Moving Pixels Podcast

Fez is an amazing phenomenon, generating a unique community that both works together to solve its many perspective driven puzzles but also shares in its appreciation of secrecy with its and tehir desire to maintain the mystery of the game. Keeping hush hush on anything in the Internet Age is a rather unlikely feat, but Fez enthusiasts seem committed to the cause.

This week we discuss that community, the game itself, and, well, spoil a few of those mysteries. So, listeners, be warned (though, for a change, we actually announce when the spoiler section is coming up in deference to those committed to encouraging players to experience how Fez's mysteries unravel from your own perspective).

This week Nick and I are joined by Jorge Albor and Scott Juster of the Experience Points podcast to discuss how video games fare as live action properties.

Some of these films are homages, some are there to support their franchise, some are both. Most are better than what we have seen on the big screen.

We're all pretty enamored with the simple mechanics and smart reversal of the tower defense genre that serve as the foundations of Anomaly: Warzone Earth.

We decided to attack a discussion of the game from a variety of angles by choosing to play it across platforms in order to see how the game fares as it shifts from bigger to smaller screens.

This week, the Moving Pixels podcast considers their personal picks for the top five arcade games of all time.

In doing so, we look back to the arcade and the various spaces that game cabinets existed to occupy our time and extract our quarters. What is the place of the arcade machine in the history of a gamer culture, a culture that has largely moved towards home consoles rather than remained gaming in public spaces?

Part parody, part loving homage to the Silver Age of comic books, Freedom Force was the best superhero video game that we played before the advent of Arkham. This episode, the Moving Pixels podcast turns back the clock to revisit a title by Irrational Games that really holds up despite its age.

Having spent last week discussing the manner in which our personal playthoughs have affected our sense of Mass Effect on the whole through the series's seemingly consequential storytelling, this week we move on to a discussion of Mass Effect 3 more specifically.

We begin at the end by discussing the controversy surrounding the game's ending and the notion of requesting (or demanding) that some changes might be in order to a game in which player choice has always seemed to be of some importance to the developer. However, we also get into the game as a whole, considering some of the other moments that mattered to us in the trilogy's concluding 40 hours.

Last week our podcast crew had all only gotten started playing through Mass Effect 3, so the three of us got together to discuss our initial impressions of the game as well as how we have played through the trilogy.

So, this week's podcast concerns our sense of the significance of how the ability to carry over story data from one game to the next affects the way we play the game and how much control we assert over getting "our" Mass Effect experience just right.

Never fear, though, next week we will get into the full game, including the controversy surrounding its endings. So, stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, we submit for your consideration: The Mass Effect Effect.

Stoic lone gunmen? Check.

Delicate and sensitive female healer? Check.

Rogue with a heart of gold? Check.

Video games, like most media, draw on some fairly stock types to build their characters. However, since so much of games' plots and characterization just feel tacked on in spots, sometimes these stock types remain just that-never given the opportunity to grow as characters that we can relate to or representing ideas that we might, likewise, relate to.

Archetypal characters and stereotypical ones populate games, and it may be a fine line that developers walk between characters that personify an idea and characters that are merely simplistic placeholders for more legitimately developed ideas.

Theology, horror, and an old school console aesthetic combine in Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl's The Binding of Isaac.

Nick Dinicola and G. Christopher Williams return from Isaac's basement with stories to tell and more than one observation about this troubling, provocative, and madly additictive roguelike shooter.

This week the Moving Pixels podcast is joined by former Digital Cowboy and current host of the Digital Gonzo podcast Alex Shaw to discuss the changing face of the gamer.

When a game full of dungeons and dragons can sell to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars on release (yes, we're looking at you, Skyrim), it seems that what was once perceived as a hobby for freaks and geeks may "belong" to a slightly broader slice of the general culture than it used to. We consider generational shifts in attitudes towards gamers, the advent of social gaming, and the inclusivity and exclusivity that gaming as a past time may or may not have come to represent as a cultural practice as we have moved into the twenty-first century.