malvasia bianca

For a game that impressed me as much as Journey did, I’ve had a surprisingly hard time getting around to writing my wrap-up post for the game. Most of this is because of my Orsay Games post: it said so much that I wanted to say about Journey that I wasn’t sure for a while […]

With the release of Journey, we decided to have a VGHVI conversation about all of thatgamecompany‘s games. I’d never played the PS3 version of flOw (though I did play the Flash version when it came out), so I figured I’d take this as an opportunity to remedy that gap. And it certainly wasn’t what I […]

Today’s talks: 10:00 am: How to Manage an Exploratory Development Process, by Kellee Santiago and Robin Hunicke. I heard Robin speak in the microtalks last year; she’s at thatgamecompany now. Good talk, and surprisingly moving: they started off by talking about how, at E3 2008, they debuted Flower, the press and their publisher loved it, […]

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 […]

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 fifth level of Flower is the most problematic by far. At the end of the fourth level, you get a pretty strong indication that matters have taken a turn for the worse, with some sort of black energy running along power cables that have glowing red lights; even so, I was completely unprepared for […]

More links (and older links) than normal this time: Reader has developed a nasty habit of not showing me all the items with a given tag, so I didn’t realize that I hadn’t posted some of these already. My favorite new blog: Dear Planetary Astronomer Mike. Learn about the history of the earth, or Pluto’s […]