Moving Pixels Podcast

This season of Telltale's The Walking Dead has offered players a way into the story via a familiar character, Lee Everett's ward Clementine.

This week-among other issues raised this time out-we consider the strangeness of "being Clementine" as opposed to what would normally be the case in a video game with such a serious tone, a less vulnerable, more adult character.

Another day, another free-to-play release, but this one has been launched by a developer with a long history of bringing virtual addiction to the masses.

This week we play a few hands of Blizzard's collectible card game, Hearthstone, while considering its place in the free-to-play gaming landscape.

If Telltale Games's latest episodic game, The Wolf Among Us, was already based on the dark vision of the fairy tale universe of Bill Willingham's Fables, this episode gets even seamier and more hard boiled.

On this episode of the Moving Pixels Podcast, we explore just how bad the game allows us to make the Big Bad Wolf.

With its unique control scheme, I like to think of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons as a "rubbing your belly, while patting you head" simulator.

A kind of co-operative single player game, Brothers manages to represent a sibling relationship through the controller itself. Two characters can be controlled using each half of a controller, thus creating both a sense of unity between the brothers at the same time as representing the autonomy of each character simply through the act of controlling them as individuals and as a unit.

This week we explore how this 2-in-1 control scheme plays out mechanically and narratively in this indie darling from last year.

The Stanley Parable is a game about games. While parables are usually straightforward little tales that have a clear and singular meaning, though, as noted, this is a game about games. Thus it is also a parable about paths, paths that expand, branch out, and loop back on themselves.

This week we explore the branching narratives of The Stanley Parable to see if there can be a singular and straightforward way of understanding Stanley's plight.

Your mom already hates GTA V and now it seems like a fair amount of video game critics do too.

That's why we're spending much of our time discussing the endings of GTA V this episode. We want to explore what GTA V has to say about the United States in 2014. And we're pretty convinced that it has more than a few things to say about the current state of the American economy.

It may seem unlikely, but nothing evokes terror more than a game of hide-and-seek. Hiding out and deciding when to put yourself at risk is the core of that game, and Ice-Pick Lodge have cashed in on that familiar childhood terror in its own version of the game, Knock-Knock.

Nick, Eric, and I consider the game's successes and failures in porting childhood play into video game form. We also consider its bizarre and avant garde presentation and whether or not it amounts to much more than a disquieting mood.

By all accounts, it was the best game of 2012. So, we're back to chat about the newest complications and moral conundrums of the second season of The Walking Dead.

2013 was a year full of familiar franchises and little indie gems. However, as we discuss our own favorites from this year, we find it hard to pick a clear standout title from among the rest.

Thus, we consider: it was a year of good games, but was it a year of great games?

Known for innovation in mechanics and storytelling, an interest in games that ally themselves with the language and beats of cinema, and a sometimes greater commitment to artistic ambition than to perfect execution, David Cage and Quantic Dream have returned with another somewhat controversial title built on their vision of the modern adventure game, Beyond: Two Souls.

This episode Nick Dinicola, Eric Swain, and Jorge Albor discuss the game and how it might be "an evolution of of the point-and-click adventure game that never happened".