Recent content by Alex Spencer

Ha, it's actually funny you should mention that. I very nearly referenced that scene in this piece - it's pretty much exactly how bodies are used most of the time in games, and it's a really effective way of building tension and the idea of A Bad Thing Cometh. It's kind of what's going in the...

Body Talk: The Best Stories are Built on a Pile of Corpses Sometimes the scenery in a game tells a better story than the game itself. Sometimes that scenery is a corpse. Read Full Article

Yeah, I'd wondered about this. I've never seen Kimba, but I've heard tell. Is it worth watching? Does the Mufasa/equivalent death work in the same way?

Dastardly: yeah, that's totally it. This is kind of the point I was making in that last post to Tin Man. Pixar are total craftsmen. They know all the rules and all the reactions and while the closest we have to that is Valve's intensive playtesting and apparent intuition, that's only mechanical...

I'm so close to agreeing with you, it was hard to have anything to say that wasn't just nit-picking. But, I dunno, I'm not sure (beyond technical stuff), Pixar do anything *new*, per se. Their films are very very well told and shown stories, but they're quite traditional. What Pixar know...

I remember that game! And I wanted to squeeze it into the article, but it just didn't fit. As I recall, you die a lot, it was absolutely impossible. But as zerobudgetgamer points out, it didn't linger on the death stuff at all. (The Disney Villain deaths were something else I wanted to fit in...

Disney-Colored Death From Bambi to Up, Disney films have hardly pulled their punches when it comes to showing death to a young audience in their films. What can videogames learn from their example? Read Full Article