This Week In Video Game Criticism: Portal 2's Music To The Erotic Engine

"The fact is, writing about games is depressing in all new ways. And guess whose fault it is? It's mine. It's my fault. Ours, really. That sounds self deprecating, but it's actually kind of arrogant, and it's not even totally untrue. Games writing is now way too personal. It's too casual. Too many writers inserting too much of themselves in ways that nobody in their right minds cares about. Too many armchair journalists speaking as though their word is gospel."

"The effect of being immersed in a video game is qualitatively different from any medium in which the consumer is just a spectator. You don't feel as though you're pushing a button on a controller-you feel like you're blowing up a tank. Translate that into sexuality, particularly acting out sexual fantasies, and you are playing with a power that few companies have been willing or able to harness. Although the explicitly erotic video game sector remains relatively small, it is still a driving force in the field."

"We spend a lot of time on, I don't know what to call it, some kind of boob physics or whatever you want to call it," Abrams said with a laugh. "I have no idea what would be a great name for it, but basically our boobs bounce. There are so many little details that we go into to create a little bit of life in a character which are typically ignored most times in other games."

"In gaming, the camera's gaze and the characters' get tangled together, because we aren't just viewers, but players. We take on the role of someone in the story, and the camera serves as our eyes. Male characters tend to be the point-of-view characters, even in a third-person game. We watch what interests them. Miranda's deliberately putting herself on display for Shepard. This makes the moment of male gaze particularly jump out if you're playing a female Shepard, as then the on-screen dynamics feel misplaced, rather than feeling like a default."

"Video games tend to be an insular, thematically slight medium in which much of the meaning that is explicit often refers back to other games themselves (I'm still looking at you Braid). Whoever observed that there are more books written about other books than any other topic would have something to say about the nostalgia binge of the last five years. In this light, it's exciting to hear about an atmospheric, thematically ambitious game that not only takes on the typical, if excellent, triumvirate of nostalgia, coming of age and fantasy, but does so with a clear consciousness of weightier issues, namely global poverty and the harm it wreaks on families."

"As a devotee of noir fiction and a long-time admirer of both James Ellroy's LA Quartet and Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential (1997), I was more than looking forward to Team Bondi's attempt to recreate 1950s Los Angeles using the Grand Theft Auto sandbox template. However, as soon as Ken Cosgrove was shoved into an interview room with a suspect and told to extract a confession, I knew that something was desperately wrong – not just with L.A. Noire, but with video games as a whole. After decades of investment in realistic graphics and physics engines, modern video games can perfectly recreate what it is like to shoot someone in the face… but ask them to recreate a believable conversation between two humans and they are at a complete loss. What we need is a revolution in the way that games portray social interaction."