malvasia bianca

Cocoon is an extremely well made game, maybe one of the best designed puzzle games I’ve ever played? It’s a puzzle world where the puzzles themselves are artificial but embedded in the world, in the sense that the puzzles involve stuff like carrying objects from place to place, putting objects in receptacles, flipping switches, etc. […]

Earlier this year, I had a bit of time before the big Spring game releases came out, so I decided to replay Portal and to play Portal 2 for the first time. I’d liked Portal the first time I played it; I really liked it this time, to the extent that I think of it […]

I never participated in the Blogs of the Round Table back when Corvus was running it (at least I don’t think I did?), but I was quite happy to see that, with Corvus’s blessing, Critical Distance is relaunching that feature. So I thought I would take a swing at this month’s theme (provided by Corvus […]

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 […]

Rock Band arrived today. Despite her lobbying for Mario Kart Wii as our next game purchase, Miranda was plenty excited to see it show up; she helped me carry it in from the car (which was actually pretty useful, the Amazon packaging makes it just bulky enough to be very awkward to carry by yourself), […]

Portal is a first-person puzzle game. The controls are like a first-person shooter, but your gun shoots portals onto flat surfaces (walls, floor, ceiling): you can have one blue portal and one orange portal, and the two teleport you from one to another. The game starts out with simple puzzles: you need to get to […]

I bought my first single this week, “Still Alive” from Portal: Or at least my first online single; I dimly recall buying a few 45 rpm singles when I was a teenager, out of bemused curiosity that they existed. Buying online singles isn’t something I’d been planning to do. For one thing, I’m the sort […]

I (correctly) didn’t think that I’d have enough video games on consoles I already own to get me through the holiday break, so I got an Xbox 360 a couple of weeks ago. Some notes: I messed up a couple of cables when installing; probably because I’m conditioned to think that they’re all broken, it […]