy, which was not made in a game
Are cutscenes ever really necessary?
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
How text based games make us examine war
There are the kind of games like Call of Duty, which do little to spark serious contemplation about morality or violence. This is the norm. Text games, however, may have a little more insight than your standard AAA fare. Take 2007’s Rendition, whose title would not exist without the war on terror.
"It was a marketing vehicle, but when it was going to become a magazine, the mission statement of the magazine was to help consumers to be more satisfied with their game purchases."
–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
Casting suggestions for the Angry Birds movie
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
Remembering the fallen in XCOM
XCOM: Enemy Unknown is filled with death, no matter how carefully you plan or hard you try. Sometimes you make mistakes and other times it’s simply out of your control. XCOM‘s Facebook pages immortalizes the fallen. One of the achievements of the game is the pang of guilt when one of your soldiers d
What does your favorite videogame say about you?
Ever wonder what kind of internal insight your favorite NES games reveal? John Peck at McSweeney’s will tell you: Metroid: You have killed a mosquito with hairspray. Duck Tales: You have spelled out “BOOBS” with Alpha-Bits. Contra: You have wet the bed exactly twice: once as a child, once as an adul
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