News & Views
6/20/15-6/26/15
What an
amazing week for US news! Maybe less so for video game stuff. Welcome to this
week’s News & Views! As always, I put together a selection of the best and
most interesting written pieces I found this week from the world of video
games. For a more long form discussion about the week’s most impactful news,
look no further than The Impact Factor podcast! You can find it on our SoundCloud or on iTunes! If you would like to hear more thoughts from your
intrepid podcast hosts, you can find us on twitter: Charles Fliss and me, @alexsamocha.
Onto the
pieces! This week we have great articles talking about the shallowness of the
mobile games market, what scientists think video games do to our brains, who
won the E3 2015 media battle, and public funding for video games! Until next
week!
Spotlight
Chris Ware, The New
Yorker
Worth Reading
Sergey
Galyonkin, Medium
Tom
Chivers, BuzzFeed
Paul Tassi,
Forbes
Austin
Walker, Giantbomb
Devin
Raposo, KillScreen
And the rest!
Patrick
Klepek, Kotaku
The Uncharted 4 demo at E3 2015 was a bit of a snafu. Upon the completion of the intro
cutscene, Nathan Drake was left standing still for nearly 30 seconds. After a
start over, the demo went smoothly. It was a moment of endearing earnestness
from the team at Naughty Dog, clearly trying to live demo an unfinished game on
the world’s biggest video game news stage. Klepek gives everyone the inside
scoop on what really happened!
DaTeHaCKs,
YouTube
The Dark Souls community keeps giving and giving. As I said in a perspectives piece a
while back, bosses are one of the best parts of the Souls games. Dark Souls in particular has my
top three favorite bosses from the series. So how cool is it that modders
have made the bosses playable? The PC community continues to impress.
Erik Kain,
Forbes
This was unfortunately the biggest
news story that emerged this week. Batman Arkham Knight was
met with immense critical praise. The PC version released with numerous issues
so terrible that, in many cases, they made the game unplayable. This needs to
stop happening. Released unfinished, buggy, broken AAA games should not, and cannot,
continue.
Liam
Robertson, Nintendo Life
This news bummed me out and gave me
hope at the same time. While I’m certainly not the biggest F-Zero fan out there, I spent dozens of hours playing F-Zero on Gameboy Advance and F-Zero GX on the Gamecube. The games are fun, crazy,
fast and totally unlike anything else in Nintendo’s IP wheelhouse. So it’s a
bummer that it has been about a decade since we’ve gotten a new one. F-Zero
on the Wii U from the guys that made Burnout
would have been amazing. Oh well. At
least we know Nintendo kind of cares about F-Zero, so maybe it will pop up
on the NX!
Thomas
Bidaux, Gamasutra
Bidaux does an excellent job pulling
a bunch of statistics from E3 2015 media coverage. A lot of the figures are
surprising. For example, Sony only had a slight increase in the number of
stories about them compared to last year, despite the trifecta of fan favorite
announcements with The
Last Guardian, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, and
Shenmue 3. As a scientist, I love looking at data. Cool to see some
work is being done in this regard towards video games. Check this piece out for
sure.
PBS Game /
Show, YouTube
PBS Game / Show is quickly becoming
my favorite video game content creator of YouTube. For obvious reasons this
video oversimplifies what it describes, the delicate balance of positioning and
attacking in Street
Fighter, but it still does an excellent
job of describing these concepts in a way non fighting game enthusiasts can
understand. For everyone else, let me describe it this way. A game of Street Fighter is a chess match
where people punch each other. I
love Street Fighter. EVO2015 is soon,
everyone. Don’t miss it. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
No comments:
Post a Comment