Analysis: One Year On - Naughty Dog's Uncharted 2. [In the first of a column series offering critical reassessment of a video game released 12 months ago, Gamasutra's European Editor Simon Parkin slips into Uncharted 2: Among Thieves as it receives a 'Game Of The Year' re-release -- discovering a game that "despite its ambition towards the mainstream Saturday afternoon blockbuster, swims against gaming’s prevailing tide. "] Strange, that the video game has so struggled to mimic cinema’s Saturday matinee.
That rip-roaring yarn, unraveled by boisterous, yet charming men accompanied by tomboyish, yet alluring women has been a Hollywood staple for decades. It appeals to young and old without discrimination, delighting audiences without overly challenging them, a rollicking recipe seemingly well-suited to the video game’s inherent strengths. Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series is an anomaly then, a blockbuster happy to talk in the violent verbs dispensed by guns and grenades, but eager to couch them in easy-going, family-friendly nouns. Game Narrative Review: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Analysis: The Sexual Politics Of Uncharted 2. [Writer Tom Cross continues his earlier examination of the sexual politics behind games by examining the sexual narrative and characters of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.]
In my last article, I expounded upon the more obvious and systematic methods of conservative, regressive sexualization that can be found throughout games, the video games industry, game critics, and gamers themselves. While I singled out Prince of Persia as a game that stepped (slightly) outside of these traditional boundaries, I also pointed to Uncharted 2: Among Thieves as a game that both subtly continues these traditions, and blatantly, brashly confounds them. It’s a game that is both safe and radical in its depiction of sex. This isn’t to say that Drake and the relationships in which he participates are not sexual in any way. The Prince in the new Prince of Persia, is, as I have argued, cut from a slightly (importantly) different cloth than North's Drake. The Best of the Best What Does it Take to Get Nate to Grow Up?
Uncharted. "There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory. " — Sir Francis Drake, 1587 (opening of the first game) Uncharted is a series of action/adventure platforming video games exclusive to the Playstation 3 and developed by Naughty Dog (creators of Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter). They follow the adventures of self-styled treasure hunter Nathan Drake, supposed descendant of Sir Francis Drake, and his quests to find lost historic artifacts.
The gameplay is described as Tomb RaidermeetsGears of War, a combination of fighting bad guys, exploring the environment, and solving puzzles. To play Nathan Drake.It was announced in November 2013 that Naughty Dog were beginning development on a fourth main game for the Playstation 4. open/close all folders General series tropes: The problem with ‘intelligent’ video game writing | The Modern Things. A few months before Killscreen Magazine opened its doors, a good friend, Theon Weber, and I discussed starting a blog dedicated to intellectual writing/discussions of video games. After reaching out to a few other writers, we ultimately decided against it because he primarily plays older games, and neither of us really have the funds to invest in the amount of games needed to supply regular content (and given that video game developers are notoriously stingy with press copies, getting ample content would quickly become an issue).
Obviously, we weren’t the only ones with this inclination as Killscreen popped up as the most prominent among a number of already-existent sites dedicated to the same goal, but unfortunately, none of them really get it right. The objective of a lot of “intellectual” writing concerning video games is chiefly focused on one thing: proving that video games are an art form. Sandbox games are ripe for in-game criticism. Like this: Like Loading... Most Popular Video Games Are Dumb. Can We Stop Apologizing for Them Now?
I don't know if I agree or disagree with the article. On the one hand, Clark is saying the majority of games are dumb, which is, apparently a bad thing, to the fact that they can be so much more. Well, that's the problem, they can be, but it won't sell. Lots of gamers don't want intellectual games or thought provoking conversations. You say you wanted to like Dues Ex (I assume you're reading comments....) but you didn't. OK, the dialogue was pretty poor along with terrible voice acting, but ignoring that (and the apparent racism in the homeless black person being talkable to, instead of the dozen other white ones) the game IS intellectual. See, even in games which are "dumb" and "actiony" there is intellectual ideas.
