malvasia bianca

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 […]

Pro guitar mode in Rock Band 3 turns out to be totally fascinating: I’m still going through the songs on Easy, and I’m amazed at how much there is to learn and think about even on that setting. In particular, last weekend I decided that I would stop looking at my left hand while playing […]

I recently played through Loom along with the Vintage Game Club, and I wished I had more to say about it. It’s a point-and-click adventure game; instead of accumulating an inventory of items to use, however, you accumulate an inventory of tunes. Which is a pleasant change of pace, and helped make the puzzle solutions […]

Now that my Squier and MIDI adapter have arrived, I’m starting on the Pro Guitar mode for Rock Band 3. I’m mostly going to be blogging about it on my gaming experiences blog, but I figure I should mention it here in case somebody was curious to read about it but was put off from […]

One of the side effects of attending GDC last week was that I spent a lot of time in my car; not my favorite place, but at least I got to catch up with podcasts. In particular, I’m glad that I had time to listen to the three part Critical Distance “2010 in Review” podcast: […]

In a role-playing game, you customize your character’s abilities, refining that customization as the game progresses. Your character will typically have a class (fighter, mage, priest, rogue, etc.), which you pick at the start of the game and generally doesn’t change; this sets broad limits of your character’s abilities. You also typically have cross-class attributes […]

The Game Design of Starcraft II: Designing an E-Sport Hybrid Orchestration – Scoring Need for Speed The Game Design Challenge 2011: Bigger than Jesus An Apology for Roger Ebert Message Queuing on a Large Scale: IMVU’s Stateful Event Architecture 9:30am–10:30am: “The Game Design of Starcraft II: Designing an E-Sport”, by Dustin Browder 2005. Dawn of […]

I broke two talks out to their own posts: “Classic Game Postmortem – Out of This World/Another World“, by Eric Chahi “One Falls for Each of Us: The Prototyping of Tragedy”, by Brenda Brathwaite The rest: “Biofeedback in Gameplay: How Valve Measures Physiology to Enhance Gaming Experience”, by Mike Ambinder “No Freaking Respect! Social Game […]

Thursday 4:30pm–5:30pm: “One Falls for Each of Us: The Prototyping of Tragedy”, by Brenda Brathwaite My favorite talk of the conference, or indeed any GDC that I’ve been to. Brenda said that she now gets introduced as somebody who makes games that make you cry; I can attest that she gives talks that make you […]

Thursday 9:00am–10:00am: “Classic Game Postmortem – Out of This World/Another World“, by Eric Chahi This was a look back at the making of Another World. Overview of the creative process. Freedom under constraint: an improvisation process. Initial context. July 1989, the Amiga era. He’s 22 years old, but had written a lot of games; taken […]

I’ve broken out two of today’s talks into their own posts: Clint Hocking on “Dynamics: The State of the Art” Jason Booth and Sylvain Dubrofsky on “Prototype Through Production: Pro Guitar in Rock Band 3“ The rest: “Video Games Turn 25: A Historical Perspective and Vision for the Future”, by Satoru Iwata “GDC Microtalks 2011” […]

Wednesday, 1:30pm–2:30pm: “Prototype Through Production: Pro Guitar in Rock Band 3“, by Jason Booth and Sylvain Dubrofsky The slides are available online. In 2008: music games were a big thing, needed to innovate. Harmonix has this idea of The One Question that they focus work on a game around. For Guitar Hero: is it rock? […]