“Gyossait” is a platformer produced by indie game developer Amon26, and available to play for free on Newgrounds. As someone with an interest in indie horror games, I’ve been aware of this atmospheric, dark platformer for a while. Though the gameplay is simple–you use the arrow keys to move left, right, jump, and deflect projectiles with a shield, and have…
Tag: video games
A Brief Moment of Literature Within LIMBO
Minor spoilers for those who want to experience the game in the dark for their first time: LIMBO is a dark and foreboding game, where you play as a small boy trying to save his sister. You run from the woods through an industrial nightmare, and get chased and killed by almost everything you see. There are traps set in…
The Kraken’s Day Out
Looking at “I Wish I Were the Moon” in class reminded me of a game I ran across some time ago, “(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors” by Gregory Weir. The two works are very similar on a visual level, with flat, colorful art composed of simple pixel sprites, and they both have multiple endings, which carries…
The Gray Area
It seems like every game released these days has a morality system that gives the player the choice of being either a good or a bad guy. While this system is handled well in many games, and gives the player greater control over the game world, it has rarely been implemented in a way that is fully satisfying. The problem…
A Unique and Contemporary Stylistic Flair in a Less-than-Perfect Video Game: Kane & Lynch 2
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is difficult to immediately explain. In our current generation of advanced hardware technology on consoles such as the Playstation 3 or the XBOX 360, it’s no surprise gamers immediately and initially judge a game on whether the gameplay is intuitive, fluid, appropriately paced, and solid in design. If controls are found to be “broken”…
Review of Silent Hill 4: The Room
I have been a die hard fan of the horror game franchise Silent Hill for several years now, but, up until just a few weeks ago, I had only ever played the first three games and Silent Hill: Homecoming. Therefore, I was incredibly excited when I got my hands on a copy of Silent Hill 4: The Room a few…
Video Games: Elit or Art?
I’ve seen discussion in this blog about what counts as elit, what doesn’t, and what balances on the edge. One common topic is that of video games as electronic literature; but part of me doubts that video games lean more towards electronic literature than they do as an art form. The debate about whether or not video games are an…
Clearing the clouds, clouding the clear
For today’s class we all played Jason Nelson’s four part game series “Arctic Acre Oddities and Curious Lands.” In these games Nelson uses glitch aesthetic to overturn a lot of standard notions about how a video game should deliver meaning and how one should function. Instead of making anymore generalizations right now about all of the games I’ll take a…
Text & video games – Adventures with the Super Famicom
(One thing before you read: the sizes of my pictures are ridiculous, I’m sorry) Recently, my household acquired a Super Famicom. Basically, the Super Famicom is the Japanese version of the Super Nintendo, with the difference being that the games that were released for each console weren’t always the same. A lot of games were released exclusively in Japan for the…
Fruit Ninja
When learning the process of Game Maker, all I could think of was the popular game/app, Fruit Ninja. Granted the two really have nothing in common besides fruit, but I still find it interesting that such an overall simple idea helped to create one the best selling apps of all time. When a game such as this comes out, it…