Moving Pixels Podcast

A new puzzle game from the Atlus Persona Team, Catherine blends surprisingly difficult puzzle platforming with a strong narrative on masculine anxieties and adult relationships. Most interestingly of all, the game asks players to voice their own opinions on love, marriage, and children, but does it really demand a truthful answer?   Moving Pixels podcast regulars G. Christopher Williams and Kris Ligman are joined this week by Skyler Moss from Gamepad Dojo to discuss the game's mechanics, characterization and gender representation. Disagreements over interpretation abound as we explore Catherine's morality system, multiple endings, and structural cohesion in attempting to marry gameplay to a very dissimilar plot-or is marriage even the appropriate metaphor to deploy here?   Secrets are revealed, plot twists are spoiled, and the titular Catherine receives a thorough deconstruction, along with several others of the game's colorful cast. Can Skyler decide whether to agree with Chris or Kris and escape t

With one Chris out and another Kris stealing his chair again, the members of the Moving Pixels podcast discuss the game which kicked off Xbox Live's 2011 Summer of Arcade, Bastion. This debut title from the small development team at Supergiant has garnered plenty of attention for its lush visuals, solid gameplay, and unique "dynamic narration."   Join us as we discuss Bastion's place within the Western genre, the role of its soundtrack and narrator, and how the player brings himself to the gameplay through the game's unique challenges. We also dig into the game's multiple endings, so those averse to spoilers should watch their step.

With G. Christopher Williams out this week for some much-deserved R&R, podcast regulars Nick Dinicola, Rick Dakan, and Kris Ligman are joined by frequent PopMatters.com contributor Mike Schiller to discuss Child of Eden, an eye-pleasing and unassuming little release that has unexpectedly torn the Moving Pixels blog right down the middle.   A smaller release that was by and large overlooked next to the torrential negative press of Duke Nukem Forever, Child of Eden is a first-person bullet hell game with unexpected nuance, which may or may not work for the player. We also debate what Kinect functionality adds or subtracts to the experience and whether the included "god mode" truly breaks the game or offers something richer.   Tempers flare, questionable textual interpretations are invoked, and a good time is had by all as our podcasters volley back and forth on Child of Eden's gameplay and aesthetic merits. Listen for yourself to see if we come up with a solution . . . or if all of us even come ou

With an intentionally provocative name, Fat, Ugly or Slutty? has become a hit among readers for highlighting the sort of over-the-top trashtalk women gamers experience. From the cliched to the farcical and even the truly sad, FUoS is one part Why Was I Banned?, one part Hollaback, and eight parts "you have to read it to believe it."   We managed to track down three of the four FUoS admins-gtz, likeOMGitsFEDAY and inklesspen-a few weeks before PAX Prime to talk about the origins of the site, their own gaming experiences, and some of their favorite submissions. We also ponder a few meaningful questions about the state of online gaming-and what a site like Fat, Ugly or Slutty? can mean for it.   If you are attending the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle at the end of the month, be sure to pay these fantastic ladies (and gentleman) a visit at their panel! Date, time and location forthcoming on the Fat, Ugly or Slutty? website.

Following last week's discussion of madness in the newest iteration of Alice, it only seemed fitting that we would consider the other "mad release" this summer, Suda51 and Shinji Mikami's Shadows of the Damned.   Between its juvenile humor and interesting shooting mechanics based on darkness and light lies a strange but compelling critique of classic video game tropes. Our discussion attempts to touch on as much of the madness as we can reasonably (or unreasonably) consider.

As a follow up to a game released over a decade ago, Alice: Madness Returns reimagines American McGee's Wonderland mythos as well as the somewhat retrograde genre of the action platformer. This week the Moving Pixels podcast crew discusses Alice's imagery, mechanics, and overall presentation of insanity.

Okay, you probably won't die too much in L.A. Noire, but there are a fair amount of corpses littered around Team Bondi's recreation of L.A. in the 1940s for your investigatory consideration. Detective Cole Phelps is on the case for one of the biggest early releases of the year, and the Moving Pixels crew discusses how successful Team Bondi and Rockstar are at presenting this tough and tough-to-like hardboiled hero.   Recorded just about a week after the game's release, much of our impressions of the game were fresh as we hashed out our initial impressions of this game that some claim is not quite a game.

The tower defense game is not a genre that is often given much attention in the critical discussion of video games. Usually light on the narrative qualities that game critics enjoy focusing on and often assumed to be a slightly more casual genre, there's still a lot to be considered in this type of game's appeal and in its most successful examples.   Our discussion, of course, touches on Plants Vs. Zombies, but we also look at a few other fresher titles like Anomaly: Warzone Earth and Defense Grid: the Awakening.

