malvasia bianca

At 4:00pm on the friday of GDC, I attended The Iterative Level Design Process of Bioware’s Mass Effect 2. I went because I loved Mass Effect and because I’m always happy to see the word “iterative” used, but the talk turned out to be an excellent final experience from the conference for a completely unexpected […]

My notes from the talks that I went to on Friday at GDC: 9:00am: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Design Lessons Learned from Rock Band. Which began with the question: what do you do about the fact that everybody wants to have input into the design of your game? If a designer has tight control, […]

A quite good day today; three of the five sessions that I attended were extremely interesting. My notes: 9:00am: GDC Microtalks. I was wondering if I should go to it—my experiences yesterday didn’t leave me entirely sold on the value of panels—but I figured that, if I got one interesting thing out of it, I […]

Notes from today: 9:00am: Iwata’s Keynote. The part I enjoyed the most was his discussion of Miyamoto’s development style. I wish I’d taken better notes on one slide in particular; a few things he talked about: No design documents. Instead, they depend on personal communication among small teams. They use very focused prototypes. These are […]

I’m trying to firm up my GDC schedule. (Though, as you will see below, I’m failing miserably in that regard.) For people reading this blog who are going to be there: this is what I look like, please say hi! The only meal I have scheduled right now is dinner on Thursday, if anybody wants […]

For its fifth game, the Vintage Game Club has chosen Chrono Trigger. We’ll begin our playthrough this Saturday, and I’m really looking forward to it; if you’re interested in joining us, please grab a copy of the game and come on over to the forum!

Comcast is forcing us to switch over to digital TV soon; given that this will break our DVR, we’re thinking that we should just give up on this whole cable TV idea, and set up a computer as a media center instead. Conveniently, Apple has just upgraded the Mac mini, so we’re going to go […]

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 […]

Thanks to everybody who game me twitter client recommendations for my iPod Touch; I’ve tried them out, and settled on Tweetie. (Recommended by Shawn Rider.) It’s been successful enough that I immediately stopped launching Twhirl on my Linux machines, and I’ve recently stopped launching Twitterriffic on my Mac. Others I considered: TwitterFon. It didn’t have […]

I’d been thinking of giving Miranda a copy of Mario Kart Wii for Christmas, but Amazon was sold out of copies on the day that I was ordering presents. Rather than hunt for that game at other stores, I went with my second choice, Boom Blox, which turned out to be a quite pleasant alternative. […]

The Vintage Game Club chose Beyond Good & Evil as its fourth game. I played the game when it first came out; I enjoyed it, but it didn’t make a big impact on me, and I mentally pigeonholed it as a short Zelda clone. Still, I was happy enough to have an excuse to replay […]

What web sites should I be reading if I want to learn about iPhone / iPod Touch games? There are an awful lot of games for the platform already, with a pretty staggering variety, and the web sites that I’m reading now are generally more focused on the traditional console space. So I’m pretty sure […]

Searching for others’ blog posts about Persona 3 got me exposed to the different kinds of posts people write about games. And I was surprised about the extent to which my search clarified my feelings about what kinds of posts I like. Generally, the posts fell into a few different categories; I could break them […]

I’ve recently been reading Bruno Latour‘s Politics of Nature, and have been struck by how well various agile practices fit into his framework. So I want to try to explain his framework (again!), and to explore how agile practices might fit in. His book begins as a reaction against the split between nature and society, […]

It is definitely time for me to buy a new iPod: when driving to the airport, it took me five tries to reset the old one after it locked up, because I couldn’t get the buttons to engage. Given the frequency with which my old one locks up, that will become untenable almost immediately. Which […]