Moving Pixels Podcast

Another day, another free-to-play release, but this one has been launched by a developer with a long history of bringing virtual addiction to the masses.   This week we play a few hands of Blizzard's collectible card game, Hearthstone, while considering its place in the free-to-play gaming landscape.

If Telltale Games's latest episodic game, The Wolf Among Us, was already based on the dark vision of the fairy tale universe of Bill Willingham's Fables, this episode gets even seamier and more hard boiled.   On this episode of the Moving Pixels Podcast, we explore just how bad the game allows us to make the Big Bad Wolf.

With its unique control scheme, I like to think of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons as a "rubbing your belly, while patting you head" simulator.   A kind of co-operative single player game, Brothers manages to represent a sibling relationship through the controller itself. Two characters can be controlled using each half of a controller, thus creating both a sense of unity between the brothers at the same time as representing the autonomy of each character simply through the act of controlling them as individuals and as a unit.   This week we explore how this 2-in-1 control scheme plays out mechanically and narratively in this indie darling from last year.

The Stanley Parable is a game about games. While parables are usually straightforward little tales that have a clear and singular meaning, though, as noted, this is a game about games. Thus it is also a parable about paths, paths that expand, branch out, and loop back on themselves.   This week we explore the branching narratives of The Stanley Parable to see if there can be a singular and straightforward way of understanding Stanley's plight.

Your mom already hates GTA V and now it seems like a fair amount of video game critics do too.   That's why we're spending much of our time discussing the endings of GTA V this episode. We want to explore what GTA V has to say about the United States in 2014. And we're pretty convinced that it has more than a few things to say about the current state of the American economy.

It may seem unlikely, but nothing evokes terror more than a game of hide-and-seek. Hiding out and deciding when to put yourself at risk is the core of that game, and Ice-Pick Lodge have cashed in on that familiar childhood terror in its own version of the game, Knock-Knock.   Nick, Eric, and I consider the game's successes and failures in porting childhood play into video game form. We also consider its bizarre and avant garde presentation and whether or not it amounts to much more than a disquieting mood.

By all accounts, it was the best game of 2012. So, we're back to chat about the newest complications and moral conundrums of the second season of The Walking Dead.

2013 was a year full of familiar franchises and little indie gems. However, as we discuss our own favorites from this year, we find it hard to pick a clear standout title from among the rest.   Thus, we consider: it was a year of good games, but was it a year of great games?

Known for innovation in mechanics and storytelling, an interest in games that ally themselves with the language and beats of cinema, and a sometimes greater commitment to artistic ambition than to perfect execution, David Cage and Quantic Dream have returned with another somewhat controversial title built on their vision of the modern adventure game, Beyond: Two Souls.   This episode Nick Dinicola, Eric Swain, and Jorge Albor discuss the game and how it might be "an evolution of of the point-and-click adventure game that never happened".

Telltale Games returns with a game of choices and consequences, but this time out those hard decisions are embedded in the completely fantastic world of Fables, not the relative social realism of a zombie apocalypse. The question is does this formula work with new material?   The Wolf Among Us is a bit more action oriented than Telltale's version of The Walking Dead. It is at once made familiar through its use of fairy tale and folklore and less familiar due to its heavy reliance on a media property with a complex background and back story that is less familiar to the casual player new to the game's source material.   This week we dive in with both feet to see what we make of the first major episodic game since Telltale delivered what may have been the best game of last year.

They may never be financial successes, but Suda51 titles rarely fail to leave an impression. Killer Is Dead is a little punk, a little noir, a little James Bond, and a whole lot of crazy.   This week we consider the relative value and possible meanings of Suda51's most recent digital provocation.

Nick Dinicola and Eric Swain return this week to October 1995 to revisit a horror classic, The Dreamers Guild's expansion of Harlan Ellison's short story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream."   The game, co-written by Ellison himself, develops the back stories of five victims tortured for over a century by the malevolent super computer AM. Its horrors develop in the game, not so much via gore or titillating jump scares, but around what it suggests might really lurk in the human heart, a malevolence and cruelty that matches that of the horrific super computer that humanity is responsible for designing.

Having found the on ramp to the Zero, Kentucky Route Zero: Episode Two proceeds to immediately disorient the player and distort the world that we are attempting to explore even further.   This week we discuss further the game that seems insistent on getting us lost and of reminding us of what has been lost in a world comprised of display, empty representation, and endless highways to nowhere.

The Moving Pixels blog has committed its share of virtual ink to the discussion of this summer's "It game," Gone Home. So, we figured it was time to discuss as a group our impressions of this study in environmental storytelling and exploration.

A strange little indie release early this year took us all by surprise. Mesmerizing in its absurd presentation and deeply indebted to text adventures of days past, Kentucky Route Zero presents a world in decay, begging to be excavated.   Of course, the first episode of the game's mines, maps, and madness all beg to be explored in some depth, which is exactly what we intend to attempt in this week's podcast.

Rogue Legacy initially feels merely like a blast from the past with its 16-but sensibilities and imagery.   This week, though, we talk about the game and the possible implications of its economic systems and financially motivated play.

Another day, another zombie apocalypse, and 400 Days gives Telltale Games another chance to test our humanity within the context of said apocalypse.   Join our podcasters as we consider the right and the wrong of interacting with hungry zombies and maybe even hungrier humans-and, of course, when it might be most appropriate to shoot another guy's leg off.

This week the Moving Pixels podcast revisits the muddled, half crazed genius of Suda 51's Killer 7. Well, at least some of us revisit it. For Eric Swain and Nick Dinicola this is their first go round with what might be the quintessential Suda 51 title.   We'll consider the madness, the vulgarity, the downright frustrating mechanics, and also how Suda provokes and interrogates gaming through what was most Americans first glimpse of one of video games' most colorful auteurs.

This week most of our regular bloggers take a peek at the zombie apocalypse as translated by Uncharted developer Naughty Dog. This episode Nick, Eric, Scott, and Jorge discuss The Last of Us.

This week the Moving Pixels podcast considers how we take the supposed "meta" elements of gaming for granted. But then considers how these elements contribute or detract from the drama and realism of the gaming experience.