Moving Pixels Podcast

This week G. Christopher Williams and Nick Dinicola form a dynamic duo of flash game playin', flash game analyzin', and flash game discussin' excitement.

We take a look at three of 2011's more interesting releases, Jonas Kyratzes's Alphaland, Thomas Brush's Skinny, and Sarah Northway's Rebuild. Two of the titles are platformers and one is a turn-based strategy game, and they feature anxious video game worlds in progress, scary mommy AIs, and, of course, the hungry zombie hordes.

If you want to play along as you listen (or better yet, before you listen), you can find Alphaland and Skinny at New Grounds. Look for Rebuild over at Kongregate.

A new puzzle game from the Atlus Persona Team, Catherine blends surprisingly difficult puzzle platforming with a strong narrative on masculine anxieties and adult relationships. Most interestingly of all, the game asks players to voice their own opinions on love, marriage, and children, but does it really demand a truthful answer?

Moving Pixels podcast regulars G. Christopher Williams and Kris Ligman are joined this week by Skyler Moss from Gamepad Dojo to discuss the game's mechanics, characterization and gender representation. Disagreements over interpretation abound as we explore Catherine's morality system, multiple endings, and structural cohesion in attempting to marry gameplay to a very dissimilar plot-or is marriage even the appropriate metaphor to deploy here?

Secrets are revealed, plot twists are spoiled, and the titular Catherine receives a thorough deconstruction, along with several others of the game's colorful cast. Can Skyler decide whether to agree with Chris or Kris and escape the podcast unharmed? When the night sky turns to glamor, anything could happen.

With one Chris out and another Kris stealing his chair again, the members of the Moving Pixels podcast discuss the game which kicked off Xbox Live's 2011 Summer of Arcade, Bastion. This debut title from the small development team at Supergiant has garnered plenty of attention for its lush visuals, solid gameplay, and unique "dynamic narration."

Join us as we discuss Bastion's place within the Western genre, the role of its soundtrack and narrator, and how the player brings himself to the gameplay through the game's unique challenges. We also dig into the game's multiple endings, so those averse to spoilers should watch their step.

With G. Christopher Williams out this week for some much-deserved R&R, podcast regulars Nick Dinicola, Rick Dakan, and Kris Ligman are joined by frequent PopMatters.com contributor Mike Schiller to discuss Child of Eden, an eye-pleasing and unassuming little release that has unexpectedly torn the Moving Pixels blog right down the middle.

A smaller release that was by and large overlooked next to the torrential negative press of Duke Nukem Forever, Child of Eden is a first-person bullet hell game with unexpected nuance, which may or may not work for the player. We also debate what Kinect functionality adds or subtracts to the experience and whether the included "god mode" truly breaks the game or offers something richer.

Tempers flare, questionable textual interpretations are invoked, and a good time is had by all as our podcasters volley back and forth on Child of Eden's gameplay and aesthetic merits. Listen for yourself to see if we come up with a solution . . . or if all of us even come out alive.

With an intentionally provocative name, Fat, Ugly or Slutty? has become a hit among readers for highlighting the sort of over-the-top trashtalk women gamers experience. From the cliched to the farcical and even the truly sad, FUoS is one part Why Was I Banned?, one part Hollaback, and eight parts "you have to read it to believe it."

We managed to track down three of the four FUoS admins-gtz, likeOMGitsFEDAY and inklesspen-a few weeks before PAX Prime to talk about the origins of the site, their own gaming experiences, and some of their favorite submissions. We also ponder a few meaningful questions about the state of online gaming-and what a site like Fat, Ugly or Slutty? can mean for it.

If you are attending the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle at the end of the month, be sure to pay these fantastic ladies (and gentleman) a visit at their panel! Date, time and location forthcoming on the Fat, Ugly or Slutty? website.

Following last week's discussion of madness in the newest iteration of Alice, it only seemed fitting that we would consider the other "mad release" this summer, Suda51 and Shinji Mikami's Shadows of the Damned.

Between its juvenile humor and interesting shooting mechanics based on darkness and light lies a strange but compelling critique of classic video game tropes. Our discussion attempts to touch on as much of the madness as we can reasonably (or unreasonably) consider.

As a follow up to a game released over a decade ago, Alice: Madness Returns reimagines American McGee's Wonderland mythos as well as the somewhat retrograde genre of the action platformer. This week the Moving Pixels podcast crew discusses Alice's imagery, mechanics, and overall presentation of insanity.

Okay, you probably won't die too much in L.A. Noire, but there are a fair amount of corpses littered around Team Bondi's recreation of L.A. in the 1940s for your investigatory consideration. Detective Cole Phelps is on the case for one of the biggest early releases of the year, and the Moving Pixels crew discusses how successful Team Bondi and Rockstar are at presenting this tough and tough-to-like hardboiled hero.

Recorded just about a week after the game's release, much of our impressions of the game were fresh as we hashed out our initial impressions of this game that some claim is not quite a game.

The tower defense game is not a genre that is often given much attention in the critical discussion of video games. Usually light on the narrative qualities that game critics enjoy focusing on and often assumed to be a slightly more casual genre, there's still a lot to be considered in this type of game's appeal and in its most successful examples.

Our discussion, of course, touches on Plants Vs. Zombies, but we also look at a few other fresher titles like Anomaly: Warzone Earth and Defense Grid: the Awakening.

Last weekend the Moving Pixels podcast crew convened to discuss our impressions of E3 2011. While Rick Dakan, Nick Dinicola, and G. Christopher Williams all caught glimpses of the expo via the web or television, we are joined by Kris Ligman, who attended this year's event.

Like many others, we couldn't help but focus on some of the bigger announcements of this year, the previews of new hardware releases from Sony and Nintendo. Additionally, we spend a lot of time considering the revamping of Lara Croft in the new Tomb Raider. So, something old (kind of) and something new to consider in this year's big gaming event.