My writings gone elsewhere

My Resident Evil 3 article on sex, gender, and consumerism marks my third time being featured in the weekly online critical compendium Critical Distance and game business/art site Gamasutra. Hopefully, this is just the first of many!

A complete list of my appearances outside of Strange Country:

5/27/12: Resident Evil 3: Jill Valentine vs. the Consumerist Sex Monster, at Critical Distance and Gamasutra.

11/13/11: What Call of Duty: Black Ops is really saying at Critical Distance, and Gamasutra.

10/23/11: Splinter Cell and morality, at Critical Distance and Gamasutra.

On other blogs, people have added to and responded to my initial thoughts here, which you might find interesting:

-Andreea Bancla's university Architecture Journal features my views on Batman: Arkham City. The whole journal is worth checking out, as game architecture is rarely discussed beyond level design. 

Resident Evil 3: Jill Valentine vs. the Consumerist Sex Monster

[All images from residentevil.wikia.com]

The outfit works.

Not realistic, the mini-skirt/tube top costuming of Resident Evil 3's Jill Valentine helps stress the already uncomfortable sexuality of the series to maximum heights.

It's ridiculous that any human being might try to escape a monster-infested city in that get up, of course, but realism is not for fictional mediums. Jill's outfit tells us, as any good character design should, information about both the character and the game it is in.

Mass Effect 3, the nerd cult, and American education

All Mass Effect 3 images copyright masseffect.com.

After a $80,000 charity campaign by fans, a $1,000 cupcake-baking campaign, a response from Forbes, and uncountable angry forum posts, it is impossible not to see the success—and importance—of Mass Effect 3's ending/s. Like Michael Bay's signature film style, no matter how you view the ending/s quality they act as important cultural artifacts that have the power to change a medium.

Bay's style altered how films are edited and thus how we can read film, while BioWare's endings are pushing the very nature of company-consumer relations and DLC. More than that, that people are so passionately engaged in Mass Effect 3's endings is proof that something is working in there. There is something powerful in there to cause people to do all of the above, gain interest from the Better Business Bureau, and still create headlines over a month after release.

Updates (reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated)

Why no updates in over a month? An unfortunate work load in my real life, but don't worry, that ends soon: expect multiple updates in the next week.

What can you look forward to? "A Pale View of the Hills," which will take a long, sideways glance at Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Homecoming. Another piece will examine the importance of architecture in Resident Evil. Maybe a Mass Effect 3 one if I think of a fresh topic: believe me, I have opinions on the ending, but they're not really with the grain.

Hopefully, this long drought will be the only one this year: I'm anxious to be back.

Glitch Reading, Glitched Reading: Bethesda's "Broken" Worlds

Glitches enrich Bethesda's work. The Elder Scrolls and Fallout do not reach the same heights without that nervous, haphazard feel that plentiful errors lend them—the feel that at any moment, the world itself might collapse underneath you or everything might freeze and cease to be. 

 

Fallout 3 contains many eerie scenes of post-nuclear devastation, but the tensest moment in my experience with it came from a glitch. Here I am, wandering a desert, scavenging what I can, when a the danger music plays. Spinning about, I find nothing. The music plays. A car-sized scorpion lunges hissing at me from inside a sand dune right in front of me. 

2011: A Year in Review, Part III: "The Bad"

2011 in gaming hosted amazing and diverse games, and why should the bad games be any different? By all reports, the year had some knockouts with Postal 3, the Blackwater recruitment Kinect game, and the apparently insensitive Techland Games duo Dead Island/Call of Juarez: The Cartel, but I didn't get to experience those myself yet.

This year, I only played one truly awful 2011 game. By virtue, it wins, but even if I counted the bad games from other years that went in and out of my systems it'd still be king.

[From gamebreakers.co]

 

Duke Nukem Forever (PC/PS3/X360)

Most critics passed this one for their worst games of the year list, citing it as more boring than truly bad, but I disagree. Duke Nukem 3D presented genuine innovation and historical achievement for interaction, but this soils that game's good name; it's a Duke Nukem 3D redux gone hipster and about a decade too late to cash in on that name. All in a year that gave us a perfectly good successor to and critique of Duke, Shadows of the Damned.

Reduced to ironic detachment, Duke quips at his best friend's death and two nude women (formerly his sexy lady entourage) after their stomachs explode from alien rape (“Looks like...you're fucked!” he chortles). 

Not content with that, it compares itself—madly, like head man George Broussard-as-Ozymandias—to Call of Duty, Gears of War, and Halo, claiming superiority by mocking those games/jacking their mechanics. Duke Nukem Forever says, as a forums poster put it, that everything and everyone is shit.

Where's the respect, Duke?

2011: A Year in Review, Part II: "The Other Guys"

Not all games reach top status, of course, even if they're pretty good or decent. Here's a few that couldn't reach the top, but are still memorable.

[From Amazon.com.]

Dragon Age 2 (PC/PS3/X360)

The first game was an exercise in lame-brained nostalgia: for Tolkien's Lord of the Ring novels, even though the fantasy genre has moved past them for years with the ascendancy of George R.R. Martin, Joe Abercrombie, R. Scott Bakker, etc.; and for the Baldur's Gate game series, there reduced from its masterpiece status to a floatation device for the developer's legacy to cling to and for mainstream press to laud as a selling point. 

If Dragon Age: Origins managed to showcase a few good moments amongst a load of not-so-good (finale) to boring (Deep Roads) to amateurish (sex scene) ones, then Dragon Age 2 presents a lo-fi but legitimately decent game. Of course, it hasn't reached the level of Mass Effect and may never do so, but the more unique yet still quite ugly art style this time is something to applaud: producing a sense of genuine cobbled-togetherness (you sense that the art style itself will, at any moment, collapse) not unlike the city it almost entirely takes place in is a positive side effect. 

Strangely, it also features the most lavish loading screens I've ever witnessed—clearly a lot of time was spent here, and I can't say they're not unpleasant to look at. But the greatest achievements of Dragon Age 2 is that the game carries a sense of time and place, even if we do eventually get bored of these places, and that the people in this games's party actually grow as friends based on your input. In such a disgusting game world, the camaraderie is inspiring and something even the superior Mass Effect should aim to hit.