As Metro 2033 moves underground, the camera pans out from a postcard of Big Ben and the Venetian canals, stuck angled to the walls of the protagonist’s subway cell. Someone strums a few baroque guitar chords and picks a melody, leaving silence between each note. I’ve already known I’m playing in bombed-out future Moscow, and the bleak soundtrack confirms it.
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Fictional characters, by their very nature, are parasites. They cannot live without us – the attention we pay to them as readers, viewers and players quickens and sustains them. Our cognition is the coal that fuels their furnaces. In this way, all narrative is interactive. (more…)
A green carpet. Two loving parents, a house by a laboratory, a tiny tree in the front yard. A water boiler in the kitchen, a television in every room. Bright red footstool. Spotless floor. Overbearing silence. A premonition that they are gone.
These are the images of my arranged childhood. (more…)
If you pay attention to my bylines (hi, Mom!), you may have noticed you haven’t seen one for a while. The onset of summer is usually a difficult time for me – shorter, warmer nights aren’t pleasant when you’re most comfortable sleeping in a cold, dark room, and when I don’t get enough sleep things start to go sideways. But it’s not just that. (more…)
My mother shows enough passing interest in my gaming habit that when she pays a visit she’ll sit down on the couch and crochet while I play videogames. So it was that mom was a spectator for a session of Fallout 3 and one of the vilest displays I can act out in any videogame I own. My character, Vault Boy, laid into a human raider with his combat shotgun, a shotgun with a drum barrel that required no pumping action and had a deep ammunition magazine.
When the raider fell, Vault Boy walked over to the corpse and reloaded his weapon. Vault Boy then proceeded to blow off the corpse’s head, arms and legs, in that order. The coup de grace was a barrage of shells loosed into the chest of the deceased. The body exploded into bloody chunks strewn on the ground. And my mother asked me “Why are you shooting someone who’s already dead?” (more…)
This week, Unwinnable’s own Michael Sheridan joins the usual crew of Don, Ken, Stu and Chuck.
We talk games, movies and this week we feature a new segment, “Tech Talk with Don and Ken.”
Music by:
Ripface Invasion, Citizen Blast Kane and Brine & Bastards.
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For the first time in any official capacity, I have declared a videogame better than all the others that have been released in a particular year. Now if I can just get people to believe me…
Regardless, I present to you the Best Videogames of 2008.