Did you know, when FF7 was released, they had to remove the option to be able to bring Aries/Areith back to life because it was deemed too difficult for the western market? Next, why should games be deep? To sum up, games are no different to anything else. So, yeah. I Am Alive Review. HIGH Finding a safehouse where colors still exist. LOW Taking a beating and limping along for two areas on a sliver of life. WTF Why aren't critics talking about this game? Oh, right. Mass Effect 3. The worst thing that could possibly have happened to I Am Alive was for it to be released on March 7, 2012—and it was.
What made this particular day so terribly unfortunate? Mass Effect 3 was released on March 6. Not only did this small, post-apocalyptic download debut in the shadow of a massive blockbuster, anyone remotely connected to games was aware of furor over Mass Effect 3's ending and how it threw the signal-to-noise ratio in critical circles entirely out of whack. At its core, I Am Alive is a platforming-heavy third-person adventure with exploration elements and a heavy burden of resource management. It's clear from the start that the main character is a survivor, but that doesn't mean he's invincible. I Am Alive's combat requires a similar level of awareness and caution. Crusader Kings II by Paradox Interactive.
You Played That? Game Studies Meets Game Criticism. At the 2009 Digital Games Research Association conference, I participated in a panel organized by David Thomas, "You Played That? Game Studies Meets Game Criticism. " The other panelists were William Huber, Margaret Robertson, and José Zagal. The panel posed the following question: What is game criticism?
How should the academy claim its place alongside game journalism as a productive voice in game criticism? What follows is my position paper on the topic, as it appeared in the conference proceedings. Even though Marshall McLuhan devotes a few pages to games in Understanding Media (covering the way games extend man the social animal), he doesn't account for either the computer or the videogame, neither of which had gained popular adoption when he was writing in the early 1960s. Might we conclude: videogames are the first creative medium to fully emerge after Marshall McLuhan. By the time videogame studies became a going concern, McLuhan was gospel. Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams: Popular Music, Narrative, and Dystopia in Bioshock. By William Gibbons Abstract The science-fiction world of the video game Bioshock (2K Games, 2007) presents a dystopian vision of mid-century America.
The game explores the creation and ultimate destruction of the underwater city of Rapture, an Ayn-Rand-inspired capitalist Utopia. Though the game features an award-winning original score, its soundtrack also borrows extensively from the popular music of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, including tracks by The Inkspots, Django Reinhardt, and Noël Coward, among numerous others. On one level, this borrowed music signifies the time period evoked by the game, grounding the action in the mid-century despite the presence of futuristic technology, acting as a constant reminder of the aesthetic and cultural values of the predystopian American culture, creating a dichotomy between its optimism and the dystopian environment of Bioshock. Keywords: Game Music, Popular Music, Bioshock, Dystopia, Irony, Intertextuality Introduction Welcome to Rapture. The Philosophy of Game Design (part 1) Indeed, all this philosophizing might seem pointless when confronted by that simple truism.
But let's recall the history of thought in videogame design (or at least, recall it in the way I've packaged it) - the very notions of "player accessibility" and "artistic merit" in games are both relatively recent. In fact, they barely existed in the 16-bit era, much less the 8-bit era. What seems obvious now is actually the result of a long, gradual shift in thinking. Even now, our "golden mean" of game design is still shifting as new developers and new player audiences emerge. Our notion of a "good game" is slowly moving somewhere ... But where? Are games getting more "political," and if so, are these considered to be "good games" by our standard? Are "art games" a legitimate genre or a pretentious annoyance with no future - or is the very label redundant if we're to argue that all games are intrinsically artistic anyway?
But that frustration is good, because that will begin the conversation. In Defence of Criticism: The Close Reading » Medium Difficulty. By Lana Polansky In what has become the standard model of “games criticism,” a game’s value is broken into a rubric, where each of its component parts examined and measured. Graphics, sound, gameplay, story—each one isolated and evaluated according to a very strict set of requirements.
A rating is then applied at the end, representing an average total of all the individual components. It’s all very scientific and objective. This is how you know where to put your money. But let’s imagine, for a brief moment, a magical world in which a work of art is thought of holistically—all its parts working together to convey an overall message, theme or sensation; to produce some kind of resonance; to have an effect on the reader, watcher or player. Videogames are not cars or toasters. Let’s back up for a second. Journalism essentially describes the practice of recording history as it happens.
Such a mechanical form of analysis overlooks that games are an expressive medium.