malvasia bianca

I used to play driving games a fair amount: they were never my genre of choice or anything, but I found them soothing. I’d gotten out of the habit over the last few years, but I’d been hearing good things about various Forza games for a few years; so when I finished playing through Shenmue, […]

At work, we frequently play a few rounds of Burnout Revenge after lunch. (Video games seem to be a general startup thing, not just a game startup thing.) Which is a lot of fun; the only Burnout game I’d previously played was Burnout Paradise, and while I think that game is a masterpiece, I’m also […]

The main question that I’d like to understand better in the current Vintage Game Club playthrough of Super Mario 64 is how the game fits into the taxonomy of the genre of platformers. Or, indeed, whether it fits into the taxonomy of that genre: while, at the time it was released, Super Mario 64 seemed […]

(See conflict of interest disclaimer.) Many Facebook games (e.g. most or all entrants in the farm genre) could be considered sandbox games; and one of my most eye-opening experiences in spending time on Facebook is just how different those sandbox games can be from console sandbox games. Console sandbox games constantly give you very direct […]

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 […]

(See conflict of interest disclaimer.) We launched Tiki Resort last month, and it took me a few days to come to grips with it. I was dutifully doing what the game told me to—placing buildings, gathering coins, clicking on messes to clean them up, feeding my tourists—and leveling up apace. But I was starting to […]

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, the Big Surf Island expansion expansion to Burnout Paradise got me appreciating the game in a rather more visceral way than I had before then: all the different gameplay options crammed together in one small package hooked me on the game fairly seriously. So I decided to […]

I very much enjoy the VGHVI game nights on Thursday evenings (we’re playing the Beatles game this week, by the way), but they don’t interact well with my normal style of going through games. I have to budget my game play time fairly strictly; since I normally like to go through games in depth, this […]

I normally stay away from online video game play, both because of a lack of time and because of the bad things I’ve heard about strangers’ behavior on Xbox Live. For the last six months, though, I’ve been meeting up every Thursday thursday to play games with people from the Video Games and Human Values […]

I just got a copy of Call of Duty 4 in preparation for tomorrow’s VGHVI play session. I figured I should get my fingers used to the game first, so I went to play it tonight; I launched the game, futzed around with the menus, started a game, and it froze. (Soft, not hard, the […]