Bit Creature

10/05/2013

Aaron Matteson is absolutely fu***ng brilliant. Read his two-part piece on trolling in Second Life: http://www.bitcreature.com/features/the-fool-and-the-villain-part-ii/

09/05/2013

Lana Polansky explores maps, space, and game design in this beautiful, thorough piece. The Edge Of The Ocean: http://www.bitcreature.com/criticism/the-edge-of-the-ocean/

The problem is to plot the map.My sense of geography is spotted with black holes. There’s the Chinatown and there’s the bridge and anything too far east just slips into the void. I know this area and I know how it connects to that area, but the space between the puzzle pieces is negative, unpopulate...

08/05/2013

In his second guest slot, Filipe Salgado offers up our first prose-poem. Play Everything: http://www.bitcreature.com/features/play-everything/

Play everything.No, I’m serious, play everything.Play that game of hopscotch those kids drew up on the sidewalk with coloured chalk. The boxes uneven, the numbering crooked.Play Rogue and try to decipher its pre-Wikipedian mysteries . Play Colossal Cave Adventure and learn its arcane syntax.Play poo...

07/05/2013

Gavin Craig tackles the conundrum of genre-comedy in video games: http://www.bitcreature.com/criticism/genre-in-question/

Why are there so few video game comedies? At least twice in the past year I’ve bumped into conversations trying to answer this question, neither of which was entirely satisfactory. On Splitsider, Noah Davis talked to a number of game designers and critics, who seemed to agree that it’s really diffic...

01/05/2013

Alexandra Geraets discusses the impact of the perspective, and the affecting stories it can influence: http://www.bitcreature.com/editorials/tell-me-your-story-and-let-me-play/

Perspective might be the most subjective thing about video games. It’s a personal thing, as I’ve never met another gamer who fully shares my tastes in games, but it’s also a game thing, as perspective – literal camera point of view, game play, narrative – is what keeps a gamer involved.Bioshock: Inf...

30/04/2013

Ryan Winslett reviews Zombie Tycoon II: Brainhov's Revenge, out today! http://www.bitcreature.com/reviews/zombie-tycoon-ii-brainhovs-revenge-review/

It was somewhere around the time when I was fighting a giant, undead, car-flinging grizzly bear with a massive zombie-bulldozer-thing that Zombie Tycoon II: Brainhov’s Revenge really started to click for me.As much as it pains me to admit this, I don’t have the tactical military prowess I like to im...

26/04/2013

"The Fool & The Villain: Is there such a thing as compassionate trolling?" By Aaron Matteson. http://www.bitcreature.com/editorials/the-fool-and-the-villain/

25/04/2013

Alexandra Geraets reviews Sacred Citadel, which hearkens back to Saturday morning cartoons: http://www.bitcreature.com/reviews/sacred-citadel-review/

Sacred Citadel is a side-scrolling beat-‘em-up adventure that looks and plays like a Saturday morning cartoon from the 1990s, but it is still an entertaining experience, good for a few hours of play. Solo campaigning is entertaining and a decent enough challenge, but the game is best when played wit...

24/04/2013

Rich Shivener reviews the controversial Dead Island: Riptide!! Did he love or hate? http://www.bitcreature.com/reviews/dead-island-riptide-review/

About five minutes into Dead Island: Riptide, my character slams a crowbar across the skull of an infected soldier, and she’s not happy. She’s annoyed. I’m confused.“I am so sick of this,” she hisses to herself.I take that as a meta-commentary on Riptide, a first-person shooter set in an open world…

18/04/2013

In case it passed you by, we're proud to have Daniel Starkey as a guest columnist: http://fb.me/1E5iTGfz6

17/04/2013

Guest columnist Daniel Starkey joins us with a discussion on empowerment and vulnerability: http://www.bitcreature.com/editorials/discordant-tones/

Love and war. Violence and empowerment. More and more these seem like vestiges of our medium’s adolescence. We work to shed tired tropes and clichés. The boss battle. The es**rt mission. The token love interest. The illusion of narrative complexity. The reassuring feeling of absolute dominance. Viol...

15/04/2013

Happy to have Zolani Stewart as a guest columnist, discussing the destroyed urban sprawl of Mirror's Edge: http://www.bitcreature.com/criticism/tightrope-wasteland/