"’Even the most vehement critics of contemporary popular culture would be hard-pressed to find anything in today’s mainstream mass entertainment as alarming as the gore-drenched, gun-worshipping fantasies that Spillane and his publisher dished out for the delectation of millions of ordinary American readers in the supposedly halcyon days of the 1950s,’ argues Schechter. He also recounts the extraordinary gore of ‘pulp’ comics during that decade, which were often replete with macabre, masochistic scenes."
"Received middlebrow opinion is that the frissons such pursuits produce are distinctly lower pleasures. Video games—unlike chess and bridge—are deemed escapist, and at best distractions from what really matters in life. At worst they are turning a generation into pale antisocial creatures with repetitive strain injury and a propensity to engage in real violence."
"California’s rule would allow censoring not just video games but films and even books aimed at young people. It’s a venerable impulse: since the time of Plato’s Republic, human beings have imagined that if we could just stop our kids from seeing or reading anything bad, they would grow up to be perfect."
THIS WEEKEND ONLY! Gabriel Knight I, II, and III, Phantasmagoria I and II, and Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption all for the low, low price of US$23.94! FMV schlock-horror at its greatest, you guys! (I cracked and bought the Phantasmagoria games, but I genuinely thought about re-buying all five Sierra titles.)
Marcus Boesch’s tumblog is great. Here, he isolates a paragraph from a longer blurb about ‘1378 km.’ (‘1378 km’ is a recently-released Half Life 2 mod set sometime before the fall of the Berlin Wall.)
The excerpt that Boesch singles out, though, is a catalogue of other controversial shooting games set against real-life backdrops—games in which you, as a fantasy gunman, repeatedly reenact some real-life crime against a facsimile of a real-life victim. Boesch includes a screenshot from the 2004 game installation ‘Waco Resurrection.’
Exactly one year has passed since Geocities’ close, and Jason Scott (yeah! The ‘Get Lamp’ guy!) is readying the DOWNLOADABLE TORRENT OF GEOCITIES. I love this, I do, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but maybe not every little bit of history needs to be saved. So: if you find a precocious-but-obnoxious 14-year-old girl running a webcam somewhere in SoHo/Studios, I only ask that you avert your eyes. Thanks.
A nice overview of the current trend toward "gamifaction" in schools, although I wish it had gone beyond competitiveness and ‘achievement points’ and into talk about virtual learning spaces etc etc (via @betajames)
Action Escape Kitty is a long-in-the-works 2D free-to-play Flash-based shoot-em-up. It looks good and plays great. I did experience some serious slowdown, but then again, I was on the La Quinta Inn WiFi, so who knows. Anyway, Action Escape Kitty is a must-play. But rather than sending you directly to the game, I’ve decided instead to link to Fabu’s critique ("Ich vergebe 4 von 5 Katzenfutterdosen," he writes).
When Good Old Games dot com faked its own death, I went from surprise to horror to annoyance in a matter of hours. It wasn’t until GoG published its "We’re sorry we freaked you out" downtime website that I actually became livid. But at the time I also struggled to understand my own ire. Scott Juster gets it: "Does GoG or anyone else truly believe that the kind of people who are looking to play King’s Quest are the kind of people amused or impressed by PR stunts?"
I recently picked up Fatal Frame III: The Tormented, and then I put it right back down again. Those games make me crazy with fear. But writer Michael Clarkson promises that FF3 has nothing like the all-too-effective scares of FF2 Crimson Butterfly—after all, I’ll be too furious with it.
2D sidescrolling shmup with music by Nullsleep: "The leader of the bad guys, Governor Cheeseburger, is behind the whole mess and will not rest until the rebel duck is stopped"
I’ve only seen the first two or three episodes of ‘Glee,’ but this is approximately how I remember it going. Play through the videos so you can be all caught up just in time for Season Two!
"When Abbie Heppe submitted her review of Metroid: Other M (2 out of 5 stars) for G4," Michael Abbott writes, "I’m guessing she hit the SEND button and ran for cover." Look, for me, this is personal: my review of the Wii title ‘Boogie’ was second on the scene—and my negative review followed what may well have eventually been the Internet’s only glowing review of the title—and I did feel that maybe the masses were unduly wrathful with me and my gendered byline. Also, someone wrote that I "obviously hate fun," which made me SO MAD, because I am a karaoke girl through-and-through. Anyway. Here, Mr. Abbott carefully criticizes the critic’s critics.
