[This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Ben Abraham on topics including the explosion of clone games on iOS, indie game Fate of the World, and more.] I can't keep putting it off - assembling the best and brightest pieces of writing, blogging, opinion and criticism of video games from the week is not going to happen by itself. Let's see what we've got here... First up this week, Michael Abbott at The Brainy Gamer looks at the 'Clone Wars' currently raging on the iPad/iPhone platform. He singles out one publisher - Gameloft - for churning out ersatz version of AAA titles. The cheek! The nerve!
"Gameloft's clones are whole cloth derivatives of aesthetic elements like character design, art style, user-interface, and even color palettes. No art is wholly original; we all create from the inspiration of others. But these copies aren't simply inspired by their originals. They appropriate the creative work of artists and designers and re-purpose them with mostly cosmetic changes."
At his blog Gaming the System, Tanner Higgin writes about 'The Trap of Representation' this week. It's hard to summarize without violating the integrity of his argument, but essentially he's suggesting a more sustained and systemic critique of the entire game development ecosystem than is achieved by concentrating only on representations of diversity in games. N'Gai Croal writing for his Edge Online blog this week turns his attention to the big picture, whole industry view in 'When good enough isn't good enough':
"Fewer titles, bigger bets - this is the modern mega-publisher's conservative recipe for success - or at the very least, for survival. The traditional portfolio is unlikely to be the norm, when money spent on marginal concepts and riskier ideas could be doubled on surer bets. The danger is that if everyone follows this path, where will the next Wii Fit or Guitar Hero come from to blaze the trail for entirely new categories of gaming? It's at times like these that survival and mutually assured destruction look virtually indistinguishable."
Nik Davidson has been messing with (the) Fate of the World an indie game about combating a global warming future as part of an global government set up to deal with the problem. And problems there are many, but it was Davidson's own response that intrigued him:
"What's fascinated me about my response more than anything is what it showed me about my attitude toward the world. I was quick to institute a one-child policy in India, but not in the United States. I was willing to dump tons of money into the U.S. and Europe to fund research, but struggled to come up with funds to fight political unrest in Southeast Asia. I pretty much ignored Australia entirely. While I was happy to enact technological reforms in the industrialized world, I was hesitant to levy extra taxes on those regions to fund them. I was excited to spread 4th-gen nuclear power plant technology to the world, then found myself wishing I hadn't, as rebels in northern Africa got their hands on weapons-grade nuclear material. I'm a huge proponent of nuclear energy, but coming face to face with even a fictionalized consequence of my political beliefs was a little bit humbling."
At Gamers with Jobs, Rob Zachny writes about why the 'interrogation' sections of L.A. Noire are... kinda ambiguous and broken. And a nice companion piece at Significant Bits by Radek Koncewicz says a very similar thing, comparing the dialogue system to two recent BioWare games:
