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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 […]

I’ve been playing Android: Netrunner at work over lunch maybe a couple of times a week for over a year now; three of us have been fairly devoted to the game, there’s one other person who plays occasionally, and one person has recently joined the cult as well. I like the game a lot: there’s […]

It’s been a couple of months since my first impressions of Rocksmith 2014, so time for some second impressions. First, my overall feeling about the game: my current feeling is that it’s a great game, and potentially an important one. Not necessarily important as a game so much: what I like about it so much […]

I play a lot of Android: Netrunner at work; other board games, too, but Netrunner is the one that’s sunk its teeth into me most deeply. I mostly play over lunch, but sometimes I play at other times, and occasionally those lunches get pretty long; this makes me wonder: is there any way I can […]

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 […]

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 […]

I don’t normally write about Flash games, but Naya’s Quest (here’s the direct link) seem substantial enough to qualify. Plus, it’s by Terry Cavanagh. Not that I have much to say about it. It’s a puzzle game, with a pretty interesting idea: that if you do 3-D tiles with the right fixed perspective, then tiles […]

Just to preempt confusion: this blog post is about the song Love Hurts (by Incubus), as experienced through Rocksmith, it is not about any non-musical personal experience! So, if you’re a friend of mine, no need to worry: I won’t take a stand on to what extent love can be a painful experience, but I […]

I wish I hadn’t waited a month after finishing Digital: A Love Story before writing about it: I don’t think I had a lot to say about it when I finished it, but I had something to say about it then, or at least I had something to say in/after the VGHVI Symposium on the […]

I was looking recently to see if Nikoli had put out any more iOS versions of their puzzles; they hadn’t, but I saw several apps from Conceptis, and I have a lot of respect for them as well. So I downloaded a bunch of those and started giving them a try. Which I’m very glad […]

I’ve had a weekend with Rocksmith 2014 now; and my initial take is that it’s subtly better than its predecessor in a few interesting ways. I spent most of my time in the original game going through the Events that it gives you: a collection of songs each of which has a target score, so […]

The interesting thing about Plants vs. Zombies 2 isn’t the gameplay: that’s largely the same as in its predecessor, and remains solid. Instead, it’s the business model: the game is free to play, and makes its money off of in-app purchases. Which is something that the corner of the games community that I’m part of […]

In the past, my habit has been to only write my main post about a game when I stop playing it. That makes sense for the vast majority of games that I play; but for games that I play for month after month, that I would play in perpetuity if a sequel wasn’t released, that […]

It took me a little while to warm up to Ascension: Immortal Heroes, but I eventually ended up liking it quite a bit, about as much as the second expansion. It first seemed like the new mechanic, randomly acquiring a card from the original game that was valid for one turn only, added a bit […]

Liesl and I are in the middle of a reread of the Kushiel series, and the original trilogy continues to be, in its own way, great. I thought I’d written more about it here, but it turns out that I’ve only barely touched on the series. So I think it’s time to touch on it […]

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 […]

I got off on the wrong foot with The Unfinished Swan, starting from its very first storybook page: that page begins with the sentence “The King was young, arrogant, and amazingly talented”, and that set up too many associations for me. Associations with my personal life: I spent a lot of time doing math contests […]

I haven’t been following the Twine scene too closely: in my experience, Twine games generally feel like hypertext, and hypertext isn’t something that I’m particularly interested in. Porpentine’s work is distinctive enough to make me take notice, but even her work isn’t entirely to my taste, though I’m leaning towards a belief that that’s more […]

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 […]

I wish I’d written about Proteus soon after playing it: it’s an amazing game, different in significant ways from almost every other game I’ve played, and while I don’t think I’d managed to come up with too many coherent thoughts articulating what I had to say, I suspect I had more at the time than […]