Ben Weber writes, "My system attempts to … [incorporate] parameter-tweaking into procedural content generation. The system creates new levels on the fly in response to the current performance of the player."
A tenderly youthful eighteen-year old, as a fledgling retro gamer, pledges to begin attempting play at games that are totally way older than 18. I know I started really playing 2600 games with any kind of fervor at age 18—and many of those games were older than I!—so of course I wish young Ryan all best in his endeavors.
Current TV’s Mario Anima has proposed a SXSW panel about games and girls. It needs your vote! Panelists include: Area 5’s Matt Chandronait, Game Informer’s Philip Kollar, Funtank producer Robin Yang, and ME! So please vote for us, oh please, oh please.
"The same dozen or so ideas get lobbed back and forth like so many frisbees until all the interesting material gets stuck on the roof and the players stagger about, blithely wondering where all the stimulation went."
Jess Ragan has become one of my favorite retro-writers. Five pages in length, this particular retrospective is pretty in-depth for a 1UP piece, but you should probably read it.
I remember the day the Virtual Boy launched—August 14, 1995—because it was my 13th birthday! I almost bought a Virtual Boy, and I had waited and waited for the day to arrive, and I ended up spending the money on a leather jacket instead. I still have that jacket, though!
FINALLY! Phantasmagoria AND PHANTASMAGORIA II YOU GUYS PHANTASMAGORIA II sold together for the low, low price of US$11.18! WHAT THE—but only until Monday, August 16. Hey! It’s almost as if gog.com knew my birthday is this Saturday! Happy birthday to me!
Decades-long poster campaign exhorts train passengers—often in clever or surprising ways!—to use their best manners. At least one poster alludes to a video game. Enjoy!
Actor, comedian, director, and games designer Kitano “Beat” Takeshi hates video games. Also, stop applying your makeup on the subway: it’s rude, ladies.
Matt "Fort90" Hawkins is officially Attract Mode’s blogger! Not bad, Adam! After all, Matt’s done plenty of work for Gamasutra and Tiny Cartridge, just to name a couple outlets from memory. Anyway: Babycastles is what you ought to be doing tonight, except that I’m adding it to my del.icio.us links, which means you probably won’t see it until 1am EST
Commissioned by Channel 4’s Alice Taylor and written by RPS’s Kieron Gillen, this free-to-play point-and-click adventure game has great writing, terrific (if scene-chewing) acting, and high production values. A review at Ars Technica.
‘Black Lotus’ was allegedly stripped of its main character and ultimately reworked into an entirely new game, thanks to Activision’s semi-unspoken policy against female protagonists
Holy shit! I’m actually a little bit in shock! Does this mean no more indieclicks ad banner, though? Man. I mean, I have tried, and indieclicks does not just give that privilege out to people. However: now it’s a lot easier to read ALBOTAS from work! Yaaaay!
Meant to repost this awhile ago (via @gnomeslair)! There is something unspeakably, face-punchingly endearing about Anatoly’s "DOS Nostalgia" video reviews, which themselves focus mainly on DOS-based point-and-click adventures. Here, Anatoly praises the good-lookin’ Leisure Suit Larry I remake.
Wow. Um, I saw I was getting a little traffic from this particular link, and Bureau editor Nick Martens has absolutely paid me I think the compliment of my life. But all the articles listed here—this is a mid-year best-of-2010 reading list—are utterly due your time and interest.
For instance: I know the Robin Sloan piece well, and David Cole’s "Metagames and Containers," an interactive demonstration of our human tendency to invent our own games and little rulesets, is a tremendous accomplishment. As a reader and gamer and Internet-user, you’ll find plenty more hyperlinks to articles sure to engage: there’s "Playing the Odds," "Toy Soldiers," and "On Tetris," to start. So follow the link to, uh, find all those links.
I’m a little obsessed with GJAIF, but only in the same way I was—for years—obsessed with Perez Hilton (who will get totally burned today? Let’s watch and wait!). The unhappy truth is, I can’t help but agree. There is now more wrong with Ben Paddon’s humorlessly vindictive Tumblr than ever. Time for me to disconnect?
