malvasia bianca

The Experience Points folks suggested replaying Journey on the anniversary of its release; I did that, and I enjoyed the experience enough to return to it again a few days later. Journey is a wonderful game for many reasons, of course, and its short length lends itself very well to this sort of return. I […]

I am not into stealth games. In fact, before its recent resurrection, the only Vintage Game Club game that I didn’t finish was Thief. I was excited to play that game, but when it actually came down to it, the experience was just too much for me. Some of that has to do with personal […]

My guitar playing—my relationship to/with my guitar, really—has continued to change over the last few months. A lot of that is a steady drip of improvement, but my feelings towards bending strings have been a bit more of a state change. Bending strings was probably the most significant technique that Rock Band 3 didn’t model […]

This is going to a hard post to write. Normally, I play a game, finish it, and write about it here; but I’ve been playing Rock Band 3 for more than two years, and I’ve been playing one game in the series or another constantly since the first game came out back in 2007. So […]

The Vintage Game Club has been dormant for a while now, but the recent release of System Shock 2 on Good Old Games was too much for Michael to resist, so he’s organizing a playthrough! So, if you’re thinking of giving the game a try yourself, please consider playing along with the VGC.

When I saw that Kris had a “Cat Games” tier on her GoFundMe campaign, promising that she would “encourage Jason to write a Twine game about your generosity (it may be a string of “jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjkkkkkkkkaaaaa”)”, I just couldn’t resist. And I am very pleased to see that Jason has, indeed delivered. It is a true […]

Every so often, I get somewhat dissatisfied with an aspect of how I’m spending my time; these days, it generally involves rethinking the way small actions fill time. I’m in the middle of one of those periods right now; it was kicked off by me running into a thought-provoking article about (temporarily) quitting Twitter right […]

Papo & Yo is, I suspect, an important game. But it is also a game that my history doesn’t equip me particularly well to talk about. This, given its subject matter, is extremely fortunate for me personally; it does handicap me as a blogger in this instance, however. But still: I have to say something […]

I think Spaceteam is a kind of amazing game, though I doubt I’ll have much to say about it. There are way too few cooperative multiplayer games out there, which is one of my favorite play styles; the game play is charming and holds up for a surprisingly long time given its basic simplicity; the […]

Another GDC is coming up, and as frequently happens, there’s a video game blogger who is trying to raise money to attend GDC whom I very much support in that endeavour. This year, it’s Kris Ligman, whom you probably know best through her work curating This Week in Videogame Blogging at Critical Distance each week; […]

I’ve been playing Rock Band in whatever its current incarnation is pretty much every weekend since the first iteration of the series came out. At first, I liked playing fake plastic guitars and was curious about drums (and, to a lesser extent, singing), and I enjoyed having people with good musical taste select songs for […]

For a long time, the Kickstarter whose product I was most eagerly waiting for was Corvus Elrod‘s Bhaloidam. The funny thing was that I wasn’t entirely sure why I was looking forward to it so much—I have a lot of respect for Corvus, and he seemed to be going in an interesting direction, but I […]

I don’t normally put spoiler warnings on this blog, but given how recently The Walking Dead came out, I’ll make an exception: spoilers below.   If I had to try to put a finger on what makes The Walking Dead so different from other narrative games I’ve played recently, it’s the way the game avoids […]

For the last couple of weeks, my twitter feed has had a lot of chatter about Persona 4 Golden, enough so that I was thinking that I should maybe get a copy at some point. I don’t have a Vita yet, but I’m actually hearing enough buzz about that system that I’m not against getting […]

I never played Words with Friends, or Scrabulous before it, so Letterpress was my introduction to the genre of “asynchronous video games based on coming up with longer and/or more obscure words than your friends”. Which turns out to be a pleasant enough genre! Especially since my stock of long and obscure words is not […]

I have not been playing a lot of games recently. Part of this is that my weekend video game time is almost entirely taken up with Rock Band 3 and Rocksmith; part of it is that we’re watching more movies than we used to and we’re going through Deep Space 9 as well; part is […]

Miranda’s elementary school was a parent participation program, so I spent a couple of hours there every week for several years. And one of the most peculiar aspects of that experience was watching kids learn how to read. I have been reading fluently and obsessively for most of four decades by now, so I am […]

Dragon Age 2 starts off with a frame: the Seeker interrogating Varric about Hawke’s deeds, and calling bullshit on him. So: it’s first of all a game about story. But not a story with a clear ending or a clear path; and not a story where we the player (or, for that matter, the player’s […]

I’m working on trying to get the 60-second achievement for Hyper Hexagonest mode in Super Hexagon; for a while, I’ve had the feeling that 60 seconds is achievable with my current skill level (and that my current skill level isn’t increasing particularly quickly), I just need to have a lucky run where my guesses and […]

I basically spent one long afternoon playing Rock Band Blitz. I went through all the songs, unlocked all the power-ups, earned three quarters of the achievements, challenged a few friends, completed some of the goals from the Facebook app. So: a long afternoon, and a pleasant one! But, after that afternoon, I didn’t really feel […]