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Tag Archives: Karl Parakenings
What Is Games Journalism? Part One – What Is A Journalist?
“…while the medium in which [journalists] work affects the nature of specific tasks, it does not inherently make those tasks any more or less journalistic.” – Cecilia Friend and Jane B. Singer, Online Journalism Ethics: Traditions and Translations 1. What … Continue reading
Horror Done Right: Identifying The Player in System Shock 2
by Karl Parakenings These days, it’s probably better known as the spiritual influence behind the Bioshock series, but in its heyday it was one of the first 3d games that used the technology for immersion and tension instead of showing off hardware. The first game, the eponymous System Shock, detailed the creation of a rogue AI gone bad, SHODAN, who was so evocative that she now serves as the shadow behind many of gaming’s better-known moments and villains. In the second game, you are given the choice of defining your character, up to a point: after walking into a recruitment centre on Earth, you’re asked to run through a series of training programs related to the tours of duty you’ve chosen. You can become a marksman, a psionic expert, or hacker par excellence, and after running through your training regimens, you’re sent off to the Von Braun for a supposedly-routine Continue reading
Posted in Criticism, Horror Done Right
Tagged Day Z, game design, horror, Karl Parakenings, Looking Glass Studios, SHODAN, System Shock 2, Tom "Rocket" Hall, Warren Spector
6 Comments
Horror Done Right: Horror as a Pejorative
“…there are all these games in which your health regenerates after a while but they aren’t about finding shelter or moving from one point of cover to another. they’re just there because they’re cruft that’s been accumulated. a lot of what contemporary video games are is the accumulation of that cruft. it’s all borrowed material that’s been completely divorced from its original context. we’re not looking carefully at our history, we’re just taking the shiny thing and running with it.” -Anna Anthropy, interviewed at ctrl-alt-defeat May 1st, 2012 A great deal has been made lately of ‘evoking emotions in players’ by game developers and the writers who love the games. The recent Lone Survivor by Jasper Byrne spends a fair bit of time trying to get under your skin in familiar ways. Players commonly remember Silent Hill 2 and 3 as the last great horror games, with pretenders such as F.E.A.R. and Continue reading
Life and Undeath in Chernarus: Why Day Z Is the Worst Best Zombie Game
Another recent viral phenomenon is the explosion in popularity of Day Z, a mod for the formerly-niche military simulator Arma II: Combined Ops. Only a few months old, Day Z is now so popular that Amazon recently ran out of keys for Arma II and a recent version of the mod added support for more than a million player characters in the central database. It’s officially a Thing.
Even more striking than the scope of the mod’s sudden success, though, is the way in which every game blog of note seems to be covering it. Rock Paper Shotgun and PC Gamer are publishing post after post after journal entry, describing the poster’s experience within the mod. Even the recent interview with the mod’s creator, Dean “Rocket” Hall, is mostly in the form of the interviewer and interviewee comparing notes about their respective experiences with the game.
So the question remains to be asked: why is Day Z so popular? Continue reading
Posted in Criticism, Features
Tagged community, Day Z, Day Z guide, Day Z help, DayZ, DayZ Guide, DayZ help, Dean "Rocket" Hall, Karl Parakenings, living a good life, living well, PC Gamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, zombies
4 Comments
The Decline of the Western Games Industry
Game designer and blogger Anna Anthropy is thought of by many as inflammatory, provocative, and controversial. Whether the issue at stake is the legitimacy of the Independent Game Festival’s yearly awards, the questionable taste of Kotaku articles and the problems with the editorial response, or even the validity of a father speaking for his game designer daughter, Anthropy thrives on a hard-line, take-no-prisoners approach, and refuses to apologize for it.
She pops up in the gaming press with tidal regularity, here mentioning her game design philosophy, there presenting her unconventional response to a solicitation from Stephen Totilo. Regardless of where you engage with her opinions, she presents and defends her opinions with the heat and passion of one utterly certain of her convictions.
Which is why I snapped up her book “Rise of the Videogame Zinesters” as soon as I was able: for once, she had her own platform and space to present her own case rather than being forced into a reactionary role. What would she say? Continue reading
Review: Mass Effect 3
by Karl Parakenings Let’s get one thing out of the way: Mass Effect 3 is a deeply, deeply flawed game. While the game does a few things well, it mostly suffers from the same resource and vision conflicts that have … Continue reading
Review: Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Changed Pop Culture Forever
By Karl Parakenings Author: David Kushner Publisher: Random House ISBN: 0812972155 Year: 2003 $15.78 (Kindle, copy purchased) $15.95 (Print) “We do illusions and none of it is true… You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here, you’re beginning to … Continue reading