News
& Views
5/30/15-6/5/15
So much is going on, and I love it! For any of you who haven’t seen it
yet, please check out the fifth episode of my podcast, The Impact
Factor. If you finished it you’ll know that that next week will be a very
special episode of the show: an E3 prediction super-cast! My co-host Charles
Fliss and I will sit down and go through each press conference and make our
guesses: the expected, the bold, and the crazy! For those of you who haven’t
seen already, I have been streaming Spelunky on my Twitch, and later uploading them to my
YouTube!
All right, enough self-promotion. Let’s get into this week’s News &
Views! Honestly, I probably found too many great things for you all this week.
Since I’m clearly terrible at editing, you get them all! I found some amazing
writing about bullying and the enforcement of ‘normal’, how a game uses boredom
as a strength, the convergence of dress up and Final Fantasy, and a lot about Splatoon.
All of this and more below! See you all soon for an exciting next two weeks.
Spotlight
Tauriq Moosa, Polygon
Worth
Reading
Chad Sapieha, Financial Post
Maddy Myers, Metroidpolitan
Sophie Sampson, KillScreen
Bryant Francis, Gamasutra
Anthony John Agnello, Engadget
Asher Einhorn, Gamasutra
And the
rest!
Daniel Starkey, Wired
Starkey
provides an interesting take on an often highly controversial topic. I’ll
freely admit seeing sex in video games is a little… bizarre. Something
something uncanny valley something. But if that’s the point, as Starkey argues,
mission accomplished!
Leigh Harrison, Haywire Magazine
I really
enjoyed this piece from Harrison in Haywire Magazine. As any of you devout
followers of The Impact Factor know, I loved my time with Valiant
Hearts. You can check out my review here.
I commented a little how the game can be ‘too easy’ or ‘boring,’ and it’s great
to see in writing why I, and Harrison, was ok with that.
Holly Nielsen, The Guardian
Not much
to say here. The representation of women in games has been bad pretty much
since video games were made. I would love to see the diversity of
representations male characters get applied to the female ones as well.
Patrick Klepek, Kotaku
Ever
since I have wanted to use female avatars / toons / characters / whatever you
want to call them in games, I have noticed what Klepek points out in his
article. Essentially every game sets
the default gender to male. Splatoon and Nintendo have taken some great steps to appealing to everyone:
whether it is having a female character featured most prominently on the box
art, or this. Cool.
Wesley Yin-Poole, Eurogamer
Yin-Poole
sits down to interview a fascinating Final Fantasy fan that spent five years retranslating this
classic game. For anyone who has played FF7, you’ll remember just how bad the
original translation was. Sheesh. Not as bad as ‘All your base are belong to us’
but it got close at times. I appreciate the effort this fan put into retranslating
the game. Too bad it sounds physically, emotionally, and mentally draining to
have done so.
The
Pokemon TCG has just banned a card from tournament play for the first time in
more than a decade
Pokemon TCG
This story
really caught my attention. I love card games. Played the Pokemon
TCG casually when I was a kid. I have
always heard playing competitive Pokemon
is kind of like the wild west, where everything goes. So when I read about the
first time a new(ish) card was banner in over 10 years, that’s crazy. After
reading it’s effect, I can see why. Designers have to be so careful when
introducing powerful effects like the one on this card.
Patrick Klepek, Kotaku
What a
nightmare scenario. Ever since I started writing this blog I have worked on a
couple game ideas. No real progress has been made, though. But to have worked
on something for a year only to find
another, similar, game is coming out from some real high profile people must
have been soul crushing. I applaud the Blind team for fighting through it and continuing work on their new title. I’ll
have my eye out for it.
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