Crit Links 1/10

Baldur's Gate: Durlag's Tower - #1 - Design Club

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The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Seasons' dungeon design | Boss Keys 

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Farewell 12 Dominion Cards

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Review: Japanese Arcades

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Sinister Seductress - Tropes vs Women in Video Games 

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Review: Japanese Pachinko Parlors - YouTube

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Pokémon GO - Designing for the Real World - Extra Credits 

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Why Abzu Might Be the Most Important Game for Kids in Years - Writing on Games

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Free-to-Play's MECHANICS are Great - Gwent, Blitzball, and the Mini-Game Revolution - Extra Credits

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Shovel Knight and Nailing Nostalgia | Game Maker's Toolkit

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Gwent IRL

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All the Slender Ladies: Body Diversity in Video Games

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Video game sequels are a different beast than sequels in other mediums. In video games, a sequel is typically expected to improve upon its predecessor because video games are intensely technical. Since a game is thought of at least partly as a feat of software engineering, sequels are approached as a honing, refining and improvement of the original as much as they are a thematic and aesthetic continuation of them. In other words, we should think of video game sequels as new and improved models as much as the next chapter of a story, if not more so. On the other hand, the nature of a sequel demands in any medium of genre demands narrative escalation.

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The Chinese Room logo - the creative process — The Chinese Room
The logo was designed by a local Brighton graphic design studio about 4 years ago. It works well as a logo, but as The Chinese Room has grown and changed, it wasn't sitting right as the visual to represent the studio. Red and black are very heavy colours and triangles are quite harsh and sharp. The overall logo is very masculine and corporate - exactly what The Chinese Room is not.
So I began my goals for rebrand -
•    Make the logo less masculine

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“No One Criticized Bioshock Infinite Before!” | this cage is worms
 something has changed. If the world were the same way it was three years ago, the people finding out about these long standing critiques would still be walking around thinking everyone sees Infinite as a holy grail of achievement. And that’s heartening, in some ways, because it means the discourse has shifted that little, small amount. The words got out, somehow.
/.../
I’ve got the long view on “games criticism” at this point, like quite a few others, and I’d say that 80% of the people doing that kind of work on the internet who predate myself and my “cohort” have gone on to other things. Maybe even higher. But there’s a weird print in the culture in the shape of their words, and well, I guess that’s something.