malvasia bianca

Breath of the Wild is, of course, a stunning game. And a surprising one, both in how it departs from Zelda tradition and in how I reacted to those departures. No more progressive unlocking of weapons/tools/areas, no more restricting those areas to your specific skill set / power level (at least after the first two […]

For better or for worse, I only rarely replay video games. When I start a game, I almost always make it all the way through the game; but once I’ve done so, my brain decides that it’s happy and that I should move on to something else. And constraints on my time are such that […]

Every year brings with it its collection of lists of top N games; I mostly enjoy reading them, though I have misgivings about their existence, but I’m not very well positioned to create one myself. This year is special in that it has also brought ‘games of the decade’. About which I have fewer misgivings: […]

For its seventh game, the Vintage Game Club chose The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Which I was really excited about: aside from being a Zelda fan in general, I was curious to see if my memory of the sidequests held up. (Margaret Robinson’s GDC talk was an influence here.) The short answer: yes and […]

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about choices in games, and the effect that game save mechanisms have on the ethical impact of those choices. I won’t even attempt to link to the vast majority of the conversation, but two contributions (both involving Nels Anderson) particularly struck me today: slides for a talk by […]

I’m pleased to say that the Vintage Game club has chosen The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask as its seventh game. The discussion will probably begin on Friday, June 10th; it’s a wonderful game, and one that I suspect has quite a lot to teach me; please come join us if you have any interest […]

One of the most interesting of the talks I attended at this year’s GDC was Margeret Robertson’ talk Stop Wasting My Time and Your Money: Why Your Game Doesn’t Need a Story to be a Hit. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any notes while listening to it, so my summary at the time was exceedingly sparse. […]

The Vintage Game Club chose Chrono Trigger as its fifth game. I never owned a SNES, so I missed the game its first time around; I did play through most of the PS1 port of the game, but found it a bit of a slog. Which, I’d gathered, had a lot more to do with […]

Whenever I start a new Nintendo game in an established series, I do so assuming I’m going to be disappointed. Their core series made the leap brilliantly to 3D, opening up gameplay in ways that I’d never imagined. And then, with one idiosyncratic exception, Nintendo has mined that gameplay in subsequent installments, not adding anything […]

I just finished the latest Zelda. Summary: a good game, quite well done. But not a great game, for two reasons: the previous games in the series, and a certain other game in the genre that came out the same year and that is much much better. The good: it’s a Zelda game, with all […]