Category: games
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Replayed Quantum Conundrum (2012)
(I reviewed QC for The Gameological Society (which was the AV Club’s games site in 2012, long before Paste bought the AV Club and then the AV Club shut down Paste Games. I have not looked at that review before writing this).
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Thoughts After Four Hours of Amberspire
disclosures: I know nic (designer and director), and I have played lots of games with nic, and that makes me familiar with their sensibility. I am not a city-builder player. amberspire is on steam edit: nic’s bluesky thread of all of the people who worked on the game is a good corrective for my glossing…
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A Puzzle In Microid’s Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express
In Microid’s Agatha Christie’s The Murder on the Orient Express, there’s a minigame where you turn dials on a briefcase lock. A click sounds plays as you pass each number, with a louder sound played on the correct number for each dial. The dial is surrounded by a white oval which becomes squiggly as each…
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Paratext – columns at Joystick Division and Unwinnable – 2011-2013 (with two post-Paratext pieces from 2014)
“From 2011-2014 I wrote some columns called “Paratext” for the websites Joystick Division and Unwinnable. These are those columns.” is a collection of columns I wrote for Joystick Division and Unwinnable. The rest of this post is the same as on my other zine pages. Have fun! You can download the PDF above, and then…
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I read Marie-Laure Ryan’s Beyond Myth and Metaphor – The Case of Narrative in Digital Media about a week after finishing playing Immortality
https://www.gamestudies.org/0101/ryan Beyond Myth and Metaphor* -The Case of Narrative in Digital Media by Marie-Laure Ryan Games Studies Issue 01 Volume 01 and Immortality, the game by Half-Mermaid I read this piece after reading Aarseth, Juul, and Frasca’s contributions to this initial issue of the Games Studies journal. It is gutsy and important, I think, to…
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Montage
I found this markdown document in a drafts folder, dated June 2022. I didn’t look at it at all, just copied and pasted into the CMS. Soviet montage theory. It’s pretty simple – the idea is that the images in cinema don’t produce meaning on their own. It’s the juxtaposition of images through editing, through…
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Despelote (2025)
This was beautiful and sweet and I am so glad it exists and I could not hold my attention on most of the soccer-playing* but damn that 3D scan of the area from 2024 was great *until the final scene ** but then when the camera shifted into the ball, two of the characters were…
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Clair Obscur (spoilers obvs)
I chose the Maelle ending. I think it’s kind of weird that the ultimate takeaway here appears to be: Maelle and her mother were unable to process their grief and move on, her father and the fictional version of her brother were right about that. It feels maybe a little disappointing? to spend all that…