Emotive Pixels — Marginalia on Videogames

It's a trash heap of a game of things to collect today as we examine Fallout 4 and inevitably compare it to 3.

We are joined by a psychologist to examine the setting, feelings, and depth in Sony's brilliant cosplay generator.

Join Craig and Nate live and raw around an iPhone as they lavish Virginia with criticism and praise both immediately after finishing it. There will be fun times and sad times as they each respond with their most visceral, unprocessed responses to a fresh playthrough of Variable State's indie darling Virginia. (Editor's note: My (Nate's) opinions are very dumb in this episode. Oh, to be 5 years you...

Conclude Nathan Drake's (and one arc of Emotive Pixels') journeys here with a long, rambley discussion of the best in the series, deserving a lower score than Uncharted 2.

We travel to Indigenous Alaska with the traditional Iñupiaq tale "Kunuuksaayuka", a co-op platformer juxtaposed against micro-documentaries.

This episode of Emotive Pixels sees us, like so many others in the doldrums of 2020+, return to things left unfinished in our past. In this fine week from years past, we discuss Pauly favorite game Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, from 2010. Many things are said, it's unclear why Nate was here, and Craig loves God of War. Pauly leads the show this week with some discussions into the mechanics of this...

Let's get back to nature with someone fresh from the cast of Mad Men . Relevant links! From "Irritable Heart" to "Shellshock": How Post-traumatic Stress Became a Disease (via Gizmodo) The theme this week is Linker, by our very own Pauly!

Join us for a discussion of The Beginner's Guide . This game is so complicated and so deep and so oddly emotional - whether funny or brutally devastating is really up to you, apparently - that we bring in a psychiatrist to help us sift through the experience. It's an experience with few parallels in gaming, the depth and intensity of our responses reminding me of Kentucky Route Zero . The Beginner...

Join us for a discussion of The Stanley Parable , a game entirely focused on turning negative possibility spaces into positive possibility spaces. Game design theory and meta-commentary abound in this episode about the utterly-hilarious Half-Life 2 mod The Stanley Parable by Davey Wreden. The level of fergazzlement on display is outstanding ! Tune in with us next week for a talk about the emotiona...

Warning: This is an early podcast of ours and is long! You have been warned. Join us for a discussion of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 . This week, we talk about the differences between the base game and the glorious PS Vita port, Golden, and whether you have to actually experience something the first time for it to be nostalgic when you play the remaster - a more involved discussion than the "yes...

Nine years out from its release, we return for some thoughts and critical analysis of Mass Effect . This is almost a companion podcast to our bookclub on Drew Kapyrshyn's first Mass Effect novel, Revelation , and in this podcast we hear Nate being a huge grump after (or because of) missing what is easily argued to be the entire point and centerpiece of not only this game but entire series of games...

Join us in discussing the text version of a single Mass Effect side-mission, Mako-free, here in Drew Karpyshyn's debut prequel to Mass Effect .

Papers, Please is aptly summed up by its marketing tagline: "A dystopian document thriller". Everything that can go wrong will go wrong in this 'simulation' of being a border crossing agent in the clearly-Soviet-in-all-but-name Arstotzka. Morality and shades of gray are front in center in this puzzle game, but transparency of choice is not; what you do may make be ethical but its outcomes vary wil...

It's a very intimate show tonight, as Will and Nate venture deep into electronic music territory in two distinctly different approaches to the musical platformer. Electronic Super Joy is a pixel graphic-styled brutal platformer's chase (the difficulty of which has only Super Meat Boy to pay homage to) in order to take down Rogue Pope One as a silhouette of a boy to the incredibly loud thumping bea...

In our most up-to-date episode ever, some of us sit around and chat about that rehashing of the '90s phonomenon of Pokémon. Remember that? Yep, so does everyone gathering in your local civic area either rejoicing the human condition together, or robbing one another (or falling off cliffs). We hit peak 2016 this week. The theme this week is a mildly jazzy and mildly chippy one: "Funk of Ages" by Th...

Here we have a very strange experience that you might or might not share with your boy/girlfriend. The thing about Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is... well, okay, the first thing is that its name is ridiculous and rad. But the second thing is you might not remember your play session if your host is generous enough with his - bourbon, was it? I don't remember. Anyways, Lovers is a couch co-op gam...

This podcast is part 2 of 2 in our Hack and/or Net series. This week's title comes 13 years after the original magnificent Uplink that really forms part 0 of the hacking series, but that's not what's important because what is important is games that share flipped versions of the same name. But I don't want to rush ahead of myself and spoil anything. Listen along this week as we delve into a superi...

NetHack is a 1987 text adventure game that's stood the test of time, surviving countless ports and interface changes. How does it hold up, and what is its depth? Each of us will give a dramatically different answer to that. Join us today around the campfire as we share our stories. The theme this week is "NetHack" by Rob Balder , parodying of course the Butthole Surfers' "Pepper" - more info at hi...

We process the closing of Evo by reflecting on all 3 MotorStorms, their unique swan song Onrush, and their late-blooming critical darling - the best arcade racer of all time - Driveclub.

This week, we take a look at Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception , the third title in the series, and one we found somewhat forgettable - until we took a second look, some of us in the Uncharted Collection on the PS4. This time, we're heading to the Rub' al Khali, as mentioned in the Quran and the works of T.E. Lawrence. Is it really fair to call this the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull of the Uncharted s...

This week, one bold host claims this is the best JRPG ever and that all others are stupid. The entire cast disagrees with both points. Okay seriously though. Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is a lengthily-titled Studio Ghibli (yes, the Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle folks) role-playing game in the Japanese style, like Final Fantasy but prettier and more sensible but also more childish...

There's a lot to talk about this week as we inspect Supermassive's wild horror adventure, Until Dawn . This game is fun and only mildly quick-time-event-driven, but we come away feeling a lot more positive than you'd expect if you'd listened to our (admittedly early) Heavy Rain spoilercast. We also feature some lovely excerpts of a lengthy edition of Will's Gripes(tm), this time about character an...

There really isn't enough space to talk about Naughty Dog's Uncharted 2 , the (spoiler alert) fantastic sequel to Nathan Drake's first adventures through the (spoiler alert/debatable conclusion) wendigo worlds. This game sees Naughty Dog and writer Amy Hennig at their utter strongest with plot and pacing good enough to keep even Will satisfied, right alongside so many millions of movie-style-game-...

What do these two games have in common? More than you'd think, and that's their abstract surrealism, the magicality of their wonderful worlds, and the gorgeousness of their graphics. Seriously, play both of these games and join us this week as we discuss their finer points, and how spiritual you really are in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, and how alive you are in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter....

This week, we all sat down to play each other (or mostly, to collectively fend off expert Will) in Ironclad Studios' Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion , which is a hybrid 4X and realtime ("RT4X") strategy game all about managing a spacefaring empire in the far-flung future. And of course since it's a 4X, you battle each other. And of course since it's a 2015 game, there is no campaign-- wait, this...