Gameography

This week we say farewell to John Romero with his last AAA shooter, Daikatana. Last week we talked through its disturbed development, and this time we talked about how, despite Daikatana being one of the most reviled games of all time, it still left us disappointed somehow. It’s one of those rare blunders that makes […]

The post S2 E28: Sucking Down John Romero’s Daikatana first appeared on Gameography Podcast.

This week we begin to wrap up our journey with Id co-founder John Romero with a look at the ill-fated production of his post-Id project Daikatana. Daikatana has been a punchline for the last 23 years, but it wasn’t always. There were a few years when it was one of the most highly anticipated games […]

The post S2 E27: Daikatana’s Mythic Production Woes first appeared on Gameography Podcast.

This week we continue our retrospective on Deus Ex, the seminal Immersive Sim. While age hasn’t been entirely kind to the game’s visuals and sounds, we found a surprisingly relevant and meaningful story and clever design to be found. We talk about Deus Ex’s relationship to player choice and player agency, and the masterful way […]

The post S2 E26: Deus Ex’s Philosophy of Human Agency first appeared on Gameography Podcast.

We’re back after a bit of a break with Matt Devil to continue discussing the history of the immersive sim with the quintessential spy action thriller Deus Ex. This episode covers how the game came to be from a spark of an idea while watching the X-files to John Romero calling up Warren Spector with […]

The post S2 E25: How Deus Ex Was Made first appeared on Gameography Podcast.

This week we’re joined by special guest Matthew Devil to talk games that have made us cry, Sonic the Hedgehog, the upcoming Mario movie and of course we get around to talking through our thoughts on the System Shock remake demo at some point. That’s it for Gameography for 2022. We’ll be back next year […]

The post S2 E24: System Shock Remake With Matt Devil first appeared on Gameography Podcast.

We talk a bit about the punishing difficulty and how that probably stopped many from seeing the quite insane ending. And we finally get to talking about how the game was made by a small team working in symbiosis with the company who made the original System Shock, Looking Glass Studios while they worked on […]

The post S2 E23: System Shock 2 – How SS2 Was Made first appeared on Gameography Podcast.

System Shock 2 took players into deep space and placed them in the middle of a politically complex and tense situation. While the player character has amnesia and wakes up to the horror of an alien infestation on their ship, the player knows that this is System Shock and that SHODAN is somewhere around the […]

The post S2 E22: System Shock 2 – The Story of Our Voices first appeared on Gameography Podcast.

System Shock 2 saw rookie designer Ken Levine and his new business partners at Irrational Games take a swing at their take on the System Shock universe. System Shock 2 introduced true survival horror elements to the franchise, and concerned you less with hacking AIs and more with hacking apart zombies. This game is still […]

The post S2 E21: System Shock 2 – The Horror of Discovery first appeared on Gameography Podcast.

System Shock was an early example of a game that thrust you into a fully realized world, with a backstory, seamless travel between areas and interlocking systems. It could appear almost quaint given that these things are in many ways the standards by which almost all modern games are judged, but at the time they […]

The post S2 E20: System Shock: the First Great Immersive Sim first appeared on Gameography Podcast.

Looking Glass Technology did what Id didn’t. The plan for their 1994 immersive first-person shooter was on the face of things quite similar to Romero and Hall’s vision for Doom: A story driven, action packed, seamless open world adventure through a space station. But while Romero ditched the story and open-world design, for short levels […]

The post S2 E19: System Shock, Dreaming in Cyberspace first appeared on Gameography Podcast.