malvasia bianca

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 […]

On entering the Musée d’Orsay, you are confronted almost immediately with a sight that is familiar to anybody who plays video games, namely a textbook example of male gaze: This is Femme piquée par un serpent, by Auguste Clésinger; because, of course, we all know that, when a woman is bitten by a snake, her […]

John Fairbairn and Mark Hall have been doing a series of books on single go games or a small series of games, and they’re really good: a great combination of historical context paired with detailed commentary on the moves of the games themselves. The one I just finished reading was The Go Consultants, devoted to […]

Thursday’s talks were rather meh, but Friday started off with my favorite of this year’s postmortems and just got better from there; a fabulous way to end the conference. My notes: 10:00am: George Fan, How I Got My Mom to Play through Plants vs. Zombies The tutorial was the most important factor in helping his […]

Not a great day for me. The morning was postmorterms for games I’ve never played; I basically enjoyed the postmorterms, but in retrospect I should have tried something else. And both afternoon talks were actively disappointing. Or at least not a great day for me in terms of talks: I had a lovely lunch with […]

9:00am: Flash Forward Most of the speakers were given 45 seconds to pitch their talk; it was well run, people did a good job. I learned a little bit more about why the schedule seems a bit more meh than normal to me this year: it’s because the schedule turns out to be full of […]

My favorite talk on the first day of GDC was Margaret Robertson’s The Gamification of Death: How the Hardest Game Design Challenge Ever Demonstrates the Limits of Gaming, so I figured I’d break out my notes on that to a separate blog entry. Her takeaways from the project that this session was about: Your work […]

Here’s my best guess at my schedule for GDC 2012. Please say hi if you see me; and I have no current plans for lunch on any of the days or dinner on Wednesday or Friday. (I’ll only be there for the main conference, I’m skipping the first two days.) Wednesday 9:00am: Flash Forward 11:00am: […]

We did end up talking about my teaching games post (among other things) in the February VGHVI Symposium; sadly, I had weird network problems which meant that I missed maybe a third of the conversation entirely and could listen but not speak in another third. Which is especially a pity because I think Roger and […]

I’m sure most of you are familiar with Mattie Brice—over the last half year or so, she’s seems to suddenly be in the middle of every conversation on Twitter, she writes regularly on her own blog, The Border House, Pop Matters, and Nightmare Mode, and her empire is continuing to expand with appearances in Kotaku […]