Jessica Walter winks suggestively and describes Lucille Bluth’s “dire straits” in “Arrested Development” season 4
Michael Cera and Alia Shawkat discuss sex and awkward love in “Arrested Development” season 4
Nick Offerman sings a filthy song about rainbows to his wife
“Anchorman: The Legend Continues” trailer compares Ron Burgundy to Jesus
In part 1 on IFC’s focus on “The Witness,” I talked about the experience of playing Jonathan Blow’s next game and how it differed from his 2008 hit “Braid.” The build of the game I experienced was still a work-in-progress but Blow stated that it provided an accurate representation of what he was aiming for…
Jonathan Blow’s last game was “Braid,” the 2008 masterpiece about time and memory as told through the template of a side-scrolling platformer. Players could manipulate the flow of time, pausing it or slowing it down, to solve various puzzles in the waterercolor dreamworld where “Braid” takes place. Tim, the game’s suit-and-tie wearing hero, journeys through…
It was just yesterday that the trailer for “Indie Game the Movie” premiered, accompanied by word of another Kickstarter campaign to get the finishes done on the film. Well, in an amazing show of anticipation and support for the doc, it appears that they’ve already hit their funding goal. Pajot and Swirsky sent along the…
One of the biggest barriers to greater cultural understanding of the video game medium is the simple fact that most people don’t know how games get made and who makes them. People understand that actors memorize lines, musicians string together chords and writers make stuff up to create their works. Along with the skill sets…
Over the summer, a group of indie developers–including 2D Boy and Edmund McMillen of Team Meat–offered their titles in a pay-what-you-will package call the Humble Inde Bundle. Folks who bought the games were able to determine how much of their contribution went to the developers and how much went to the Child’s Play charity and…
Maybe it’s the genetic lineage from “Dungeons and Dragons” and J.R.R. Tolkien, but the role-playing genre in video games tends to take itself way too seriously. The trope of the earnest and plucky young lad who ventures forth from a small village into a world-saving destiny gets recycled several times a year with a completely…
Several months ago, a New York Times article on the indie game scene framed big corporate game publishers like Electronic Arts and the heroic indie game intellectuals like “Braid” creator Jonathan Blow as church and state. Never the twain shall meet, it implied, and that’s to the good of the plucky, iconoclastic indie guys. The…
Two columns back, I capped off a discussion about the video game industry’s worsening case of blockbusteritis with a plea for a viable indie gaming model like that of the movies. There is an independent gaming community out there, one that’s historically existed mostly on the PC, and continues to thrive thanks to sites like…
As any summer moviegoer knows all too well, there’s nothing Hollywood likes more than a franchise capable of spawning sequels and tie-in merchandise. The glut of superhero, science fiction, horror and action series may please genre fans (in theory, if not always in practice), but their true admirers are the studios, who rely on them…
