A new documentary film, GameLoading: Rise of the Indies was released this year after a successful Kickstarter. The film, which is available for digital download through Steam or from the GameLoading web site, was created to showcase the diversity in the indie game development community and celebrate the works of indie game devs. How successful is it? Let’s talk about it! But first, let’s watch a trailer, after the jump!
At first impression, Bravely Default is actually terrible. It is the JRPG that Zynga would make. … the story is the most generic JRPG tale possible, an epic where one must take a magical priestess and her fairy sidekick to a temple to “Activate the Wind Crystal” and then three other elemental crystals of increasing power thereafter.
I knew, hour one, that I was going to play it for a hundred hours anyway.
By eleven in the morning I’m a sweaty, dizzy, panting mass of insect stings. Earlier, sliding down a rocky embankment, I lost my footing on the rolling stones and toppled, face-planting in the mud. I dropped my knife and saw it spin out into the bushes but I can’t find it. My stratospheric fever makes this bright day dim. The periphery is clouded by a dense black fog; my head pounds. I stumble again and fall, injuring myself. My throat is parched and I cannot find water. I am lost among unrecognizable landmarks. And I am dying. If I’m very lucky, I will die before it finds me.
Welcome to the first day of the worst days of my life.
I have too many delightful gaming memories to ever choose a favorite, but I can point at one and say it’s definitely among the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had. What I have in mind today is the weekend I spent with two of my closest friends, sprawled on a sofa, playing co-op Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 in splitscreen.
Understand, we had no idea how to play the game. We had no instructions and had never played online or in the campaign. GRAW2 is the most unforgiving kind of tactical shooter, and even simple moves like reloading took a while to figure out. But for some reason we stuck with it, and over the course of about 40 largely-straight hours, we completed the entire co-op campaign. We stopped to catch some sleep around 4:30 a.m. each day, and all my dreams were viewed through a sniper’s scope.
The article below represents months of work and appears in Well Played 2.0, a game studies textbook published by Carnegie-Mellon University under the guidance of Professor (and Celebrity Guest Editor) Drew Davidson.
Each chapter of Well Played discusses a single game or franchise, with both meanings of the well-played phrase in mind: the game must be well played as a book is well-read, and it must provide something to better the medium as a whole. Beyond that, the analytical expectations are dependent on the writer. My chapter was about the STALKER franchise, which I know and love well.
I really wanted to do a “director’s cut” version of the article for Tap, including self-made, narrated gameplay videos and the like, but a recent computer crash has eaten up all my STALKER saves. It’d just take too much time to put a project like that together. Instead please accept the odd embedded YouTube video, plus some additional pix and multimedia that don’t appear in the book.
This is a textbook chapter, not a blog post. As such it’s even longer, boringer, and more pedantic than I usually write. It even has footnotes. Enjoy!
Adventure game reviews, walkthroughs, discussion, and more
Adventure game reviews, walkthroughs, discussion, and more
Adventure game reviews, walkthroughs, discussion, and more
Adventure game reviews, walkthroughs, discussion, and more
Adventure game reviews, walkthroughs, discussion, and more
Adventure game reviews, walkthroughs, discussion, and more
Adventure game reviews, walkthroughs, discussion, and more
Adventure game reviews, walkthroughs, discussion, and more
Adventure game reviews, walkthroughs, discussion, and more
Adventure game reviews, walkthroughs, discussion, and more