(NON-)SPOILER NOTE: This post discusses the moral situations of the protagonists of several games without going beyond very general plot outlines (Does the character make seemingly immoral decisions? Do his/her reasons seem good?

Why Hasn’t There Been a Great Movie Based on a Video Game?

When I saw the roller-coaster-like movie Gravity, I was surprised to realize that I occasionally felt like I was watching a video game on a giant screen.

Why Keep the Flawed Masterpiece GTA V So Stupid, When It Could At Least Be Irreverent and Clever?

I recently finished a fifty-five-hour playthrough of Grand Theft Auto V. It is a brilliant achievement. It’s a ridiculously fun game. It’s also a very disappointing game.

 In the last couple of years, interconnected games in which player actions in one game affect options or situations in another have started to pop up more frequently than usual.

As I discuss in a related post [here], escort missions are usually terrible, bringing otherwise fun games to a screeching halt with shoddy mechanics, annoying characters, and terrible AI.

Note: spoilers for the two games being discussed are all over this article.

Note: spoilers for the two games being discussed are all over this article.

Can Gameplay Have Spoilers Like Stories Can?

NOTE: This post contains story and/or gameplay spoilers for the following games: Final Fantasy VII, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, The Walking Dead (Telltale Games version), Mass Effect (1), Heavy Rain, Spec Ops: The Line, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, Infamous 2, and Mass Effect 3.

Just finished a re-play of BioShock Infinite the other day. There are so many reviews and gamers calling BioShock Infinite one of the best games every made for the PS3.

 Should Halo Expanded it's giant Universe going forward? Or Not?

I never owned an Xbox system until I bought a 360 in Fall 2011. So I was almost exactly ten years late to the Halo party when I fired up a hand-me-down copy of Halo 2 that fall. Halo 2 was showing its age by that point, of course, but it still made an impression in a couple of ways.

Balancing the Old and the New in Game Sequels

I started playing Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones for GBA yesterday, and while on the Fire Emblem Wiki I glanced over the summary of the game’s reception, which went something like this:

In another post, I argued that videogames (like all expressive media) influence the world but that, cumulatively, their influence is more likely to be positive than negative because games can show us new. 

Dive into XCOM’s Compelling Video Game Story

            Partway through XCOM: Enemy Within (the expanded version of XCOM: Enemy Unknown), I realized that its video game story would never work in a movie.