Comments for malvasia bianca

Comment on curse you, brainy gamer! by Dan Bruno

Dan Bruno — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:49:33 +0000

You know, that Abbott guy is directly responsible for me playing Okami. He even tried to mail the thing to me, when I hesitated on buying it. What flagrant disregard for free time!

The game club is a great idea. Kotaku has something like it, but, well, that’s Kotaku; I feel like I remember another site that does something similar, but I can’t think of it now.

Michael, I actually think your site in particular would be well-suited to a game club. It seems to me that it acts as a nexus for our particular corner of the gaming blogosphere — David and I (as well as Corvus and Ben and L.B. and the rest) all read the Brainy Gamer, even if we don’t necessarily all read each others’ blogs. I think we’d have a sizable group interested in this sort of thing fairly quickly.

Anyway, it’s something to think about. Although I too have a backlog of games I’ve been meaning to play…

Comment on curse you, brainy gamer! by Michael Abbott

Michael Abbott — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:19:48 +0000

How about this for a solution?:

Disclaimer: Games discussed on this podcast may be detrimental to your free time, career, and budget. Listeners are advised to proceed with caution. The Brainy Gamer cannot be held liable for any negative repercussions, but will happily assume responsibility for all positive ones.

Seriously, your video game club proposal is VERY interesting to me. I’ve been discussing a similar idea with my wife where I would choose a game on the site and invite people to play it along with me and post comments as we go along.

But I like your idea better because it sounds like something that could be hosted by various game-focused sites like yours and mine…sort of like a group of friends in a book club take turns hosting members in their homes. Is this sort of what you had in mind? I think it’s a terrific idea.

If you’d like to email me and discuss it further, maybe we could flesh out the idea and move forward with it. I can think of several excellent blogs/sites that would make excellent hosts and would probably jump at the chance to be involved.

Maybe this will make up for the many ways I’ve ruined your life.

Comment on a third of a way through the textbook by malvasia bianca » Blog Archive » two-thirds of the way through the textbook

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 04:54:01 +0000

[...] of the way through my Japanese textbook, and the second third went much more smoothly than the first third did. All but one of the chapters took two weeks each; that one took three weeks and, if you throw in [...]

Comment on memory by David Carlton

David Carlton — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 02:14:47 +0000

I’ll have to say, mnemosyne looks pretty good. I think I’ll still roll my own because I want to use it as an excuse to learn rails, but mnemosyne would probably be perfectly reasonable otherwise.

Comment on go tournament as 1 dan; japantown by malvasia bianca » Blog Archive » alive games

malvasia bianca » Blog Archive » alive games — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:31:16 +0000

[...] in living objects. Which got me thinking: where else do they appear? I have go on the brain these days, and if any game is going to show signs of life, surely that’s the one, so let’s test [...]

Comment on malstrom’s nintendo strategy articles by David Carlton

David Carlton — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 05:15:07 +0000

I love dialogues.

Comment on malstrom’s nintendo strategy articles by David Carlton

David Carlton — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 04:23:09 +0000

Yeah, the idea that Nintendo will be moving up the gaming complexity ladder and grabbing more market share all the while is really interesting. I’m very curious how the next two or three years will turn out.

Comment on malstrom’s nintendo strategy articles by Michael Abbott

Michael Abbott — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 02:05:13 +0000

Wow, this is a terrific resource. Thanks for the link and the heads-up. This is a unique and much-needed perspective on an overlooked aspect of video games. The “casual fallacy” thesis has me rethinking a few of my most basic assumptions…and how often does that happen?!

Comment on half-life 2 by David Carlton

David Carlton — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 03:53:20 +0000

If you like sandbox games but would would prefer to spend a couple dozen hours instead of hundreds of hours on one, I recommend Bully.

Comment on half-life 2 by Stuart Marks

Stuart Marks — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:51:04 +0000

How can you save “more often than is healthy”? I thought the point of saving was to preserve your health.

On game-playing and plot, I think Doom was early enough in the FPS genre that it didn’t really need a plot. The introduction of plot came later. Halo certainly has a more intriguing plot than the Doom/Quake series, its graphics and music are fantastic, and the necessity to scrounge for alien weapons made for an interesting variation on the usual another-pile-of-health-and-ammo-around-the-corner. But some of the levels got to be VERY repetitive.

I also also surprised how quickly I finished Halo. I think I got through it in — a wild guess — 20 hours or so. This compares to GTA Vice City and GTA San Andreas (a different genre, yes) where I’ve spent hundreds of hours on each. And I’m only 1/3 of the way through San Andreas.

I don’t have a machine capable of playing GTA4 yet, which is just as well, as I don’t really need another time-waster at the moment.