malvasia bianca

You have doubtless noticed the new widget in my blog’s sidebar. It’s for Child’s Play, a charity that gives toys, video games, books, etc. to children’s hospitals around the world. It’s a wonderful cause, and those of us in the Vintage Game Club thought that it would be fun to try to pool our energies […]

I dipped into Rock Band 2 a bit more today. Miranda wasn’t in the mood, so I went through a few solo challenges; it turns out that the various marathon challenges provide a tour through all the songs on the disk, so my previous concerns are at least somewhat unfounded. I wasn’t planning to be […]

Game | Life on the death of next gen consoles in Japan. The Gallery of Fluid Motion. I like the second one too, though it takes a while to get going. Arlo Belshee on planning without estimating. As with his earlier promiscuous pairing experiments, there’s a lot to think about here… Interesting way to think […]

I’ve now finished the Rock Band vocals solo tour on Hard. To my family’s consternation / bemusement, I sung most of the songs in the second half in falsetto: it seems to pick up my pitch more reliably that way? (Dan Bruno says that I’m not the only one who does that.) It didn’t actually […]

I wouldn’t have thought that anything could get me more excited today than learning that Harmonix had gotten the rights to make a Beatles game, but then I learned that Google now has the right to sell copies of out-of-print but in-copyright books. I am extraordinarily surprised, amazed, pleased by this. Books have been very […]

When we last left our humble narrator, I was making my way through the Rock Band drums. I made it all the way through on Medium, and a fair distance on Hard. But all the skills aren’t there yet: in particular, my foot has a harder time sight-reading than my hands (should have practiced organ […]

I trust you are all aware of The Big Picture? I thought this one was particularly beautiful. And unrepresentative, in that the pictures are all taken from a single source, the Earth from Above exhibit. My favorite video game business analyst giving an exegesis of a recent Nintendo interview. The backlog as a map. I’ll […]

We’ve finished the VGC playthrough of Deus Ex; what did I learn from the experience? Well, one thing that I learned is that a lot of people have a lot more to say about the narrative and world of the game than I do. Which made reading through the discussion a lot of fun! And […]

If you’re interested in participating in the Vintage Game Club, but haven’t felt like joining in either of the first two games, now is your chance to change that: we’re discussing possible choices for game 3 in the forum right now.

When I finished playing Shadow of the Colossus, I was impressed by it, but no more than by several other games from around the same time. Then at some point, perhaps a year and a half later, I was browsing the web and came across a picture of the game. And I gasped, I shuddered. […]

As previously threatened, I tried out the drums in Rock Band today. And they’re fun! But mysterious. It turns out that skill in playing plastic instruments does transfer, at least to some extent: I started on Medium, and I was passing the songs fine. For the first few songs, my leg hurt like crazy; then […]

Not much to say about Brain Age 2. The formula is the same as in the original; if forced to chose, I probably like the new challenges a bit more, but not enough to make a difference. (Speaking of which, how do non-piano players do on Piano Player?) And I’m not nearly as into sudoku […]

When I last discussed Rock Band, I’d remembered the existence of the solo buttons, and thought I should give the hardest songs a try that way. So, the next weekend, I put down my GH3 guitar, picked up my Rock Band guitar, and gave Flirtin’ with Disaster a try. It took a while to get […]

Achilles’ Phat Lewtz, on the Iliad and MMORPGs; huge amounts of fun from Roger Travis. Jordan on David Foster Wallace. My heart sank when I saw that Retronauts episode 49 was almost 3 hours long. But it’s all about the Dreamcast, including a great segment with Tycho, the best three hours of podcast listening I’ve […]

I was reading Delany’s About Writing recently when I ran across the following (pp. 408–409): Excitement, Drama, Suspense, Surprise, Violence Each of these five nouns names a very different effect. What makes so much popular narrative (especially in films and TV) seem so mindless is that someone, usually a producer, has mistaken one for the […]

Rock Band is the first game I’ve played in ages where I’m actively trying to improve my skills at the game, replaying challenges at harder difficulty levels instead of going through it once, enjoying it but moving on to the next game on my shelf. I’m still trying to figure out why this is. It’s […]

The Vintage Game Club chose Deus Ex as its second game. I think I’ll probably do most of my commenting on the game in the forum, but I’ll leave some notes here periodically, too. For me, the most interesting aspect of the first week of gameplay is watching how badly suited my brain is to […]

Hmm, been a while since I’ve done one of these; sorry about the length… Visualizing the Python commit history. Leadership, responsibility, and sausage. Solving sudoku games via package management. Japan, computers, appliances. (Via Niels ‘t Hooft.) Breakpoints as a checklist. Programmers, insecurity, source control. I linked to a movie of strandbeests (amazing wind-powered sculptures that […]

The World Ends with You is an, uh, RPG? from Square-Enix. Honestly, I’m not sure which pigeonhole to stick it in: in particular, I’m pretty sure that the main reason why my brain leapt toward the RPG category is its publisher, because it varies significantly from traditional RPG design. You return to the same areas […]

We’re kicking off a discussion on what game the Vintage Game Club should do next.