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alien: isolation

For years now, I’ve been frustrated by games’ fixation on an anointed hero saving the world through mass slaughter; I’ve been talking about that most frequently recently in the context of Dragon Age: Inquisition, but of course anointed murderers are all over the place, the only reason why I bring the issue up in the […]

system shock 2

I’m planning to play through all the games in both of the Shock series this year; I had a quite good time replaying System Shock, but I’d never played System Shock 2, which seems to get talked about rather more. (E.g. I’ve seen comments claiming that BioShock is in many ways an inferior remake of […]

games and copyright

John Walker’s editorial in Rock Paper Shotgun on “Why Games Should Enter The Public Domain” was going around my Twitter feed the other day, frequently coupled with Steve Gaynor’s response. And what I appreciate about both of them is the pragmatic tack that they take: I think that the U.S. Constitution has it right by […]

gone home

From reading the initial responses to Gone Home, I was optimistic that I’d like the game, but I wasn’t optimistic that I would like it as much as many people did: many people’s favorable responses seemed to be about how well it resonated with their experiences, talking about the details of being a teenager in […]

system shock

I first played System Shock right when it was released: a friend of mine who worked at Looking Glass gave me a copy. And it’s apparently lodged itself in my brain—over the summer, I wandered across some footage of the game, and it all came back, almost two decades later. So I figured I should […]

pc gaming

As I mentioned last month, I was thinking of hooking up my laptop to the TV so I could play System Shock on it. That idea didn’t go away; so I ordered a mini-DVI-to-HDMI converter and a lap desk. It took me a little while to get around to setting things up—I was playing the […]

playing pc games on the tv

I recently watched a video about the System Shock and BioShock games, and I was surprised how nostalgic the System Shock footage made me. I’d been tentatively thinking that I should play through the entire BioShock series (I’ve only played through the first game in the series), but now I’m thinking I should start off […]

an apple-focused personal history of computing

When Steve Jobs died, I felt I should write about him. Probably about Apple, really: I don’t know anything about Jobs, but Apple (the company and its products) occupies a surprising amount of my psychic space. It took me quite some time to get around to writing the post, however; and, when I started typing, […]

half-life 2

I managed to avoid playing any of the Half-Life games in the past: I’ve been almost exclusively a console gamer since 1998, and the few computer games I’ve played since then are ones that can be played with a touchpad (my hands and mice really don’t get along), which pretty much means that PC FPSes […]

erik ray, r.i.p.

I was very sad to learn that Erik Ray died on May 14, after being hit by a car while riding his bicycle. He was more of a friend-of-a-friend than a direct friend, but I certainly enjoyed the time I spent with him when we were both living in the Boston area. For those of […]

i do not like first-person shooters

I used to like first-person shooters – in the distant past, I seem to recall having enjoyed Doom, Marathon, System Shock, Dark Forces, and GoldenEye, for example. The last few times I’ve played FPS’s, though, they really haven’t done much for me. I’m not sure why the big change – part is probably that I […]