A videogamer visits San Francisco and gets a serious case of deja vu — with pictures.
Fantasy novels are filled with war, and maybe that’s a default because human history is also filled with war. And violence is exciting, right? But I start to wonder: can’t we imagine a different way of telling a story? Fantasy is an imagined world after all. After reading Laurie J. Marks’ Water Logic, I’ve come [...]
A while ago I watched some Godzilla movies with some people who don’t exactly appreciate the aesthetics of suitmation / kigurumi, or, in less technical language, a guy in a rubber suit. One of the things I like best about Godzilla movies is that as soon as I glimpse Godzilla rising from the depths or [...]
I hated studying history in high school. It was as if the curriculum had been designed to leave out everything that impressionable minds could possibly associate with, while making no provisions to seem like it was anything but handed down from an institution. However, in recent years it’s a totally different story. I won’t read [...]
Every time a new World War 2 First Person Shooter is announced, the collective groans from gamers and game media can be heard for miles, as if nothing more could be possibly done with this setting. The genre receives a bad reputation mainly because of the sheer amount of mediocre copycat titles that seem to [...]
I was a little nervous as I waited for Half-Life 2 (Vivendi, 2004) to start. The original Half-Life (Sierra, 1998) is one of the reasons this column exists — the game brought atmosphere and intelligence to the first-person shooter without skimping on the visceral kickassocity, and brought me back to videogames after a decade of [...]
Six million people listen to a radio broadcast, and a quarter of them run screaming from their houses. Their frenzy and fear infect many other people who have no idea what’s going on. Mass panic! Are the Martians really invading? The streets are crowded with people who all believe it.
If you’re the kind of reader who wants to know what happens next, then China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh might not be the book for you. This debut novel from 1992 has intriguing characters and a few strands of plot, but overall it operates a little more abstractly than most novels. The main [...]
A man is having his first physiotherapy appointment. A woman comes in wearing a white doctor’s coat. Their conversation begins on a clinical level, the doctor asking the man about how he sustained his injuries. The man explains that he works in the videogame industry, and in fact has come from work. She assumes that [...]
I’ve managed to climb down the scaffolding in the pouring rain and get to an open window. It leads to a kitchen, and from there I hear voices: it’s the cleaners, or rather the hired killers masquerading as cleaners who have been dogging my every step. They’re watching a program called “Lords and Ladies” when [...]
Ninjalicious is the founder of Infiltration, a zine documenting his urban exploration hobby in hilarious and diagram-enhanced travelogues. He’s recently been playing Thief II (Eidos, 2000), a videogame with a focus on stealth, and I asked him about how the first-person sneaker measured up to his real-life experience.
Powerful women are sexy, and this cuts both ways. MobyGames, a game documentation and review project, has a categorization for female protagonists that shows that there have been about as many games released in the first three years of this decade as there was in the entire previous one. There’s a bunch of factors involved, [...]
Is it possible to have a pleasure circuit overload? “Girls are to be kept away from those activities of civilization that over-stimulate the imagination and the senses, such as fashionable novels, paintings, music, balls, theaters… as this can lead to uterine epilepsy, sapphic tastes, and nymphomania.” While this is Victorian-era advice, it’s reflective of how [...]
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What, it’s June already? I’m sure a I had a whole year here a minute ago. In any case, summer means humidity, allergies, and a sad lack of home AC. This year, it also means squirrels in the roof (don’t ask. No, really).
