malvasia bianca

Picross DS was an amazing game: I sunk hours and hours into it, I suspect that there were individual puzzles that I sunk more than an hour into. So I was really looking forward to Picross 3D. Sadly (and ironically!), it’s only a shadow of its predecessor. The extra dimension should have added more possibilities […]

I was expecting to spend a fair amount of time playing games on my iPod Touch / iPhone, but that never really happened: I rarely found myself in a situation where it was my only game-playing device available, and, for me, games on it didn’t manage to compete against games on other devices. With my […]

Since I started working at Playdom, I’ve been getting occasional e-mails from friends who play traditional video games (or “core video games”, as they’re frequently called these days). The authors of these e-mails haven’t been impressed by the social games that they’ve played; so, given that I mostly blog about core games and my tastes […]

At GDC this year, Randy Smith recommended that game developers provide a “game-toy” as their players’ initial experience with their game: strong, juicy affordances with low pressure. Which is great advice, but is of course not all that you need: as Smith also comments, we want players to be able to enjoy the game for […]

Scott Rosenberg has recently been making a case that web sites (news sites, at least, but I think the argument applies more broadly) should make the revision history of stories public. Which makes sense to me, and to enough other people that a Post Revision Display WordPress plugin is now available. Which I’ve just turned […]

For better or for worse, I only rarely replay video games. When I start a game, I almost always make it all the way through the game; but once I’ve done so, my brain decides that it’s happy and that I should move on to something else. And constraints on my time are such that […]

One of my favorite video game groups is the Video Games and Human Values Initiative, spearheaded by Roger Travis; in particular, I always look forward to the weekly VGHVI gaming nights. (Usually on Thursdays, though other nights are possible as well.) We’d been coordinating our events through a Ning site; unfortunately, Ning has now decided […]

Earlier this summer, we went to see Puccini’s opera The Girl of the Golden West. Which was quite the spectacle, but my first thought after it was over was “after this, I’d better not hear anybody ever complain about video game plots again!” Its plot was threadbare and ridiculous; I’ve certainly played video games with […]

I promised a post on why I created my linkblog, but then I forgot to talk about it in my recent Reeder post. The primary trigger was in fact my increased iPad usage: I find it annoying to read others’ link roundup posts on the iPad/iPhone, and it’s also a bit of a pain to […]