Last weekend the Moving Pixels podcast crew convened to discuss our impressions of E3 2011. While Rick Dakan, Nick Dinicola, and G. Christopher Williams all caught glimpses of the expo via the web or television, we are joined by Kris Ligman, who attended this year's event.   Like many others, we couldn't help but focus on some of the bigger announcements of this year, the previews of new hardware releases from Sony and Nintendo. Additionally, we spend a lot of time considering the revamping of Lara Croft in the new Tomb Raider. So, something old (kind of) and something new to consider in this year's big gaming event.

This week the podcast crew got together with writers from The Border House, Gay Gamer, and The Vorpal Bunny Ranch to discuss inclusivity in video games and these sites that provide a voice for gamers that exist on the margins.   With Chris recovering from a tonsillectomy, Kris graciously filled in to host our discussion with Alexandra Raymond of The Border House, faePuck of GayGamer.net, and Denis Farr who has worked at both sites and also writes at his own blog, Vorpal Bunny Ranch.

From campy exploitation to the exploitation of addiction, the Moving Pixels podcast discusses a few of this year's flash game releases.   You can find free-to-play versions of the three titles that we discuss in this episode below:   High Tea Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars The Man with the Invisible Trousers

Of course, we here at the Moving Pixels blog are fans of the work done over at the Critical Distance web site, a site interested in serving in a curatorial role in highlighting and maintaining various discussions in video game criticism. Conceived by Ben Abraham and launched in 2009, Critical Distance provides a weekly update of some of the best video game criticism published around the internet. Additionally, they provide a number of critical compilations of writings done by various critics, journalists, and academics on significant game titles.   We wanted to sit down and talk with Ben and fellow Critical Distance contributor, Eric Swain, to talk a little bit about the site, what purpose they see it serving in the emerging conversation about games, and how they manage the Herculean task of locating and managing such a vast array of voices.

A few weeks ago the Moving Pixels podcast crew revisited 2007's Portal in anticipation of the impending release of its sequel.   Well, the sequel has arrived, so we have gotten together once again to consider how well the follow up works in terms of its extended narrative and its various gameplay tweaks.

Given how much Dragon Age II occupied our thoughts on so many of our blogs in March, it seems inevitable that the Moving Pixels podcast crew would gather to discuss our varying takes on the game.   Despite its more limited geographical scope, Kirkwall is a game world well suited to an expanded discusssion. Bioware's ambitious efforts to tweak combat, experiment with narrative, and present one of the most inclusive casts in gaming are just a number of topics worth returning to in our expansive chat about the game.

Sometimes a tech problem requires a little strategy to resolve. With some trouble with a microphone among a few other snafus leaving us potentially unable to discuss our planned topic this week, gamers that we are, our solution was to turn this weeks show into a game by putting a little social media to work for us and treating this podcast as something a little more interactive than usual.   The result is this week's experiment in podcasting, a show based on utter miscellany about gaming and gaming culture. We sent a "voiceless" Kris Ligman out to Twitter to gather possible mini-topics for discussion this week related to gaming, and then, of course, arbitrarily assigned points to our podcasters ability for improvisationally riffing on said topics in short conversational bursts.   You will find that some of our intial efforts to shoot from the hip on topics like Lesbian Spider-Women from Mars or "books on video games" may not be all that exceptional, but as the podcast moves along and we bite into s

It was a shooter that was nothing like a shooter. Given the imminent release of its sequel, the Moving Pixels podcast crew felt that it was time to take a step back into 2007's Portal..   We tried to spare ourselves from just revisiting the old "cake is a lie" memes and the like and instead found ourselves revisting the tight pacing, innovative gameplay, and, oh yeah, we talk about the rivalry between GLaDOS and Chell.

At Tom's suggestion, the Moving Pixels podcast crew decided to take a trip back in time to have a look at Jordan Mechner's 1997 game, The Last Express.   A thriller/mystery packaged within the structure of a kind of much more interactive Choose Your Own Adventure, this point-and-click adventure is really not exactly like any of the genre categories that I just listed. Featuring a very different approach to the concept of a video game script and some interesting ways of playing with time, The Last Express is quite unique, offering a very mature and very innovative approach to interactive storytelling worth mulling over even a decade later.

Dungeons & Dragons might be its low tech form, but video games have not strayed far from the formula of getting some friends together, killing some monsters, and collecting loot. From Gauntlet to Diablo to Torchlight, the hack and slash game is an experience both social and individualistic, steeped ironically in both greed and co-operation.   This week the Moving Pixels podcast looks at the evolution of the dungeon crawl from its social aspects and etiquette to its mechanics and playstyle.

An aborted effort to play retro classic Maniac Mansion leads to a discussion by the Moving Pixels crew about differences between older and newer games.   We wonder how well retro games hold up with rapidly changing platform generations, as well as higher expectations for graphics quality and overall accessibility.

Originally conceived of as a discussion of the best superhero video games of all time, the Moving Pixels Podcast crew quickly discovered that super powered games have been-for the most part-less than super.   With that in mind, our discussion of the presentation of superheroes in video games became, instead, a discussion of the history of the superhero in video games-more particularly the refinements that have lead to more interesting gaming experiences within this genre.