malvasia bianca

So: Osmos. It’s a lot like Art Style: Orbient, no? In the mechanism of circles absorbing other circles until they become the largest circle, in the simplicity of the controls, in the puzzle nature, in the simplicity of the presentation, in the amount of content that’s perfectly reasonable for a five-dollar game. I like Osmos‘s […]

Rock Band 3‘s signature song is Bohemian Rhapsody; and, as a video game, that song is a very odd experience indeed. Unless you’re singing, you spend large portions of the song waiting for your next chance to play; whether or not you’re singing, the style and difficulty vary wildly from section to section. This is […]

I don’t have much to say about Professor Layton and the Unwound Future. It’s a Professor Layton game, and while that’s a good thing, it’s also a known quantity at this point. We learn a bit about Layton’s past here; he turns out not to be particularly socially adept or comfortable around women, as one […]

(And now, a temporary break from Bible commentary to our traditional fare of video game related navel gazing!) So: Ben wrote this thing. Which I feel like responding to, and I can’t very well do that on his blog! Therefore: Yes, we absolutely should experiment more with rhetoric. Forget “we”: I should experiment more with […]

The heros of this section: the three wise men, a.k.a. the three Magi. I enjoyed listening to Amahl and the Night Visitors when I was growing up, glad to see them make their appearance here. (The night visitors, that is, not Amahl.) Though I feel strangely conflicted about the gifts that they’re bringing. They’re giving […]

When I play a puzzle game (or do puzzles on paper), my goal isn’t to find solutions to the puzzles: my goal is to prove that there is a unique solution to the puzzle, with the production of that unique solution a side effect of that proof. This approach is so deeply ingrained into my […]

Here’s a summary of what I’ve done in Dragon Age so far. Note: when I say “city” or “dungeon” in the following, I don’t mean a literal city or dungeon, but rather a relatively free-form inhabited area (with other traditional associated trappings, e.g. shopping) versus a relatively linear combat-focused area. I decided to play as […]

With the addition of Rock Band 3‘s pro mode, there’s quite a bit more to learn when mastering a song; to that end, they’ve added a new variant of practice mode. Rather than simply having you play through the whole song (with options of changing speed and going back through sections), they pull out a […]

My very first impression of Rock Band 3 was surprisingly negative. Liesl, Miranda, and I sat down to play; I’d assumed that we’d go through career mode on Miranda’s band. The game, however, created a band for me and then refused to let us change to one for her. (I didn’t look into it too […]

The main question that I’d like to understand better in the current Vintage Game Club playthrough of Super Mario 64 is how the game fits into the taxonomy of the genre of platformers. Or, indeed, whether it fits into the taxonomy of that genre: while, at the time it was released, Super Mario 64 seemed […]

In general I think of myself as the sort of person who feels compelled to complete video games at a narrative and geographic level, following all of the obvious side quests as well as the main line, but not to master their mechanics. And of late I haven’t been entirely comfortable with that state of […]

(Obligatory disclaimer: these are my thoughts, not Playdom’s/Disney’s.) One of the things that has impressed me the most about Cow Clicker is the culture that has sprung up around its wall posts. Wall posts are offers of bonuses and/or requests for help that games encourage you to post. And in my experience (which, I should […]

I normally blog about a video game here when I finish playing it; that causes problems with games that I never actually stop playing, and the Rock Band games are the worst offenders in that regard. Still, with Rock Band 3 coming up, I figure it’s time to come to some sort of stopping point […]

(Disclaimer: I in no way speak for Playdom.) There’s a certain strain in the criticism of social game development that has always sounded bizarre to me, and I think I’ve finally understood why. It’s really a two-fold strain: on the one hand, it complains about the metrics-driven approach to game development that social game studios […]

Puzzle Agent HD is a thoroughly delightful game. The obvious comparison is to the Professor Layton: like that game, it’s full of quite good puzzles, like that game, it has a distinctive graphical style which works rather well. (Slightly less charming than Layton‘s style, and the delightful music is completely missing; but Layton is special, […]

Picross DS was an amazing game: I sunk hours and hours into it, I suspect that there were individual puzzles that I sunk more than an hour into. So I was really looking forward to Picross 3D. Sadly (and ironically!), it’s only a shadow of its predecessor. The extra dimension should have added more possibilities […]

I was expecting to spend a fair amount of time playing games on my iPod Touch / iPhone, but that never really happened: I rarely found myself in a situation where it was my only game-playing device available, and, for me, games on it didn’t manage to compete against games on other devices. With my […]

Since I started working at Playdom, I’ve been getting occasional e-mails from friends who play traditional video games (or “core video games”, as they’re frequently called these days). The authors of these e-mails haven’t been impressed by the social games that they’ve played; so, given that I mostly blog about core games and my tastes […]

At GDC this year, Randy Smith recommended that game developers provide a “game-toy” as their players’ initial experience with their game: strong, juicy affordances with low pressure. Which is great advice, but is of course not all that you need: as Smith also comments, we want players to be able to enjoy the game for […]

For better or for worse, I only rarely replay video games. When I start a game, I almost always make it all the way through the game; but once I’ve done so, my brain decides that it’s happy and that I should move on to something else. And constraints on my time are such that […]