Street Fighter IV was received with widespread critical acclaim and relatively strong sales. Whether these early players actually developed an appreciation for the game’s staggering complexities is another matter. The Street Fighter series has always made itself available to beginners, and its most basic mechanics will satisfy the vast majority of gamers. But this is merely the outer shell of what is an almost impenetrably deep gameplay system. Fortunately, sirlin.net recently posted a comprehensive critical survey of this very issue. It is quite informative and doubles as an interesting critique of many questionable design decisions, which reviewers overlooked. By the way, it is also extremely hardcore (you were warned).
Archives for the month of: April, 2009
That was a joke. But if taking games seriously is your idea of fun, Mia Consalvo’s introductory essay for the latest issue of Eludamos provides a lovely progress report. Here’s and excerpt:
…there’s been a concomitant drive to specialize, already well under way. We can already see the emergence of separate venues, literature reviews, and research agendas forming for seemingly disparate areas such as the study of virtual worlds, MMOGs, serious games, industry studies, and the like. Even areas that once started as seemingly narrow, such as serious games, have refined themselves further, as we see separate conferences, journals and literatures emerge for ‘games for health,’ ‘games for change’ and educational games. As evidence of our dynamic history we even have a debate that ‘never took place,’ between narratology and ludology (I’ll go on record that I thought it did).
Speaking of games that time forgot.A fascinating essay on board games, which I discovered while randomly blog browsing through the ridiculously addictive condron.us.
Read it here.
