malvasia bianca

I was excited that the Vintage Game Club chose Thief as its eighth game. I’ve never had a very good relation with stealth games (or stealth segments/aspects of non-stealth games); but I’ve heard enough good about Thief (especially from Justin Keverne) to make me cautiously optimistic that I’d like the genre more when I saw […]

I’ve been working at Playdom for about a month now, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it so far. If any of my readers think it might be an interesting place to work as well, I wanted to point out that we’re hiring. (In a fairly big way, as the list of positions suggests.) Feel free to […]

For its seventh game, the Vintage Game Club chose The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Which I was really excited about: aside from being a Zelda fan in general, I was curious to see if my memory of the sidequests held up. (Margaret Robinson’s GDC talk was an influence here.) The short answer: yes and […]

I’m kind of thinking I’m not doing nearly enough to minimize waste. (Via @littleidea.) Playing a bigger game. (Via @DianaOfPortland.) Luck as a skill. (Via @superkiy.) A good list of tech blogs. This round’s Pink Tentacle link is an anatomy of folk monsters. Magnetic Ink: (Via Dubious Quality.) And on (rather than just from) Dubious […]

In a recent podcast, Justin Keverne talked about how it was odd that we define genre in video games almost exclusively in terms of what you do, whereas in other media genre is linked more with the themes that are under consideration in the works. I’m still not sure what I think about this (and, […]

Sorry for the delay between posts; Miranda asked recently if she could watch Haibane Renmei (which I highly recommend), so we’ve spent many of our recent evenings going through that. And I don’t have a real post now, either, but I’ll at least give a link round-up. (Besides, the Zork walkthrough is much more awesome […]

The one flaw I’m seeing so far in the Beatles game is its microphone support. I really want to try out the vocal harmonies, but I don’t have many suitable devices around the house: I have two Xbox headsets, but the game only supports USB mics, and I have a USB headset for Skype usage, […]

Really, everybody should have their own domain these days. Rands on Your People. Cave photos. (Via 25 Times a Second.) A handy list of Rails security tips, and a lesson on timing attacks. Sections. Tetris meets Magic Eye. (Via Offworld.) Being a blogger. A different look at the Beatles. (Via @dan_schmidt.) Two on programming hardware, […]

I very much enjoy the VGHVI game nights on Thursday evenings (we’re playing the Beatles game this week, by the way), but they don’t interact well with my normal style of going through games. I have to budget my game play time fairly strictly; since I normally like to go through games in depth, this […]

Art Style: Boxlife, like the last game I talked about, is a short puzzle concept game with a mix of set-piece puzzles and random input puzzles. This time, though, the mixture is treated in a more traditional fashion, by separating the two gameplay ideas into into two separate modes. The set-piece mode is rather good, […]

I mentioned Roger’s Operation KTHMA last time, but it’s actually started now and sounds awesome enough that I’ll mention it again: day 1, day 2, day 3. Our whole household was playing Bunni Game: How We First Met last week. (You should be able to see my world at this link.) Victorian Homes of the […]

Art Style: Pictobits is a funny mix for a puzzle game. Many puzzle games challenge you by throwing random input at you faster and faster until you break. (Tetris is a classic example.) And many puzzle games give you set-piece challenges that, while perhaps requiring some quick thinking and precision (and even having a bit […]

I feel like I should have more to say about Rhythm Heaven. It’s a rhythm game; I like rhythm games. It has quirky Japanese music and images; I like quirky Japanese music and images. It’s a small-scale experiment that was quite popular in Japan; I’m all for that sort of thing. But I don’t have […]

One of the GDC sessions I attended this year was a charming panel discussion including, among other people, Steve Meretzky of Infocom fame. Which got me curious what he was up to these days—I don’t generally expect people from that era to still be active in the game industry—and was pleasantly surprised to find out […]

Tanuki testicle art. One day in kanban land. Pixie Driven Development. A plain-text version of the Declaration of Independence. (Via Kelley Eskridge.) Rock Band as a music theory teacher. Maira Kalman on Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. (Via @bos31337 and The Edge of the American West.) The red handprints are a particularly nice touch. Another […]

I still haven’t made up my mind about Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. It never grabbed me in the same way as its predecessor; how much of that is due to novelty wearing off, how much is due to the strangely low quality of the DS port, and how much of that is due to the core […]

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about choices in games, and the effect that game save mechanisms have on the ethical impact of those choices. I won’t even attempt to link to the vast majority of the conversation, but two contributions (both involving Nels Anderson) particularly struck me today: slides for a talk by […]

The Vintage Game Club’s sixth game was Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. About which I don’t have much to say, but I’m in the habit of blogging here when I finish a game, so: It’s a Civilization-style game. Some of my friends praised it quite a bit, but I’m not seeing that: it’s in the lineage […]

I periodically encounter discussions of why people play games (most recently in A Life Well Wasted), and I’ve been getting more and more allergic to such talk. The main reason is that it almost always comes in the form of claims that “we play games to have fun” (with a strong implication that anybody who […]

I’m pleased to say that the Vintage Game club has chosen The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask as its seventh game. The discussion will probably begin on Friday, June 10th; it’s a wonderful game, and one that I suspect has quite a lot to teach me; please come join us if you have any interest […]