malvasia bianca

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 […]

Like I said yesterday, we’re in a surprising heyday for match 3 variants. Of the variants I’ve played recently, I like Triple Town quite a bit more than 10000000: I get the feeling that there’s a lot of depth to the gameplay, in the way that it invites me to plot out strategies that take […]

10000000 is one of the many match 3 variants to have popped up over the last few years, along with Puzzle Quest (and its sequels) and Triple Town. Like those other games, it’s surprisingly good, but it’s the weakest of the trio: the gameplay doesn’t have nearly the conceptual depth of Triple Town, and the […]

I have basically nothing to say about Puzzle Agent 2 HD. It’s like the first Puzzle Agent, which in turn is like a somewhat less charming and noticeably shorter Professor Layton: a strong lineage, and a pleasant way to have spent five hours or so, but not something which has shaped my thinking in any […]

I really liked the original Ascension, but I got tired of its first expansion a lot more quickly. I assumed the second thing would happen with its second expansion, Storm of Souls, but I think I may have played the new iteration almost as much as the original. It introduces two new mechanics: certain monsters […]

I enjoyed Plague Inc., as did Liesl; nice concept (play a disease trying to exterminate the world), pleasant enough to figure out the underlying systems (which is good, since there’s not much else going on), and the different disease types are a good mechanic to let the designers vary the systems. I put several hours […]