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Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren
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The game that lets you smash Paul Ryan in the face is blessedly here
In the past few weeks, we’ve told you about some pretty heady political games: the Redistricting Game and Randy Chase’s forgotten but classic Doonesbury Election Simulator. But maybe you want a political game that is a little simpler, one that features less thinking and more smashing. Well, Bam Bam,
The new Amnesia game will scare the living bejeezus out of you
I played Amnesia: The Dark Descent alone, on a couch in my old studio apartment in lower Manhattan. Some fish live there now, but nevermind. Anyhow, the apartment was basically a room with no insulation from the city, so I felt like I lived in the middle of Second Avenue. It was not a particularly p
Borderlands 2 reduces consumer culture into a game
Borderlands 2 is a shooter where you can collect loot and level up. It’s similar to many RPGs in that you can decide to find every single chest/loot holder or bypass some. Ethan Gatch on Medium Difficulty found that he couldn’t ignore loot. I was a loot fiend in the worst kind of way: grabbing usele
New footage of Glorkbot’s Mini Adventure is a homage to Metroid, projectiles
A very earlier Kickstarter project, James Kochalka and Pixeljam’s collaborative Glorkbot’s Mini Adventure is going on its third year of development. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — we’re all busy people and the team has been eeking out details along the way. James sent me a note about new foota
There were lot of smarts behind The Binding of Isaac’s cheekiness
When games get edgy, it usually means they are gory or contain erotica. Too often we conflate pushing the envelope with meaning. Soldier of Fortune let you blow people to pieces, literally. Mass Effect treats sex and romance as though it were written by a salacious 13 year old (I will give credit to
Notes on how to incorporate Grim Fandango into the Disney universe
Disney owns Lucasarts; a hurricane nearly drowned humble Kill Screen; a robot may be president in a week. These are times of frightening and great change, but, dear reader, as I just remembered, the greatest changes present the greatest opportunities. I would never do something as crass as to sugge
The sexist assumptions behind female game characters
Why does Mrs. Pac-Man need a bow, lipstick, and eye makeup to show that she’s a woman? Well, she’s the female version of a male character, so she has to be somehow different, right? And how else can we signify femininity, if not with lipstick and bows and breasts? Anjin Anhut at How Not to Suck at G
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