malvasia bianca

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 […]

What to say about Child of Eden? It’s an awful lot like Rez, which I also had very little to say about. The graphics are better; mostly, that’s good, and leads to a bit more surface to attach thoughts to (e.g. in the game’s pairing of mechanical objects with passion). But there’s nothing like the […]

I’ve been going through the songs in Rock Band 3 on Expert Pro Guitar for seven months now; it’s been an interesting journey. At the start of that period, I could feel my way around a guitar and play basic chords, but I wasn’t nearly as comfortable as I’d like; to be honest, that’s arguably […]

In the media I interact with, there’s a lot of killing. In games, it’s especially prominent, because killing is frequently used as a core mechanic for non-narrative reasons. (That’s not the only reason for the prominence of killing in games, of course: the desire of many games to appeal to an extremely skewed view of […]

I was really excited to play Ni No Kuni DS for three reasons: 1) Studio Ghibli; 2) the book; 3) to improve my Japanese. And, when I started, I was happy for all reasons: the packaging was better than anything I’ve seen in decades, the Japanese in the manual and the game was at a […]

I don’t think my blogging norms really require me to blog about Rez HD: it’s a remake of a game I’ve played before, and a remake that doesn’t stray from the original as far as I can remember. So I’m really replaying a game, not playing a game for the first time, and as such […]

For a game that impressed me as much as Journey did, I’ve had a surprisingly hard time getting around to writing my wrap-up post for the game. Most of this is because of my Orsay Games post: it said so much that I wanted to say about Journey that I wasn’t sure for a while […]

With the release of Journey, we decided to have a VGHVI conversation about all of thatgamecompany‘s games. I’d never played the PS3 version of flOw (though I did play the Flash version when it came out), so I figured I’d take this as an opportunity to remedy that gap. And it certainly wasn’t what I […]

The first two Mass Effect games were among my favorites of this console generation. Despite that, I’d been rather ambivalent about the approaching third installment in the series for the last year, ever since Mass Effect 2‘s Arrival DLC. Arrival took a series that had always allowed me to express optimism about doing the right […]

I’ve always been an unconventional video games blogger, because of the low volume of games that I find time to play, but that’s become much more the case over the last year. I was surprised to look at my recently played games list and realize that I didn’t finish any games for five months solid […]

I don’t have a lot to say about the Return of the Fallen expansion to Ascension. I enjoyed playing it (both alone and in combination with the original set of cards), and I’m sure I went through a couple hundred games, but it didn’t have the same effect on me as the original game had. […]

While I was on vacation, I decided to give Jetpack Joyride a try: the GDC talk on it was interesting enough, Miranda liked it, several people on my Twitter feed liked it, and the iPad was the main device I had with me to play games on. And: it was all right. I rather enjoyed […]