When I was eleven years old, my dad took me to see the Rolling Stones Voodoo Lounge concert. The stage erupted with inflatable skeletons, giant Jagger-like cartoon lips flashed across a jumbo screen, and Mick Jagger strutted across stage. I was sold—it was rock n’ roll and I not only liked it, I loved it. I still do. Growing up, the only time I chose to “study” classical music was when I slipped the 1984 film Amadeus in my VHS […]
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Creating Video Game Avatars
The best part about creating an avatar is that a player has free rein to become whatever or whoever she wishes. Want to become a blue-skinned troll or a pink-haired elf? Want a perfect body without setting foot in the gym? You’ve got it! Want to partake in a love story filled with knights and damsels in distress? Go for it! Limited only by her imagination, a player can create an entire persona that may or may not have anything […]
My Son’s Video Game Art and Level Design
Ashton, my five-year-old son, loves playing video games on his Nintendo Wii. His favorites include Disney Epic Mickey, Hot Wheels: Beat That!, and Wii Sports Resort; he plays the New Super Mario Bros. Wii the most. I’m also a huge fan of the game, and we often team up as Mario and Luigi in the game’s multiplayer mode to save Princess Peach from Bowser and company.
Like most children his age, Ashton enjoys diverse activities. He plays cars with his Hot […]
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Video Games for Halloween
Zombies, witches, vampires, monsters, and other blood curdling creatures invaded pop culture centuries ago. While I’m not big on gory thrills, I am a fan of other ghoulish delights. I fill each October calendar day with some Halloween activity. With video game titles like Little Red Riding Hood’s Zombie BBQ and A Vampyre Story, I have plenty of action to fill my free-time.
Count Dracula, a vampire, sorcerer, and Transylvanian nobleman, radiates confidence that even Napoleon would covet. In his 1897 […]
Steve Jobs, Breakout Pioneer
One of my favorite games in ICHEG’s collection is Atari’s 1976 arcade classic Breakout, an elegant, one-player elaboration of Pong. Players move a paddle side-to-side to keep a bouncing ball in play long enough to knock down multicolored layers of bricks. A tone sounds each time a ball strikes a brick. The ball speeds up with each successive layer of bricks, making it harder and harder to hit. Breakout is a seductive game, easy to learn, difficult to master.
Steve Jobs, […]
How Long Is a Good Video Game?
With so many video games to choose from, I often have trouble deciding how to get the most bang for my buck.
Sometimes I compare how much I spend on a game to the amount of time I expect to play it. I wonder if other gamers do the same? Games like Kingdom Hearts, Okami, and Dragon Age: Origins may easily take 50 to 60 hours just to beat the initial storyline, to say nothing of any side-quests on which a […]
Bill Kunkel, 1950-2011: Video Game Journalism Pioneer
On September 4th, the video game industry lost a true pioneer. Bill Kunkel, founder of Electronic Games magazine and longtime video game journalist, passed away at the age of 61.
Kunkel began his career writing comic books and covering the wrestling industry, but he made his greatest impact as a journalist chronicling, celebrating, and critiquing video games. Over the years he worked on numerous publications, designed games and taught about them, and in 1981 cofounded, with Arnie Katz and Joyce Wetzel, […]
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Been Here Before: Same Landscapes, Different Stories in Video Games
In college, I spent much of Critical Reading loathing the professor’s love of American Romanticism and wallowing in my disdain for his assigned texts. Many of my classmates held similar sentiments, but we kept quiet during discussions of titles such as “Bodily Harm: Keats’ Figures in the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’” However, I will never forget the rapid-fire conversation about how individual experience shapes varying degrees of reality. We all had encountered many of the same things—holidays, historical events, […]
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Gaming Television
Some fans of video games today don’t necessarily play the games before they get caught up in the gaming culture. Movies based on video games abound, t-shirts featuring video game characters hang from store windows, and action figures from popular games line store shelves. While growing up, I watched game-related programming before I even picked up a controller. And of all the ways to immerse myself in gaming without hooking up a console, such shows remain top on my list.
My […]
