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You Know What I Love? Double-Jumps
You know what I love? Double-jumps. I love the ability to jump and then, in mid-air, and in a way that completely defies any understanding of physics, to jump again. I love how this is used in level...
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You Know What I Love? Battlefield: Bad Company
You know what I love? Battlefield: Bad Company. Not Bad Company 2. Bad Company 1. As a console-only Battlefield (gasp!) that came out way back in 2008, it has understandably been overshadowed somewhat...
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You Know What I Love? When Cool Stuff Happens
You know what I love? When cool stuff happens in games. As an aspiring videogame academic who is largely concerned with how and why we enjoy videogames, I read lots of articles that try to pinpoint the...
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You Know What I Love? Sliding Into Crouch
You know what I love? Sliding into crouch. In some games (too few games, sadly), if you press the crouch button while you are running, your character doesn’t just stop and crouch, but dramatically hits...
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You Know What I Love? Having A Companion
You know what I love? Having a companion in a game with me—a human companion. Be it the built in co-op mode of a shooter, chilling out on a Minecraft server with my girlfriend, the sympathetic...
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You Know What I Love? When Game Designers are Jerks
You know what I love? When game designers are jerks. Not so much when they hold back key features to release as day one DLC, or when they force me to be online even to play single player, but when they...
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You Know What I Love? Diegetic HUDs
You know what I love? Diegetic HUDs. That is, when the heads-up display (your health, ammo, and all that information) that sits there flat against the screen in most videogames is incorporated into the...
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You Know What I Love? Songs
You know what I love? Songs. I love when instead of ever-looping ambient music that continues forever, a game figures out how to implement an actual, voiced, start-to-finish song into a scene. It’s so...
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You Know What I Love? Ledge Grabs
You know what I love? Ledge grabs. I love playable characters that, when they can’t quite make a jump, can grab onto a ledge and lift themselves up. It’s such a simple, ubiquitous skill that passes...
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You Know What I Love? Music, Visualised in Games
You know what I love? Music, visualised in games. I love it when a game renders bits of its own music visible in the space of the game world—or when that game world is a visual representation of the...
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You Know What I Love? Dawn and Dusk
You know what I love? Dawn and dusk. Sunrise and sunset. I love games with persistent time, with a sun and a moon that circle the sky without a care in the world for my character’s petty little...
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You Know What I Love? Chunky Guns
You know what I love? Guns that feel chunky. When I pull that right trigger or click that mouse button, I want each and every bullet fired to feel like a fist attached to a rocket. The simple feel of a...
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You Know What I Love? Dying
You know what I love? Dying. In those games where death is both probable and permanent, death might not be the victory I was striving for, but its inevitability gives a sense of intensity and...
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You Know What I Love? Nostalgia
You know what I love? Nostalgia. I love it when a new game makes explicit or implicit nods to a previous generation of gaming, be it through subtle references or blatant, pixel-art aesthetics. I get an...
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You know What I Love? Carmageddon’s Pinball Mode
You know what I love? Pinball mode. It’s a power-up in Carmageddon that practically breaks the game for as long as it is active. I love the absurdity of pinball mode. I love that this ability is so...
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You Know What I Love? Violent Videogames About Videogame Violence
You know what I love? Violent videogames about videogame violence. I love the trend over the past few years (and the last year especially) to examine the various ways that violence functions in...
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You Know What I Love? Endings That Actually End
You know what I love? Endings. I mean real endings. Not just that point where the game peters out before the credits roll, but proper conclusions that actually wrap everything up, grabbing the...
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You Know What I Love? Short Games
You know what I love? Short games. Games that aren’t bloated with content simply because games are apparently meant to be long. Games that know they can say what they want to say in a matter of hours...
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You Know What I Love? Cinematic Games
You know what I love? Cinematic games. For all the times that we say the best videogames are those that are “games first” (whatever that means), I love the games that aren’t afraid to take a lesson or...
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You Know What I Love? Borderlands 2’s Goliath Enemy
You know what I love? The Goliath enemy in Borderlands 2. While initially it might seem like just a slightly larger bullet-sponge than all the other bullet-sponge enemies in the game, the Goliath...
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