How Portal portrays science

Portal presents a world that indulges in the idea of science. The facility of Aperture is a place of endless testing and research, where every placement and movement is calculated and pre-determined. It’s walls are endlessly white, it’s environments are sterile and void of any character or sense of human touch. This is how Portal, ...

Feedback Loop: Many choices, or none, make a game.

Is just one choice all it takes to turn a novel into a video game? Before you say yes, consider when a game is created out of many choices and when we are left with none.

Richard Eisenbeis looks at Katawa Shoujo in an April 24 Kotaku article. Eisenbeis holds up the dating sim/visual novel as proof that one choice is all it takes to turn a novel into a game. It is a shallow analysis and the implication that one can stick a choice in a novel and have a game is just false.

If we step away from the screen with only Eisenbeis’s assertion, we lose out on understanding what developers have to do to take a story and turn it interactive.

Creating a good game means understanding the times when a million choices create an interactive work and the instances where no choices are required.

Writing on the Wall: The Secret Messages of the Half-Life Universe

In 1981, a French graffiti artist named Blek the Rat coated Paris in stencil renditions of rats scampering about the city streets. They had no explanation, context, or detail beyond an outline. They were everywhere. Before the infamous Banksy followed in his footsteps, Blek was obsessed with the creatures, intrigued by their ever-present role as ...

ZIGGURAT and the end of the world during coffee break

A wise man once wrote what I believe to be one of the core tenets anyone who calls himself a game reviewer should have in mind: if you want to know if a game design works, imagine that game with an endless mode. It’s one of those advices so simple and obvious only a genius could have thought of.

And now that genius went off to make his own endless game, ZIGGURAT.

It’s one of those things that leaves me both excited for the results and frustrated about my own inadequacies. Just like when Erik Wolpaw, who used to write hilariously astute reviews and commentary on games in his Old Man Murray website, went off to write arguably one of the best videogames ever made: Portal.

The result is that Tim Rogers, the number one defender of friction in games, made what is, together with Canabalt, the game with the most friction you can find on the iPhone. ZiGGURAT is a genre great game with so much friction I have the impression my iPhone is rumbling even though it lacks a rumble feature.

In defense of boring

As games move towards noise and thunder, I’m inclined to retreat back into the eye of the storm. I’m retreating to boring games. The action movie palette, often robbed by games, gives us bright lights, flashing pictures, and melodramatic scenes, creating a variety of experiences based on the number of explosions. If the beginning of ...

Death and Storytelling

One of the distinguishing – though not universal – features of playing games is that you die.  The natural phrase people use – even small kids who’ve not learned it via experience – is to say “I died,” not “Mario died.” This presents an opportunity for storytelling that a variety of games have explored over ...

What could’ve been: A Portal 2 without Wheatley, GLaDOS, or portals

(Warning: This article contains spoilers for Portal 2. Read at your own risk!) Before the Portal 2 we know and love came into existence, Valve had many different scenarios in mind. During the Game Developer’s Conference, Valve’s Chet Faliszek and Eric Wolpaw revealed a few of the pre-release versions in question.

Portal 2: A labor of love

(Warning: This article contains spoilers for Portal and Portal 2. Read at your own risk!) Every now and then a video game comes along that is able to tug at my heart strings and force out a tear or two. These games are uncommon in a world where fun matters most and shooting dudes is ...

PBS Off Book Covers Video Games

With oh so lovely networks like Fox News providing us with plenty of ignorant, biased, politically driven garbage in their extensive coverage of video games, it’s nice to see another network giving gamers a break from hearing flat out unpunished slander about their favorite hobby vomited onto millions of viewers. Off Book, a web series ...

Preorder Dungeon Defenders for a discount and TF2 and Portal DLC

Dungeon Defenders, the upcoming action-RPG tower defense game by Trendy Entertainment, is now open for preorders on Steam. Trust me, there’s plenty of incentive to preorder, too. Not only will a preorder net you the typical 10% discount Steam games like to adopt, but it will also guarantee you two awesome pieces of DLC. First, ...

Valve want cross-platform integration for CS:GO

Gabe Newell surprised a lot of people when he showed up at Sony’s E3 keynote last year and announced that Portal 2 would be available on PS3 with Steamworks. Valve are looking to continue that relationship with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive early next year. Speaking to Develop at Gamescom where the game was previewed for the first ...

The Neverending Road

A factor in many reviewers’ judgment of any given game is the length of time it takes for them to complete it. However, the focus often seems to be on the amount of the content rather than the quality of the content. A game that was fairly well-received by critics, and was of considerable length, ...

Are Difficulty Settings Necessary?

The pursuit of a challenge can be a driving force in life. The accomplishment of something thought to be unobtainable has a certain allure which some find irresistible. Game designers tend to play off of this concept, creating challenges that seem insurmountable in the context of the game world. Typically there will be an option ...