This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Erik Fredner on topics including the reception of Call of Duty: Ghosts and the present console transition. Painstation As you might have heard around the watercooler or in unsolicited dubstepping pop-ups, one of the two Shiny New Boxes came out this week in North America. Polygon and quite a few others have posted thoughts on it. Mouse-wielding contrarians Rock, Paper, Shotgun took the opportunity to hoist the PC flag using MS Paint. And, as is all but tradition with console launches, the initial lineup has been getting reviews that amount to an optimistic meh, with one exception. In C-D’s second-ever reference and first-ever link to the badly animated kids from Colorado, South Park’s latest outing takes shots at said Shiny New Boxes, Black Friday, consumerism, and even the preorder numbers for their most recent game. (Content Warning: It’s South Park.) Fondish Farewells A number of publications ran rose-tinted and/or older-and-wiser reflections on the outgoing generation of consoles. Here’s Kotaku on their favorite characters and boxart from the seventh generation of game consoles. Joystiq also reminisced about the PS3 Looking Forward Sure, so-called next-gen consoles are a big deal, depending on who you’re talking to. A lot of major news organizations are running pieces on the rise of mobile and PC. Right or wrong, some bets are on that we’re entering “The Last Console Generation.” Or not. Jonathan Blow, designer of Braid and The Witness, gave a talk about free-to-play:
“If you make these [treadmill mobile games], I just want you to know that you’re making the new bad TV.”
Elsewhere, Jason Rice weaves together Sleep No More, The Stanley Parable, The Walking Dead, and player performance, looking toward the future of interactivity. Something You Already Knew But Science Has Now Confirmed
According to a new study by the Queensland University of Technology, playing video games improves children's emotional, social, and psychological well-being. The study also finds that playing video games together as a family can help build stronger family bonds.
More at GamePolitics. Big Guns With new consoles comes the inevitable march of new shooters. Battlefield 4, Call of Duty: Ghosts, and Killzone: Shadowfall all dropped (the bass) recently. At Critical Damage, Brendan Keogh has some kind-ish words for Ghosts’s campaign:
You've probably seen the video of how the intro of Ghosts uses an identical animation sequence to the end of Modern Warfare 2. It's the most explicit example of it, but the same animations and moments are used throughout Ghosts. It's either intended as laziness, apathy, or deliberate intertextuality—it functions as all three. The entire game feels like a collage of moments from the previous games. Not just the same mechanics or the same features but literally the same moments. The moment your bro looked into the distance then helped you up. The moment your
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