Gaming Intelligence Agency

The Gaming Intelligence Agency is shutting down. Again.   When Andrew and I were talking about reviving the GIA two years ago, what attracted me most was the idea of an online space for any thoughts I had about games. If you engage with games, or any other art form, critically at all, then you know how it goes: you play a game, it stirs a reaction in you, and you think, “I should explore this.”…

Bloodborne: Not The Tourist’s Authentic European Hellscape Vacation

So I promise I will talk about Bloodborne but you know, everyone is talking about Bloodborne. So let’s talk about Tsutomu Nihei for a second.

Tsutomu Nihei is a manga artist and writer who draws these vast, inscrutable science fiction comics; in the early 00s he was drawing Blame!, which was about this laconic man trying to find someone with the correct genes for logging onto the Internet in a…

Axiom Verge: Empty Space

What could any Other know of the Up-and-Out? What Other could look at the biting acid beauty of the stars in open Space? What could they tell of the Great Pain, which started quietly in the marrow, like an ache, and proceeded by the fatigue and nausea of each separate nerve cell, brain cell, touchpoint in the body, until life itself became a terrible aching hunger for silence and for death? — Cor…

Dragon Age: Inquisition: Performance Review

Dragon Age: Inquisition could have been the closest gaming’s ever come to dramatizing the life of a corporate general manager. A person smack dab in the middle of the bureaucratic pyramid, where questions and decisions pertain almost exclusively to the organization and management of people, not budgets and markets.

That’s not a joke: As the Inquisitor, you have a staff of direct reports, who have…

Civilization: Beyond Earth: Going Beyond Theme

I don’t remember exactly when I discovered Civilization in college, but once I did, I knew I had a problem. Once I started a new game, it was impossible to stop until it finished, even though a game would take me a brisk six to ten hours to finish. On more than one night, a friend and I stayed up with Civilization 3 until dawn broke, getting wasted, yelling at Ghandi, pushing armies right up…

Fantasy Life: Devaluing Violence

The first time I played Fantasy Life, I chose to do so focusing on only two jobs, or “Lives” in the game’s parlance. I would be, I decided, a dedicated Miner who dabbled as a Blacksmith primarily as a way of smelting the minerals I was already collecting and forging better mining equipment for myself. A friend asked, not unreasonably, why I didn’t go for a third Life of Paladin or Mercenary, so…

Looking for Lucky Wander Boy

The pareidolia of D.B. Weiss’s 2003 novel Lucky Wander Boy is pervasive, compelling, contagious. My notes for this article—assembled as I re-read the book for the first time in nearly a decade—look like a text-only analogue to a pinboard out of A Beautiful Mind: works with tangential thematic or structural connections to Lucky Wander Boy; quotations from the book and elsewhere; citations marked…

All Due Respect: Press F for Farce

Recently, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare became roundly mocked when images showed a funeral event where the player is asked to “Press [F] to Pay Respects.” Some were quick to point out that Batman: Arkham City had a similar event where Batman could honor his fallen parents. There are several key differences between the two events, however, and it’s worth investigating why the former is the one…

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call: The System That Smothers

Whether you came to the Final Fantasy series early or late, whether your favorite female heroine is Terra or Lightning, one thing that unites all series fans is an appreciation for the excellent music that’s been a hallmark of the franchise since the start. Multiple composers, including Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masashi Hamauzu have upheld the musical standard of quality established by Nobuo Uematsu,…

Theater, Rhythm: A History of Final Fantasy

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call is a living museum of Final Fantasy, a musical memory palace. It lives at the bizarre intersection of fan service and Wikia, of sweet memories and bittersweet nostalgia. It is impossible to play Theatrhythm without remembering these games and where you were in your life when you played them; in fact, that’s more or less the whole point of the enterprise.…

Notes From Indiecade: Ice-Bound

The hardest part of talking about <a href="“>Ice-Boundis knowing where to start. After my friend and I saw it, we spent a while walking around, trying to wrap our heads around its mile-high concept, and starting a lot of sentences with “So…” It’s so ambitious and out-there that any one of the bizarre concepts in the mix could serve as a good entry point. Do you open with the “novel remixing”…

Notes From Indiecade: Sunder

Here’s the good news: the further I get from Indiecade, the more I’m convinced that Sunder is the best thing I played there. The concept is audacious enough; co-op 2D platformers are a dime a dozen, but Sunder’s special trick is to show only half of the information onscreen to each player. To make any progress at all, the pair of players in control of the brother and sister onscreen must keep up…

Notes From Indiecade: EarthNight

I’ve never been much for runner games. I’ve given the genre classics a try, but Canabalt never engaged me for more than a few minutes, and Bit.Trip left me cold despite its musical whimsy. So it surprised me quite a bit when I found myself ranking Cleaversoft’s upcoming runner game, EarthNight, up there with the best of what I played at Indiecade.

EarthNight’s odd premise has you playing either…

Notes From Indiecade: Walden, A Game

Half of the GIA went to Indiecade 2014 in Culver City earlier this month and played some amazing, intriguing, and delightful games. The Notes From Indiecade series is a look at a few of our favorites of the show, along with some commentary from their developers.

Look up Walden, A Game on YouTube and you’ll get an inkling of the game’s long history: the most recent videowas uploaded just a few…

Notes From Indiecade: how do you Do It?

Half of the GIA went to Indiecade 2014 in Culver City earlier this month and played some amazing, intriguing, and delightful games. The Notes From Indiecade series is a look at a few of our favorites of the show, along with some commentary from their developers.

Sex in games is often a matter of conquest. When you do well–not at sex, but at some unrelated thing, like being a badass space marine…

Gene Wolfe famously described good literature as “that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.” By that measure, Transistor is a good game: one which can be enjoyed by an experienced player, and replayed with increased pleasure. Not since Chrono Trigger has a game demanded an additional playthrough so forcefully. Even the name, “Recursion Mode,” is a clue. You…

Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball: With Friends Like These

Gamers love arguing on the Internet about microtransactions and DLC. The practice of charging for additional content, in-game currency, or small chunks of gameplay has caused disagreements since companies first starting putting prices on digital goods. Disputes mainly revolve around what makes a particular piece of DLC reasonable or unreasonable. and whether DLC is a worse option for players than…