Category: Read

Borders opens with your player character alone in a desert cluttered with equal amounts of hardy plants and human trash. Cacti and bushes might be normal, and even helpful for hiding in, but piles of clothing raise more worrying questions. And then there are the skeletons. There is a spot just a few feet from…

There’s no such thing as a good loot box, all of them are capital ‘B’ for Bad no matter which way you slice them. We’ve established that much: so what are we going to do about it? As NPD analyst Mat Piscatella outlined to GamesIndustry.biz, for all the furore and the calls for boycotts, the…

Previously we looked at plain toast, microwave burritos, and how Destiny 2‘s Guardians are basically Mussolini with blue mohawks. It was a grand old adventure, aside from all the brain aneurysms. This time, we go into detail about FashQuest‘s unfortunate portrayal of its alien races. If the idea that art created by humans might reasonably serve as…

Self Care Jam 2 wrapped up this week, bringing in over fifty entries covering everything from phone backgrounds to novellas to poetry. And of course, there were also plenty of games to enjoy. Self Care Jam, which ran for the first time last year, differs from other jams in that it’s supposed to be entirely…

Let’s face it, almost all of the bigotry that comes from online gaming comes straight from the live chat. Whether it’s via text form or over voice chat, you always get a slew of gamers who just do not know when to stop talking. Sometimes you’ll find feminist-friendly servers, or at least a match full…

As defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, two of the three definitions of the word, “criticism” address the art of critiquing a work of art or literature. The first known usage of the word appeared in Thomas Dekker’s A Knight’s Conjuring (1607), according to the 1971 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The art of critique…

‘At once victors and vanquished’ is a fairly unusual juxtaposition for a game. Often, you fulfil the conditions of a win state, get dragged along through the firework display of congratulatory cutscenes, cup your willing hands before you to receive the gold-hewn power star of definitive success. Tragedy is a peripheral concern like air and…

I’ve always found the term ‘hate symbol’ misleading. Symbols, like technology, plain toast, and Jaheira from Baldur’s Gate are true neutral. We can charge them with significance or repurpose them, the same way we can use microwaves to heat burritos or build death-rays. Unless you’re Geralt of Rivia, though, a sign with no context is powerless.…

Recently, the lobbying group Energy Builders released a statement accusing the 2D side scroller Thunderbird Strike of attempting to ‘encourage eco-terrorism or other bad behavior’. Naturally, the alarmist press lapped it up with all the predictable zeal of a Pavlovian pooch. Boundary-pushing design and unique auteurial vision is a major draw of the indiesphere, but rarely…

Horizon Zero Dawn met rave critical acclaim earlier this year. Reviews praised its polished (if unoriginal) gameplay, its unique and compelling story, and the jaw-dropping graphics. It also got a lot of attention for its diverse representation of America, featuring a cast full of people of color and various sexual orientations. Despite its Dutch heritage…

As America struggles with its epidemic of gun violence, many citizens feel powerless. Fortunately, there is an app for that in the form of Everyday Arcade’s Thoughts & Prayers: The Game. Never before has a game so accurately portrayed the power of doing absolutely nothing. The game is free-to-play and browser based. It consists of…

Yay! Horizon Zero Dawn is temporarily relevant again thanks to some new DLC and a Monster Hunter: World crossover, which means I have a flimsy excuse to effusively gush over my favourite part of the game. Spoiler alert: It does not involve robots, dinosaurs, or any combination thereof. This is the point where an apparition of my…

My first few hours with Super Mario Odyssey were really uncomfortable. In the first few minutes of the game, when Peach is being kidnapped by Bowser, he taunts Mario by saying, “Are you jealous?” My skin crawled when I heard that. The suggestion was, Mario would be going on his Odyssey because, yeah. He was…

Imagine this hypothetical scenario; In a parallel universe, I am not merely an imposter with a penchant for thesauruses who once played Bubsy 3D for twenty minutes and feels that grants me the inalienable right to pontificate endlessly about games on the internet, but an actual game designer with, you know, talent and vision and…

It’s incredibly easy to use Steam to abuse people. Curation groups with homophobic and racist slurs in their names; antisemitic foundations; or outright white supremacy are left well alone, as Motherboard reports (content warning for all of the above at the link). Valve responded to review bombing with the addition of a graph that is…