Abnormal Mapping

Hope lies in ruins. The calamity hangs overhead. People look up, wishing that some savior will come. But nothing will save us from the inevitable: extended CGI anime movie sequels to games that didn’t need them. Alas, in this darkest hour, when all that is Holy is buried and the stigma of the planet taints even the bravest of us, the Abnormal Mappers are all that stand between the inevitable void...

We don the masks of the harvest reaper to stalk the dank halls of a far off land of clockwork intrigue and steam-powered assassination, perched on the balustrades of our own mental palaces, poised to strike in the blink of an eye. What are we waiting for? Only the final strike of the witching hour, when we will descend and offer up that vengeful mantra of horror that was granted to us by the great...

The Mappers are joined once again by Honorary Cartography Extraordinaire Destiny Sturdivant for the inaugural meeting of the RPG Explorers Club. Em leads them down the Mako-soaked lanes of his memory as they dig up that burning question for the ages: what exactly does happen to Aeris? It’s a long journey, full of pitfalls and pratfalls, and together they all learn to love again. Just like Cloud. W...

Trans-media beings exist in a digital realm, transcending the archaic definitions of one art or another. Words become images, images become environments, narrative forms change shape in a strange alchemy of noble intent and desperate capitalism. The Mappers navigate this technoplane, where all things change and the nature of creation is itself in flux, and they find themselves gripped tight to the...

This month’s Coolsoge kicks off with a bang as the Mappers are joined by fellow David Cage veteran Destiny Sturdivant to talk a boatload of games and the very ridiculous task that we’re all going to undertake this fall. Also more than a little time is spent educating Jackson on just what Meatloaf wouldn’t do for love, because they has to learn somehow. The answer is potentially “collect multiple c...

The day they thought would never happen is finally here. The clockwork machinery of the gods themselves rolled away and revealed a blinding light, from which poured a host of a host of creatures both fair and foul. All of that number were beyond mortal understanding, but they all cried out with a single human voice: YOU WERE WRONG. And so it was, that as the seas boiled and the sun and moon revers...

Em braves audio failure as Jackson drags them kicking and screaming through another Coolsoge adventure. After many many weeks between them, the Mappers have a pile of games they’ve finished and the dimmest of memories with which to recall them, but they do their best to talk about various driving and skating games, the terror of suplexing scorpions, and some Donkey Kong follow-up beef. Vows are ma...

This month is a special month, as we’re joined by special guest Destiny Sturdivant of the Badland Girls for not only our first guest third chair but also our longest episode ever! Deciding to double our pleasure, double our fun, we take a dive into the duo of Quantic Dream games for the Playstation 3—Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls. We go deep on both games, both mechanically and in their many st...

The mappers take a journey to a world where anthropomorphic animals live alongside humans and a journey begins to acquire a number of magical orbs. No, it’s not Dragon Ball, it’s Beyond Good & Evil! In between all the stealth and shutterbugging, Em decides to take a single joke as far beyond its breaking point as they can, while Jackson tries their best to detangle the good and evil of game be...

What was supposed to be a simple ‘let’s get our plans for the month nailed down’ chat between Em and Jackson turned out to be nothing but lies and deceit as Jackson fired up the recorders and started what would become the first Coolsoge Cast! Instead of the meticulous planning and structure of real Abnormal Mapping podcast, what you’ll instead get here is some free flowing talk about whatever we’v...

Ace pilots Em “Cupcake” Marko and Jackson “Ginger” Tyler fly through the enormous Library of the Giants, where the giant tombs of Video Game Lore are stacked to the heavens. Whether they have been shrunk or the pillars of writing have grown is beyond the pay grade of these two intrepid wingmen, but as they juke around zines and loop through forests of critical theory they arrive at their destinati...

Hey everyone, welcome to our first very special episode, of a hopefully long-running series called Gameography! If you need to know what Gameography is, take a look at this prior post explaining it. If you insist on the tl;dr version, we picked a game maker we really liked and played through her entire history of games and talked about them as a whole body of work. In this case, our first subject...

So April’s podcast is going to be something different than the usual. Instead of doing the typical game club and random segment 2, we’re going to do a special, potentially twice-yearly Very Special Episode that we’re calling Gameography. What is Gameography, you ask? Well, we recorded a very special bonus mini-podcast to try to explain our thinking. I’ll let that speak for itself. If you’d rather...

The Mappers dig into the ancient jungle tombs filled with the un-biodegradable legacy of dozens of one-off novelty music games and the shells of grimy controllers—trying to wrap their heads around wrapping their hands around these relics of a bygone era. Emerging from the tombs, they find a box-busting Bandicoot before them, challenging them to one final task in this three month sojourn through so...

Hello and welcome to the first Abnormal Mapping episode from our new wordpress blog! This is (for now) going to be the home of Abnormal Mapping, but it’s still barely up and running. So please follow the blog, and share this episode if you like it! It’ll help a lot to getting the word out about what we’re doing with Abnormal Mapping! The mappers find themselves in a glitch world, where the insomni...

Abnormal Mapping Episode 4: Fo(u)r Podcast! A mountain of games, atop which sits the greatest of all video games: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. But are the mappers capable of scaling the video game mountain and in what frame of mind will they encounter their goal? In this episode both Em and Jackson have existential crises when they consider the deepest of all questions: WHAT IS GAME? G...

Abnormal Mapping finishes off the year with our episode talking about 2013, 2014, and the future of video games. No, actually, we just talk about The Shivah and Vanquish and The Hobbit. But that kind of counts! Next month’s game: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Things mentioned in the podcast: A Buddhist’s Guide to Asura’s Wrath a thematic review of The Binding of Isaac the infamous philfi...

In the second episode of Abnormal Mapping, Em and Jackson have breaking news about the new console generation, Em discovers a beloved franchise maybe isn’t as beloved as they thought it would be, and Jackson hears a question so profound it makes them drop his coffee cup. Here’s all the things we talk about! Games Discussed at Length: The Swapper and Pokemon X & Y That cool article about the de...

Welcome to the first episode of Abnormal Mapping, a new monthly podcast about video games! We’re not games press, so we’re not going to be talking about new releases or industry news, but instead looking at specific games with a critical eye. This means that we’ll be freely talking spoilers for any of the games listed in the description, rather than discussing them in a review context. This week w...