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On Doom Eternal
Doom Eternal is really good. You should play it you like shooters. It’s not without its flaws though. They tried to alter the main gameplay loop in this one. In Doom 2016 players, myself included, often stuck to the same gun (usually the super shotgun) and in Eternal they clearly want you to switch weapons…
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Secret Hitler
Secret Hitler is a hidden role multiplayer card/board game which attempts to simulate the complex political dynamics that can facilitate the rise of fascism. Players are randomly and secretly assigned one of three roles: a liberal, a fascist or Hitler. Only one player is Hitler for each game. The fascist’s aim is to either enact…
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Techniques of Thought: Cognition, Identity and Ideology in Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium begins in blackness. Words fade in against the emptiness. It is your ‘Ancient Reptilian Brain’ speaking to you. Soon enough your ‘Limbic System’ pipes up. They inform you “there is nothing” (ZA/UM, 2019). As your character (who we later learn is called Harry) awakens from his drunken stupor, we come to realize that…
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Stadia
https://www.businessinsider.sg/why-are-so-few-games-on-google-stadia-2020-2 “This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service… was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece.” Notably the only real media distribution platform Google has successfully sustained is YouTube, which A) wasn’t started by Google and B) was…
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The mourning in Night in the Woods and Kentucky Route Zero
[minor spoilers for Kentucky Route Zero and Night in the Woods] Kentucky Route Zero (KRZ) and Night in the Woods (NITW) are games about decay. They’re both focused on small town America, and the slow death of rural communities as a consequence of corporate consolidation and changing times. There’s a clear pattern in indie games…
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When a game is also a game engine
So Warcraft III Reforged just released, and Blizzards fans are kinda angry. Partly because the visual improvements aren’t as great as they were hyped up to be, but more interestingly, the remaster’s licensing agreement indicates that all custom user-created maps become the intellectual property of Blizzard. This policy was in all likelihood inspired by the…
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Work and the Zero
[Some spoilers for Kentucky Route Zero] Through an unfortunate series of events, Kentucky Route Zero’s Conway finds himself in debt to a mysterious distillery in the Zero, staffed entirely by strange glowing skeletons. With no way to pay, the distillery hounds him into working for them. His traveling partner Shannon Marquez suggests that he could…
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The Smallness of Florence
One of the texts for our interactive storytelling class is this, an interactive music video for Jeff Buckley’s rendition of Bob Dylan’s Just Like A Woman. As the music plays, a series of comic book style panels scroll past the screen. You are invited to click the panels, causing them to alternate between alternative narratives,…
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Essay Proposal: Disco Elysium
Here’s my proposal for my research essay for my interactive storytelling class, on Disco Elysium: Research Question: Disco Elysium is a roleplaying game about an alcoholic amnesiac detective who’s tasked with solving a grisly murder amidst an ongoing labour dispute at the local docks, all while trying to recover his forgotten identity (or construct a…
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A Worm Through the Mind
“You are a worm through time. The thunder song distort you. Happiness comes. White pearls, but yellow and red in the eye…” As the hiss burrow through and infect the very walls of the Federal Bureau of Control in the videogame Control, they chant a very curious incantation. The words go on and on, seemingly…