malvasia bianca

I finished Ghost Trick a few days ago, and I haven’t figured out what to say about it. I certainly enjoyed it: good puzzles, and I only went to Gamefaqs once (though I narrowly missed going a second time), which certainly isn’t always the case with puzzle/adventure games. I rarely had to do laborious exhaustive […]

I was impressed enough by Randy Smith’s GDC 2009 talk “Helping Your Players Feel Smart: Puzzles as User Interface” that I’ve made a point to go to his talks the last two years as well; and I quite liked his 2010 talk “Increasing Our Reach: Designing to Grab and Retain Players” as well. Because of […]

So: Minecraft. I’m in the habit of writing here about each game that I finish, and I have indeed finished Minecraft. By which I don’t, of course, mean, that I’ve actually finished Minecraft, because it’s not the sort of game that has an end: I’ve merely stopped playing it. At least for the time being, […]

So: I’ve been playing pro guitar mode in Rock Band 3 a fair amount over the last few months. And it’s great, and I’m even learning a little bit about how to play rock guitar! The thing is, rock guitar is not the only type of guitar that I like to play: as Jordan will […]

As I’ve mentioned before, we often play Burnout Revenge after lunch at work. Not always—we play board games once a week, we recently got a nice Rock Band setup, and several people have started playing ping pong—but Burnout Revenge continues to be our go-to game. A month or two ago, we unlocked a Formula 1-style […]

I’ve been playing Zynga’s latest, Empires & Allies, since it was released, and I’m still trying to figure out what I think about it. My initial impression of it was a lot like CityVille: clearly well done, taking lessons from their prior games (and from others’ games, of course), and adding a couple of new […]

As readers of my other blog are aware, I’ve now finished all the Rock Band 3 songs on medium pro guitar. Which has been a fascinating experience, because while I’m not actually playing music yet, I’m getting close enough that I can see the music just a little ways away! On easy, I was playing […]

As I’ve said before, GTD isn’t actually about getting lots of things done: it’s about doing what you most want to do at any given moment. Having said that, ever since I stopped putting tasks on my Next Action list that are more than two weeks out, I have in fact been Getting Things Done. […]

I had the pleasure of taking part in a couple of podcast appearances recently. Specifically: I appeared on the CDC podcast talking about GDC. A very pleasant conversation, I quite enjoyed chatting with the other guests, and Eric did a great job editing the audio for this one. And I appeared on Playable Character, talking […]

At the start of 2010, FarmVille was everywhere; at the end of 2010, Minecraft dominated the conversation. The discussion of those two games, at least on the sites I frequent, had a very different tone; I believe, however, that much of those games’ successes stem from the same source, namely their strengths as guided construction […]

For whatever reason, I’ve been playing a fair amount of Flight Control HD this week, and it’s reminded me of my current attempt to get my next action list under control. In both cases, there are a bunch of items (tasks, planes) that you’d like to take care of, with new ones appearing all the […]

Now that I don’t work at Playdom, I have rather more freedom to write about Facebook games; I don’t plan to do that a lot, and I’ll certainly be doing so with a Playdom bias (among other things because I get a lot more game invites for Playdom’s games than for other games), but I […]

One thing that I’ve learned from the Vintage Game Club: the mechanics of old games don’t always hold up so well, and old adventure games are certainly no exception to that, generally making me bang my head against the wall (and not in a “proud to have finally figured that out” way) a few times […]

At work, we frequently play a few rounds of Burnout Revenge after lunch. (Video games seem to be a general startup thing, not just a game startup thing.) Which is a lot of fun; the only Burnout game I’d previously played was Burnout Paradise, and while I think that game is a masterpiece, I’m also […]

Another way to look at what I was saying yesterday about Tiny Wings: the game says that your actions matter (even if those “actions” consist solely of deciding when to touch the screen!), that they’re worth focusing on and honing, and the game goes to quite some length to actively support you in that journey. […]

Some things that I found interesting about Tiny Wings: It’s a one-button game, using a mechanism that works well and that I haven’t seen before. Which makes me happy for the medium: if there’s valuable novelty there, there’s valuable novelty everywhere. It has a procedurally generated world, but each world persists for a day. (Rather […]

I played through Planetfall recently (still an amazing game, about which more later); but, before doing so, I had to decide what platform to play it on, given the plethora of Z-Machine interpreters. And I decided to give Frotz on the iPad a try. That was an experiment, but not a particularly eccentric one: I […]

When I first started playing Minecraft, I spent most of my time, well, mining. Or at least underground: I’d obsessively dig stairs going straight through the rock in one direction or another, I’d occasionally hollow out a blocky room whenever I needed a space for a chest or a crafting table, and every once in […]

I try to write here about every full length game that I finish, but for better or for worse I don’t have a formal policy about DLC. I thought I might blog about all of the Mass Effect 2 DLC, but I never got around to doing so; and, indeed, I don’t think my brain […]

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been going through all the Rock Band 3 Pro Keys songs on Expert, going through each one several times to try to do as good a job on each one as I can. You can find more details on my other blog, if you want blow-by-blow narration, but […]