Category: Videogames

  • Search for all youtube videos tagged “Satan”


    Today Telltale announced the finale of Sam & Max Season Two, titled What’s New, Beelzebub?. This is the one where everything goes completely off the rails, leaving everyone confused, horrified, and entertained. As evidenced by the last trailer: I’m really glad we didn’t do machinima shorts for this season, because it means that time &…

  • World of Goo


    I’m not going to even try to think up a clever title for this one, since the game in question is so purposefully wry that adding more here would be overkill. But it’s a good game, and it’s called World of Goo, and you can pre-order it to get a preview copy (for Windows) right…

  • Touch-a touch-a touch-a touch me, I want to be Ghibli


    Any game company would envy the amount of buzz around Professor Layton and the Curious Village for the Nintendo DS. For months, it’s been getting breathless previews from writers who wanted it RIGHT NOW!!!, and since its release it’s gotten extremely positive reviews. It’s not hard to see why; it’s got stellar production values. You…

  • Link’s Quiver Capacity


    On his blog, Lore Sjöberg announced his new project: a weekly video podcast for his Alt Text column at Wired. The first episode rates Link’s weapons. According to his blog, more will be available on Wired’s YouTube page or via iTunes subscription. Seeing as how it’s a video with drawings, and more often than not…

  • > use research on article


    It’s kind of ironic that this review of the “Lost” videogame faults the game for its reliance on outdated and obsolete game mechanics, because the review itself relies on an outdated and obsolete assumption: that adventure games are no longer relevant. A game journalist in 2008 saying “adventure games are dead” is kind of like…

  • The Old Man and the Realistically Rendered Water Volume


    I’m just arrogant enough that I tend to automatically dismiss anything presented as a list of rules or guidelines about writing. There’s obviously a ton of craft involved in writing, independent of any concerns about talent or personal style. But attempts to codify it are always either too vague to be practically useful, or too…

  • Ready… Be fought against!


    Previously on Spectre Collie, I got alarmed at what I saw as the rising sentiment against storytelling in videogames. The people on the message boards and blog comments kept saying that storytelling and interactivity are mutually exclusive, that story-based games aren’t games at all! And notable people like Will Wright were making proclamations that the…

  • Auteurism


    Or, “Gore Verbinski’s Going to Make You His Bitch.” If you want to see me start channeling my inner crotchety prospector hankerin’ for a feud, there’s no easier way than making the claim “videogames need to adapt the auteur model from movies!” It comes up fairly frequently on the internets, and I’m usually able to…

  • Cease to resist going to Best Buy


    I really had no interest in getting Rock Band (warning: site has noise, and changes your browser window size). I skipped the last two releases of Guitar Hero, since the songs past medium difficulty stopped being fun for me. With Rock Band, at the time all the cool kids were getting it, it was impossible…

  • Night of the Raving Dead


    Nick, Jake, Jared, and the rest of the gang are cranking out Sam & Max episode trailers so quickly, it’s almost like there’s a new one every month. (Come on, give me a break. I’m home sick and pumped full of cold medication.) The next episode is “Night of the Raving Dead”, and so far…

  • Virtual Orgasmic Grilling


    [Note: Links in this post are broken as of 2016, but they pointed to a pair of predictably overblown complaints about the moral depravity of Mass Effect, by a pundit named Kevin McCullough. Also, images for a lot of posts were lost during a site move, which is a shame because my Mass Effect character…

  • Johnny Lee is my new hero


    There’s a guy at Carnegie Mellon named Johnny Chung Lee, who’s been doing experiments with the Wii remote, then putting his results up on YouTube. The ones I’ve seen take advantage of the fact that the Wii remote is an IR camera, not just a standard IR-output remote, which flips the whole method of interactivity…