malvasia bianca

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 […]

Player of Games has always been my favorite Iain Banks novel, but I’ve never been sure how much of that is because it’s good and how much of that is because it presses my buttons. I like the Culture quite a bit as a universe, and I’m also pretty obsessed with games, so it’s only […]

This year, I’ve been a little touchier about games than in the past. I’m tired of violence in games: yes, it’s a classic theme, rich in narrative possibilities; yes, it lends itself to a myriad of success/failure conditions that are rich in gameplay possibilities; but even so, does it have to be quite so dominant? […]

If I’d played Trauma before Dominique Pamplemousse, I’d probably have ended up writing the same blog post, just about a different game. Because Trauma is also a very good game, and one that impresses me in a way that I wish I didn’t find so out-of-the-ordinary: it’s one person’s singular vision, it’s very compelling, it’s […]

I’d been a little curious about Versu ever since it came out, and a talk I heard at GDC this year did nothing to reduce my enthusiasm. So I figured I’d try it out on the plane ride to Japan. Unfortunately, there was a flaw in my plan: when I downloaded the game, I realized […]

The iPad version of Mirror’s Edge seemed like a pleasant enough game: mostly good enough mechanics (albeit not ones that particularly excited me), good level design. I played through it once and then went through the first few levels again trying to get speed runs. Having said that, there was one mechanic that I didn’t […]

I can’t say that I understood Starbloom. It’s nice enough to look at and to listen to; there’s a bit of gameplay there, but that gameplay didn’t grab me in terms of the game’s explicit goals. (Either in thinking about how to approach those goals or in the mechanics of carrying out that approach.) Which […]

When I first heard about Dominique Pamplemousse (or, to use its full title, Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once The Fat Lady Sings!”), it sounded charming: what’s not to like about a claymation musical adventure game? Even so, I was blown away how much I cared about the finished product. And I wasn’t the […]

One of the better talks I went to at the first GDC I attended was by Randy Smith, so I was curious about the studio he co-founded. Unfortunately, their first game didn’t grab me; their second game, Waking Mars, sounded like it might have mechanics that were a bit more to my taste, so while […]

I played The Dreamhold on the plane ride to Japan. I guess these days the genre label that the game fits within (or the mechanics label—I’m not entirely at peace with how the term “genre” is used with games) is “parser-based interactive fiction”? Which is something I played a lot when I was growing up; […]

While I was on vacation, I only played iPad games; I’ll write a post about each of them, but they were mostly short, so I don’t always have a lot to say. Hundreds is a good example. (Though actually I really played it during GDC.) It’s a puzzle game; I’d heard good things about it […]

I don’t normally blog about Flash games or Twine games that I play (for no particularly thought-through reason), but I was thinking I should make an exception for Grow Maze: it’s wonderful and it’s as long as some iOS games that I’ve played recently that do fall into the bucket of “games I blog about”. […]