Gaming Under The Influence

The first months of 2022 will see some noteworthy games release that Mike & Alex discuss this week. Pokemon Legends: Arceus will express the core concepts of the franchise in novel gameplay mechanics. Likewise for Final Fantasy: Strangers of Paradise, the first soulslike Final Fantasy. Elden Ring hardly needs introduction. Also discussed this week: the special merits of the soulslike genre, the di...

There were plenty of interesting games announced at the Game Awards this year. Join Mike & Alex for ‘Gaming Under the Influence” E.107 to discuss the most interesting titles that appeared at the show. Also featuring some information about the developers involved & why their previous work gives us cause to celebrate each project.

This week the boys at Green Dragon discuss their wants & expectations for the game awards. What games are missing from the list of nominees? Which titles do we think deserve recognition in the most prominent categories? What announcements can we look forward to? Should the Game Awards “take a stand” against Activision?

It astounds the boys at Green Dragon that Cyberpunk 2077 is receiving praise a year after its release. This week we get right back into all the reasons why Cyberpunk is an excellent game, delving into the distinction between the form vs matter of a work of art. Also featuring a discussion of how Cyberpunk treats the individuation of the human intellect by matter.

JRPGs are back on the menu! This week Alex & Mike discuss the deep-rooted similarities between Shin Megami & Pokemon . Starting with the obvious turn-based combat, human-decentered parties & character collection, then proceeding into a discussion of the common cosmological concern behind both games, concealed by the outward guise of child vs adult orientation.

The game awards nominees for 2021 have prompted us to summarize the tendencies we routinely speak against on this show. The issue reduces to a liberal vs integralist stance on art (and resultantly games)...

This week Alex describes his early experiences with Battlefield 2042. The boys revisit the easy mode debate: mechanics & systems should express the inner logic of the work, if this pleases players or not. A few details on our ongoing Valheim server.

This week Mike & Alex talk about the impact of Xbox Game Pass on the sale of third party games to answer the question: “what is the impact of subscription services on video game art”? It appears that consumers within subscription ecosystems are no longer convinced of [“commutative justice”,] paying a proportionate price for a good or service. The indirect impact on video game art is obvious: will...

This week the boys ramble through their experiences with Valheim and the newly-released N64 emulators, all in order to answer the question: “how should the old be conveyed in the new”? Valheim iterates on a formula originated by Minecraft, with elements from soulslike and adventure games, to construct a new kind of thing, while Nintendo has simply enabled access to their intellectual property by n...

In the wake of Metroid Dread, Mike & Alex discuss the enduring merits of the decades-old metroidvania progression style. The argument: 2D adventure games with metroidvania progression are innately suitable for developers with limited experience & resources alongside strong artistic abilities & a well-conceived world. Metroidvania also scales well to larger budgets & diverse art styles, potentially...

Caught up with Valheim & older titles, Mike & Alex have already added a pile of recent releases to their backlogs. Tune in this week for a discussion of the most interesting games you may have missed in 2021 and why they are worth playing. Also features a more detailed discussion of Valheim’s special appeal: this is a game that synthesizes the radical possibilities of the survival genre (often lac...

Our discourse on the best games of all time has been forcibly interrupted by Valheim. This week the Green Dragon crew works towards a theory of survival games, specifying their appeal as a world building medium. We posit that the up-front fixation on the dialectic between player and environment makes the “inner logic” of created worlds the “remote or subject matter” of the genre (instead of indivi...

In response to IGNs recent treatment of the “best game of all time”, the boys at GreenDragonCVR return to the fundamental topic of why exactly games qualify as [one of the] “most advanced phase[s] of poetic depiction”. We will return next week with an alternative list, based on the criteria we articulate in this episode, of the best games of all time.

Alex & Mike persist with their discussion of Tales of Arise, this week expanding on the topics introduced last episode. Topics include the genre-literate design of the early zones & combat, the sincerity of Japanese video game story telling & how Tales of Arise engages with capitalism in a manner that puts Western game journalism about “politics” to shame.

Alex & Mike are pleasantly surprised by Tales of Arise. Conveyed by innovative and beautiful animation, a lean progression system and circumscriptive action combat, a high fantasy world on par with any [more expensive] genre peer has got the boys hooked. Tune in this week for a deep dive into the systems & world of Tales of Arise based on the first third of the game.

Mike & Alex return to a style of video game they have no small measure of conflicted feelings about: open-world action-rpgs. Alex returns to Ghosts of Tsushima & Mike to Maneater to check out the DLC for both titles. Concludes with an explanation of the particular appeal of open-world progression styles: without the punctuation & demands of other games like Souls (with taxing combat) or JRPGs (wit...

Mike & Alex discuss the last great western video game genre: classical or western rpgs. If, as we have previously discussed, the rpg genre definitionally represents the conduct of intelligent life in fiction, the western rpg (in contradistiction to the deterministic jrpg) does so in-deterministically, affording the player political and social agency over the course of the game world

Mike & Alex discuss potential games to pursue amidst the great summer game drought of 2021. Touching on Final Fantasy X, Ghost Recon Wildlands, Biomutant etc.

We have come to this year’s ‘great summer game drought’. In the absence of any new releases captivating us, Mike & Alex delve back into their backlogs. Discussions range from the necessity of ‘sense of place’ in worldbuilding; the capacity of difficult games to transpose the player into the alterity of his ritual identity; the weird & wonderful world/art of Grime; Far Cry Primal as a masterful ges...

Mike & Alex discuss the vast discrepancy between Western journalistic reactions to recent scandals at Activision and the Chinese government’s reported disdain for the predatory style of games peddled by Tencent. While the West demands superficial “change” that would leave brutal fundamental structures in tact, the CPC appears to target the very economic bases of exploitative game design. Alex also...

This week Mike & Alex return to the most basic element of a game - it's [self-justifying or autotelic] world, hopefully expressed in a gameplay loop that facilitates instead of inhibiting its clarity. Last week Subnautica was a refreshing escape from the overbearing psychological motivations we are required to empathize with in many third-person story games; this week, the single-player campaign o...

After being dragged by the nape through the meandering and uninteresting personal/psychological motivations of most protagonists in most games born in the West the past generation, Mike & Alex delve into two games unburdened by the trappings of western AAA. Subnautica BZ: in search of her lost sister, an ex-corpo becomes infested by an alien consciousness, proceeds to research the inner logic of a...

What do space Bezos, the easy mode debate, “professionalism” and game pass have in common? In all these we witness the celebration of the instrument-in-itself. What was once [at least purportedly] a means to an end becomes the goal, purpose, satisfaction; money and gratuitous expenditure for its own sake, the raw physical act of gaming in violation of its formal causes, cheap games, whatever they...

Mike & Alex back at it featuring a discussion about the "new Sony" and their uninspiring first party offerings as of late + the general state of the medium in summer 2021. What no one wants to hear: Sony kinda sucks now,

GUI Live & Unleashed | July 6, 2021: Featuring a discussion of the souls genre and souls like games.  A common favorite around these parts. Cheers.