Moving Pixels Podcast

This week the Moving Pixels podcast considers the ballet of blood choreographed by People Can Fly in their new game, Bulletstorm.   Is the game a perfect storm of masculinity and mayhem or just more boys and their bullets?

With one Chris out and another Kris in, this week the Moving Pixels crew travels to Ferelden to discuss the world of Dragon Age: Origins and its many expansions. Do these downloadable prologues, epilogues, and side stories add anything to the diverse and complex world of Origins? Or are they just recycled levels splashed together to make a quick buck? Join us as we dig into everything from the game itself to the demo for the sequel.

Last week the Moving Pixels podcast crew took a look at Dead Space as a transmedia phenomenon, considering the films, comics, and other spin offs that the series has generated.   This week we look at the games themselves, considering their innovative design decisions and gameplay, alongside their grotesquerie and some of their choice in presentation of issues like work and women.

Response to Enslaved has been divisive. Most agree that the game does not feature the most outstanding gameplay, but after acknowledging that, opinions vary a great deal.   Most divisions about Enslaved arise around its storytelling. With gameplay that may or may not do service to its plot but featuring some talented voice acting and direction alongside expressive motion capture and beautiful graphics, does Enslaved manage to tell a good story?   This week the Moving Pixels podcast crew discusses the success or failure of Enslaved's somewhat controversial storytelling.

More than just a video game, Electronic Arts has given Dead Space the full transmedia treatment, shipping movies, comics, and spin off titles with the same grisly themes. In anticipation of a discussion of the release of Dead Space 2, the Moving Pixels podcast explores the universe of Dead Space as a media phenomenon.   Is this all about marketing or do these additional properties flesh out the mythos or enliven the concepts of this action/horror hybrid?

Shifting settings from the mall to the casino, the Dead Rising series hasn't changed in its commitment to gross excess and superficiality.   In a similar sense, much of the approach to grappling with the zombie hordes has not been altered significantly in the 2010 follow up to Dead Rising. The player is still tasked with killing zombies and psychos, while ensuring the safety of as many of his fellow survivors as he can. The more subtle changes ("subtle" being a term that is normally very rarely applied to a Dead Rising title) come in terms of combat tweaks, some changes in difficulty, and some very different psycho fights.   This week the Moving Pixels podcast crew discusses the good and bad in those changes and whether or not the follow up is a worthy successor to one of the more popular early titles of this hardware generation.

As an experiential medium, it is often the little moments that mean so much in video games. This week we wrap up our discussion of gaming in 2010 by recapping some of the most emotionally affective and just plain cool moments in games like Red Dead Redemption, Bioshock 2, Amnesia, and Heavy Rain (to name just a few).

While Infinity Ward has take the franchise to more a contemporary setting, Black Ops developer Treyarch had yet to stray outside the boundaries of World War II with its Call of Duty installments until late last year. With a Cold War setting and a title suggestive more of espionage than traditional battle, the best selling game of last year attempted to tell a slightly different style of war story.   However, is there any real substance to Treyarch's style this time out?   The Moving Pixels podcast crew considers this and other questions by evaluating the phenomenon of Call of Duty: Black Ops.

This week, the Moving Pixels podcast crew trains their eyes on the direct sequel to Assassin's Creed II. This time the series returns to the story of the Italian Renaissance era assassin, Ezio.   However, this time Ezio has made a few new friends. So, among other aspects of the game, we discuss the "brotherhood" that this new Assassin's Creed has embraced in both its story and multiplayer options.

Certainly, it is time to usher in the new, but the Moving Pixels podcast crew decided to pause to reconsider gaming during the cusp of the last decade.   With that in mind, each of us are counting down our five favorite games of the PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, and the PC gaming era.

Bethesda's latest iteration of the Fallout series offers Sin City as one of the last remaining beacons of hope in their postapocalyptic American Wastleland. Despite the buggy quality of the game at release, many players still found themselves "all in" for this expansion of the retro-futuristic universe.   This week the Moving Pixels podcast crew discuss the subtleties of socialization, scrounging, and survival in New Vegas.

As you may have noticed in the last few weeks of November, nearly every writer at the Moving Pixels blog has had something to say about Fable III (and if you don't know this, feel free to check out the links below).   From the game's whimsical aesthetic to its politics to its possibly unfulfilled promises (within the game itself and from Lionhead about what the game offers as an experience), we all have some opinion on this newest iteration of the saga of the hero of Albion.   In this episode, we re-explore some of our isolated opinions about the game and try to suss out the effectiveness of the stranger design details, like the game's pretty unique re-envisioning of a menu system.   Oh, and Rick and I get pretty heated about Reaver-nasty little bugger that he is (that is Reaver, not Rick).

This week we seek to answer that age old question: is everything better with zombies?   Zombies have invaded Rockstar's version of the Old West in Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare. So, this week the Moving Pixels podcast crew consider the tweaked mechanics and otherworldly cast of this unexpected hybrid of genres.

While we like to put game mechanics in nice little boxes in order to describe to others how a video game plays, nevertheless, this generation of games has seen a lot of cross breeding between game genres, making it harder to easily describe what a game essentially "is".   From leveling up in an FPS to purchasing upgrades in platformers, the last decade seems one fixitated on hybridization as a form of innovation. In particular the pleasure derived from evolving characters, mechanically and narratively, seems to be one of the more popular means of appealing to players who want to have a hand in developing the role that they will play in a game.   This week we discuss such hybrids and what the strengths and weaknesses of taking a Frankenstein-like approach to design might be.

With all the furor surrounding Minecraft in the indie game community, the Moving Pixels podcast crew couldn't help but have a discussion of the game.   While a couple of us have only had a more limited experience with the browser version, nevertheless, this sandbox building experience is worth considering and raises questions about what motivates us to play.

What's a few Microsoft Points among friends?   From Activision to XSEED, it seems like every publisher these days is pressing developers to produce downloadable content, which raises some interesting questions for gamers looking to completely engage with their games.   Does seeing nipples improve the experience of The Saboteur? Does The Signal illuminate the murkier plot points of Alan Wake? This week the Moving Pixels podcast crew try to answer these questions through a discussion concerning what may or may not be added to the experience of a game through the inclusion of downloadable content.

The weekend probably saw its share of ghosts and goblins dropping by your doorstep. Those same little ghouls have inspired the Moving Pixels Podcast crew in a discussion of horror games.   Each of our contributors put together a list of their top five horror titles, judging them by their ability to scare, repel, and otherwise provoke. Our lists are surprisingly eclectic and may at times challenge what constitutes horror in games altogether. So, join us for a discussion of slashers, things that cannot be named, and other things that go bump in the night.

This week the Moving Pixels podcast crew discuss how gamers are taught to play. We discuss the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of game tutorials, revisit consideration of the game manual, and generally think about how game tutorials and other forms of learning effect the gameplay experience.

The Moving Pixels Podcast crew decided to follow up on last week's discussion of "Real Evil in Video Games" with a discussion of the various villains in games that are of a more idealized nature than the simulations of real life villainy that we had previously concerned ourselves with.   The resulting discussion took several different forms, including discussion of how gamers view conflicts within games themselves, the "evils" of various forms of antagonism within game narratives and also game mechanics themselves.   As a result, some of this discussion may be concerned with villains that represent more abstracted forms of evil but may also confront the more "malicious" obstacles embedded in the design of a game.

Hitler served as the final boss in World War II and also in Castle Wolfenstein, which is weird, right?   This week we consider a number of real life bad guys from the Nazis to the Mafia and the potential consequences of attempting to simulate such real life villainy in video games.