malvasia bianca

So: Harmonix announced Rock Band 4. I had mixed feelings when I filled out the survey: on the one hand, I claimed that pro instruments were most important to me, because that is after all how I spent most of my time in Rock Band 3, but, on the other hand: “pro instruments” probably really […]

This is going to a hard post to write. Normally, I play a game, finish it, and write about it here; but I’ve been playing Rock Band 3 for more than two years, and I’ve been playing one game in the series or another constantly since the first game came out back in 2007. So […]

I’ve been playing Rock Band in whatever its current incarnation is pretty much every weekend since the first iteration of the series came out. At first, I liked playing fake plastic guitars and was curious about drums (and, to a lesser extent, singing), and I enjoyed having people with good musical taste select songs for […]

In the January VGHVI Symposium, we discussed some of Roger’s thoughts on teaching. Which was a very interesting conversation, and I’d like to follow it up more. Unfortunately, I’m hampered for a couple of reasons: I haven’t been in a classroom at all for a couple of years, I haven’t been the primary instructor in […]

This weekend’s Rock Band 3 practice was spent playing I Love Rock and Roll over and over and over again; call me a simpleton, but I really enjoyed it in ways that bear on the way it feels (physically, not emotionally) to play it. It’s a very simple song, built around the three simplest chords […]

I normally blog about a video game here when I finish playing it; that causes problems with games that I never actually stop playing, and the Rock Band games are the worst offenders in that regard. Still, with Rock Band 3 coming up, I figure it’s time to come to some sort of stopping point […]

One of the rules I try to follow on this blog and on Twitter is to not talk about prerelease information for video games. (And, indeed, I don’t even follow prerelease information for video games too closely—why would I want to spend my time thinking about games that don’t yet exist in preference to games […]

Jesse Schell gave a great talk at DICE earlier this year on “design outside the box”. There are pretty good writeups by Kris Graft and Kim Pallister, and his slides are available, but if you’re at all interested, I recommend just watching it: his presentation style is very entertaining and engaging. The talk was all […]

I was intending for BioShock to be one of the first games I played on my 360 but, well, one thing after another came up, and it took me a couple of years to get around to the game. In the mean time, it has garnered some amount of discussion, so I’m fairly sure I […]

I was excited that the Vintage Game Club chose Thief as its eighth game. I’ve never had a very good relation with stealth games (or stealth segments/aspects of non-stealth games); but I’ve heard enough good about Thief (especially from Justin Keverne) to make me cautiously optimistic that I’d like the genre more when I saw […]

In a recent podcast, Justin Keverne talked about how it was odd that we define genre in video games almost exclusively in terms of what you do, whereas in other media genre is linked more with the themes that are under consideration in the works. I’m still not sure what I think about this (and, […]

The one flaw I’m seeing so far in the Beatles game is its microphone support. I really want to try out the vocal harmonies, but I don’t have many suitable devices around the house: I have two Xbox headsets, but the game only supports USB mics, and I have a USB headset for Skype usage, […]