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| limbo -- one-hour review | ||
Posted 2010-08-05 21:52:34 by
Jim Crawford
Limbo is a puzzle platformer for the Xbox 360 by Playdead Studios. (Yes, I totally ripped this format off of Games For Lunch.) . . .
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| deathsmiles -- one-hour review | ||
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Posted 2010-07-09 03:06:32 by
Jim Crawford
DeathSmiles is a horizontal shmup for the Xbox 360 (originally for arcade) developed by Cave. I'm not sure how this review format is going to hold up when applied to an arcade-style game. Let's find out together! (Yes, I totally ripped this format off of Games For Lunch.) . . .
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| super mario galaxy 2 | ||
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Posted 2010-07-07 23:39:24 by
Jim Crawford
Super Mario Galaxy 2 is very retro, linear, and instant-action. Takes it back to the series roots. Unfortunately for me, while I loved the original trilogy, my deepest personal roots lie with Super Mario 64. It is sad-making that exploration-heavy Mario games appear to have been a blip rather than a long-term trend. It makes sense; exploration was a late addition to the series, when they were trying to figure out how to bring the platformer into 3D. By comparison, exploration was at the heart of the Zelda series from the beginning. But my take on it is that exploration and platforming make a great mix: exploration is about discovering a space, and platforming is about navigating a space. One leads directly into the other. After you collect the 120 standard stars in Super Mario Galaxy 2, it unlocks a second set of 120 stars, colored green. If you thought that was a spoiler, don't read the rest of this post. . . .
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| far cry 2 -- one-hour review | ||
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Posted 2010-06-30 14:21:29 by
Jim Crawford
Far Cry 2 is an open-world first-person shooter for the Xbox 360 (et al) by Ubisoft Montreal. (Yes, I totally ripped this format off of Games For Lunch.) . . .
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| digital: a love story -- one hour review | ||
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Posted 2010-04-30 20:13:20 by
Jim Crawford
Digital: A Love Story is an ARG-style adventure game for the PC by Christine Love. (Yes, I totally ripped this format off of Games For Lunch.) . . .
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| game design as an act of cruelty | ||
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Posted 2009-09-30 22:00:15 by
Jim Crawford
On the Another Castle podcast, Anna Anthropy talked about how in Mighty Jill Off she was trying to draw parallels between the designer/player relationship and the dom/sub relationship. I.e.: the designer is supposed to dominate the player, but in such a way that the player can deal with it and enjoy it. The designer must be subtle and responsible about it, because it's trivial to make the game too easy or too hard.
I replayed Mighty Jill Off yesterday. . . .
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| california extreme 2009 | ||
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Posted 2009-07-29 22:34:57 by
Jim Crawford
California Extreme is a, um. The event's web page calls it “an annual celebration of coin operated pinball machines, video games and other novelties you once found in game arcades.” Well-put! It is very much a celebration. Chris Kohler over at Wired described it like this: “California Extreme is like an urban legend. Once a year, the best video arcade in the world, packed full of every game you ever played as a child, plus games that were never released, magically appears somewhere in the Bay Area. Two days later, it disappears.” But I like to think of it as a museum that you can visit in order to explore the history of arcade games. It's temporally limited, which sucks in some respects, but also allows it to display artifacts that would be inaccessible to a permanent museum, such as the one-of-a-kind prototype cabinets donated from personal collections. I went with Louis this year, and a great time was had by all. Both. Some observations, loosely organized by game: . . .
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| retro game challenge; sonic's ultimate genesis collection | ||
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Posted 2009-02-19 18:24:41 by
Jim Crawford
Retro Game Challenge, a.k.a. Game Center CX, is a Nintendo DS anthology of eight NES-era games that never existed. It's a spin-off of the Japanese TV show, in which Shinya Arino, each episode, spends a day trying to beat an old, difficult game. He's not very good and gets frustrated easily. The show is in its 10th season. In the game, Arino channels his frustrations into digitizing himself and sending you back in time to his childhood. He forces you to meet certain achievement-style challenges by playing old games in his collection. . . .
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| lucky juju's pinball museum | ||
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Posted 2009-02-03 18:13:17 by
Jim Crawford
On Saturday I went to Lucky Juju's Pinball Museum in Alameda with Casey. Was pretty fascinating, seeing the evolution from games of pure chance -- though optimized for drama and emotional payoff, like modern games still are -- through games with tiny, anemic flippers that give the players some minimal degree of control, to games where skill is a large factor. It was also interesting to see what tricks pinball designers pulled out of their hats after they had to start competing with video games. The simplest one was going from four digit scores in the 1960s to nine digit scores in the 1990s, and of course there were game design advances like ramps and multiball, but I'm mostly thinking of gimmicks like the one Orbitor 1 is based around: it has a curved playfield and magnetic bumpers that impart the ball with highly erratic motion. Another good one was when Bram Stoker's Dracula grabbed the ball with a magnet hidden inside the cabinet and made it wobble across the playfield. While I was there I picked up a brochure for Musee Mecanique in Fisherman's Wharf, which seems to be a more general version of the same idea: coin-operated mechanical entertainment through the ages, like mechanically animated dioramas and automated musical instruments. I'm looking forward to checking that place out as well.
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| know your limits | ||
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Posted 2008-12-24 03:22:06 by
Jim Crawford
Imagine that the film industry started out by making only porn. And imagine that they never moved on from it. Ambitious pornographers would put astounding, literate, nuanced story-lines into their porn films, marveling at the unique storytelling power of their medium, compared to books and comics. When porn consumers watched that porn, they'd claim that finally, here is unassailable proof that porn is truly art, and wonder why the mainstream doesn't take porn seriously as an art form. Other porn consumers would wonder why anyone gives a fuck whether porn is art and remind everyone that porn doesn't even need a story to be great. Whenever one of these groundbreaking porn titles was released, even porn consumers with no interest in the particular fetish the title served would watch it anyways, just for the story, wishing they could skip the sex scenes. Maybe they'd post on porn message boards, asking whether there have to be any sex scenes at all. And other forum posters would respond with such retorts as “Of course it has to have sex scenes. It's porn!” Well, when you put it that way... Maybe at some point along this timeline, a crazy pornographer creates one of these groundbreaking porn films. It features top-tier writing, directing, acting, cinematography and editing, but happens to have no sex scenes at all. He'd quickly discover why nobody does this: porn culture doesn't know what to do with it. The title would get critically slammed: “Great storytelling and atmosphere I guess, but it didn't get my rocks off at all! Three out of ten.” Nobody would buy it. Those porn aficionados I mentioned above, the ones who watch porn that's not of their particular fetish, are a tiny fraction of the porn-buying demographic. And the mainstream, the ones who would note the absence of extended sex scenes as a benefit? They wouldn't be caught dead with a porn playing machine in their living room in the first place. Historical science fiction authors should take a break from writing Nazis-Won-WWII alternate universe stories and write that one.
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