Awhile ago, after that 2nd Prince of Persia game on the Xbox came out, I heard that the PoP team was going to be split into two teams, and they would be working on separate projects.  The first fruit of this Ubi team bisection we saw was Assassin’s Creed.  The second offering (from the 2nd [...]

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Awhile back, while I was living under a bus, I saw an article on Joystiq which pointed to a much larger article on Gamasutra, which in essence, said “new IP for EA fails.” They’re referring of course to the less than stellar launch of EA’s new IP this quarter of Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space.  [...]

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For awhile I’ve been struggling to find a way to describe what I feel has changed about game design in recent years.  My own appreciation of games has been changing, and for awhile I thought it was just me.  I’ve been finding games like F.E.A.R. or HAZE or the idea behind Fracture as tired cliches. [...]

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I was reading a great followup to GTA IV and how well they nailed their depiction of New York city over at Sexy Videogameland, when Leigh started wondering why it had been so long since she’d played GTA IV, much less thought about it.  Namely, she questions why she used to spend so much time [...]

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I was watching yet another video for Prototype today at work, marvelling how they all look exactly the same yet are claiming to show some new content, when I heard the Exec Producer or whoever it was bragging about how intelligent their Parkouring AI was. The AI for the Player character. The Player character who [...]

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Randall Munroe over at the always kickass and occassionally deep webcomic xkcd posted some interesting stats over on his blog last month, where he asks his readers to quickly name a recent popular movie that had two female leads as the top billed stars of the movie. Naturally, it’s a trick question, as the stats [...]

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Awhile back Clint Hocking wrote a pretty kickass piece critiquing Bioshock’s Ludonarrative Dissonance. For a long time I wasn’t sure what the hell he was getting at with the word “Ludonarrative,” and after I just recently did an interview for a gaming journalism student, I learned that he had combined the terms “Ludology” and “Narrative.” [...]

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One of the things I’m noticing in my playthrough of Assassin’s Creed (although they aren’t the only ones doing this) that is bugging me a lot lately is this mis-placed idea that the character animations always have to “line up” with what he’s really doing in the world.  Somehow “next-gen” has come to mean “more [...]

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I managed to finally get my mitts on Assassin’s Creed and began a playthrough of it today, and a buddy of mine brought over Mass Effect just so I could look at it. I’ll have some larger notes as to what each one’s getting right and wrong later, maybe some full critiques, but for now [...]

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