malvasia bianca

Paper Mario: The Origami King is an odd game, and a refreshing one; Nintendo works within genres, but they don’t feel tied to genre conventions, or even series conventions, and so you’ll just run into decisions that seem totally out of left field, but that end up being unexpectedly interesting, and unusally positive. And we […]

What a game Okami is. I loved it when I first played it, though in recent years, I’d started to wonder: maybe that game went on a little long, maybe I was thinking about it through rose-colored memories? As it turns out: yeah, sure, the game does go on a little long, but wow what […]

If you’d asked me not too many years ago what my prototypical idea of a video game was, I probably would have come up with some sort of RPG-ish thing. Single player, with the story standing out more than anything (and with that story being excessively grandiose); but also with a lot of time spent […]

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: […]

In honor of the release of the Wii version of Okami, I urge all of you who own a Wii (or a PS2) and who haven’t played the game yet to go out and buy a copy. More here, but the short version is: it’s an adventure game based on Japanese mythology with a beautiful […]

I’ve now hit the 200 kanji mark in my quest to memorize all 1945 Joyo Kanji. Where by “memorize” I mean that, if my memory is working well (which it usually is), I can write down the first 200 characters (actually, the first 217 characters: I’ve been procrastinating on writing this blog post) in the […]

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 […]

Random Wii thoughts one week later: I would have expected to feel stupid saying “Wii” all the time, but I actually don’t mind. I guess Nintendo wasn’t completely insane when they decided on that name. Zelda is very good so far, except for the early fishing sequence. (I’m seven hours in, I think I’m a […]

I finished Okami at the end of last month. This left me with a three week gap to fill before the Wii release; what to do? I’d been thinking about Lego Star Wars II, but, for whatever reason, that wasn’t grabbing me at the moment. FFXII was tempting, but I’ve been thoroughly annoyed by Final […]

Okami is an amazing game. In some sense, it’s quite derivative: it’s working well within the Zelda genre (complete with sonic homages to its predecessor), so it’s not as novel as some recent games, but there’s more than enough new presentation in the game to keep me happy, combined with a thorough rethinking and improvement […]

I would seem to be in a quiet mood these days. Not feeling much like blogging, not feeling much like programming at home. Maybe because I’ve been programming a fair amount at work; I was worried that, with the new larger group, I’d have almost no programming time, but now that things have settled down […]