The Mass Effect saga is a sprawling epic that covers over a hundred thousand years of galactic history. In Bioware’s extensive fiction, we learn about people long extinct, meet dozens of new races, and come together to fight an enemy that threatens to destroy it all. It’s a complex timeline filled with personal conflict, social turmoil and galactic politics. And we got our first glimpse of it in Mass Effect: Revelation.
Bastion: The Kid’s Fairy Tale
A child’s eyes see a simple world. For centuries, fairy tales have been tools to give those eyes a view on the world they might not see on their own. They are a means of teaching lessons and giving metaphors, to see villainy and sorrow overcome by heroism and bravery. In Bastion, Supergiant Games has crafted a new fairy tale in videogame form, one that allows you to revisit your youth while celebrating the games you loved when you were small and the world was big.
Principles of Design- Characters
First impressions are tricky things. You are introduced to every character as you are every person- without context. You might have seen pictures of what they look like, heard of their stories, but until you see them with your own eyes, it’s all academic. There are only two qualities about any person that can absolutely be measured- their existence and their actions. Their motivations and psychology are nothing more than conjecture and speculation but that doesn’t mean they’re not important.
Life, Agency and How Videogames Teach Us About Both
I was born in the wasteland that was once Washington D.C. I felt joy and sadness; met people that will stay etched in my mind forever, made friends and enemies. The life was mine alone to lead and I made choices that affected it every day and with every step. I died on the other side of the Omega 4 Relay saving humanity from an enemy they didn’t believe existed.
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Fez Narrative Analysis: Changing Perspectives and Growing Up
Fez requires you to change your perspective.
You start in Gomez’s small room. Presented as a flat 8-bit, 2D side-scroller, the room is clean and well decorated, but is obviously a child’s. Gomez can run and jump but his only initial act is to leave. Outside is the beautiful, vertically oriented village and kind but simple residents. You are beckoned to the top of the village from a mysterious old man with an eye patch and a small red fez. He tells you that it’s an important day. That’s when the Hexahedron appears.
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Journey
Journey opens with a red-robed figure sitting in the sand, the only immediate task climbing a nearby dune. Making way is slow, the footing gives way and the walking arduous. The view from the top reveals the mountain peak far in the distance and reaching it is the singular goal of the title thatgamecompany has crafted, one that utilizes every narrative convention afforded by videogames to create your own journey.
Mass Effect 3
Since Mass Effect was first announced, skepticism about Bioware’s claims that choices made in its space opera would carry over its trilogy have given way to mounting pressure to make them a reality. Mass Effect proper introduced a dense universe of characters and races with real history and threw them into peril against an ancient race of synthetic life forms called Reapers who threatened to eradicate all life. But it also introduced us to Commander Shepard, the hero that took up arms to protect the galaxy. Mass Effect 2 was an incredible story of bravery set against impossible odds as Shepard once again fought against forces no one believed in.
Syndicate
Syndicate’s future world is about divisions; the divisions in the economic and political landscapes, between consumer and outcast where people are interfaced with the Datascape through neural chips that feed them a constant stream of data. That world is run by the mega corporations who plot, steal, manipulate and sabotage for the sake of patents, personnel and profit and each employs its own military and special agents to safeguard its bottom line. The original Syndicate from the mid-nineties offered a bleak, violent cyberpunk world- one perfectly suited to the brutal and creative skills of Starbreeze Studio’s.
R&D – Prototype 2
Radical Entertainment’s 2009 release of Prototype was welcomed with open arms, even though it dropped a month after the fundamentally similar Infamous. Over 400 thousand people were happy enough to aid in its journey to reaching Platinum status (which it did fairly quickly) for obvious reasons. Being an open world game centered on a biologically enhanced anti-hero capable of scaling buildings and slaughtering entire military units in a fashion that brought to mind John Carpenter’s The Thing, none of this came as much of a surprise.
Hallucinations From The Rhythm Heaven Fever
Videogames attempts to marry gameplay to music have long suffered from a case of ‘this’ or ‘that’. Narrative or pure mechanics, simon says memorization or notes on cue. Music rhythm games have been largely forced to pigeonhole themselves into working with a single mechanic with little flexibility. None of those games are Rhythm Heaven Fever.
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