Toluu

The Game Critique

A Critical Assessment of Video Games

In Defense of Ludonarrative DissonanceAugust 25

First off, no this is not a retraction of my opinion (which I was apparently the sole defender of) that Ludonarrative Dissonance is a bad thing for a game to have. Instead this is a response to the growing antagonism towards the term itself. There is plenty of it about, most recently from a post of Corvus Elrod’s over at Semionaut’s Notebook. I wanted to write this right away after reading it, but other commitments kept me from doing so at the time. Although having just reread it I find that it doesn’t say a whole lot about the term itself, just that it’s use is unnecessary and rather ineffectual.

For those who don’t know (though if you are reading this I give 4 to 1 odds you do) Ludonarrative Dissonance was a term coined by CLINT HOCKING, here, in reference to Bioshock and was later applied by others to Gears of War, Uncharted and others. It is where the game elements conflict the thematic elements the narrative tries to convey. It’s why the normally happy-go-lucky “normal” guy of Nathan Drake becomes a disturbing sociopath in the gameplay. It’s why the “rah-rah kill them” mentality of the Cogs is somewhat undermined by the fact they cower behind chest high walls at every opportunity despite wea

I’m Done and Now I’m BackAugust 20

I’ve been only lightly using the internet and got pretty much away from the site due to my summer class. The last class I needed to graduate. Well I passed it this week and minus all the bureaucratic nonsense it will take to transfer the credits to Boston University I am a college graduate. Hurray for me.

Anyway that means I’m getting back to reading my backlog, playing my backlog and back to writing. If I have my way I’ll be start posting again next week.

Side note: if anyone has any PAX prime three day passes they aren’t going to be using, please get in contact. I’ll be interested.

So How Did I Do on TWIVGBJuly 27

Well Ben Abraham was away from the internet last week, something to do with spelunking I think, and asked me to step in as writer of the This Week In Video Game Blogging feature again. I don’t know what it is, but every time I take up the task the internet decides that this is the week to get super prolific. So we I ended up writing what I believe to be the second longest TWIVGB…so far. It didn’t help that my list of links doubled about an hour before I should have written the damn thing.

You can read it here.

While I wading through the mass of writing and trying to figure out what was worth spreading around I noticed thematic trends floating around this week’s work. That and I while reading one post I began applying the thoughts of other posts to it, even if they weren’t on the same thing. The most pronounced of these were the posts examining Inception and the connection they seemed to have with examination of the self that many writers were doing via examining RPGs. So instead of simply grouping all of the related material together and calling it a day, I tried to do something new. I tried to connect them thematically int he post the same way they were connecting thematically in my own mind.

It was an experiment and so far I’ve gotten really positive feedback.  I would still like to hear how well the connection style worked, was it sloppy, did I not do enough, did I do

Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter – A Book ReviewJune 23

I haven’t done video game reviews on this site. I also don’t intend to. I have only done video game critiques or criticism. The name in the top banner should be enough of a clue. So it is interesting that the first review I do for a blog about video games is really about a book.

I finished Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives over a week ago, before E3 started. I wanted to finish those posts on inFamous before I got around to writing on the book. Now having settled down and let the pages stew in my mind for a time, I find there is not much to say.

The book is very well written. I finished it in two days and didn’t take any self-discipline on my part to get through it, which is saying something. In this tech saturated, attention deficit age, actually sitting down and doing one thing is both a miracle and reprieve. Bissell’s words flow like nectar down one’s throat, unsweetened and unpreserved. They are the raw and natural words of a man speaking from his, if not heart, than his truth, his center, his being. Extra Lives is a deeply personal book and as much about Tom Bissell as it is about video games. But then if you

What I got from E3June 22

I know it’s kind of pointless to write anything on E3, especially after this pretty much summarizes the whole thing, but it’s my blog and I want to.

Going into E3 I wanted to see only a few things: Beyond Good and Evil 2, The Last Guardian, Dragon Age 2, Mirror’s Edge 2 and anything that hadn’t already been announced. That last one is a little innocuous, because with the exception of The Last Guardian, none of the others on my list have been announced. Well I was heavily disappointed. (You have till TGS to make it up to me.)

Other than great unity that I felt with the twitterverse during the Press Conferences I got two things. One was the announcement of the next project from the studio ThatGameCompany. Journey is visually minimalistic like their other games and because of that strikes my imagination. WE don’t know what it’s about or have even seen any video of it being played. And yet I’m more excited about it than any of the over a dozen shooters put on display.

The other thing this E3 did for me was convince me it might be time to get a Wii in the near future. The number of games I actually want to play on i