malvasia bianca

I’d been playing Rock Band with Miranda (my daughter) since we got it, but Liesl (my wife) had been resisting. She was clearly somewhat interested in the game—she would sometimes get caught singing along in the background—but somehow we never managed to pull her in. But I kept asking; I tried not to be annoying […]

The Vintage Game Club is returning from its holiday break; as its fourth game, we’ve chosen Beyond Good & Evil. This is the first game that we’ve chosen that I’ve actually played all the way through; I’m curious to see what the experience of replaying a game in company will be. I’m also curious about […]

I was just looking over at my shelf of games; here are the non-downloadable games I currently own for the Wii: Super Mario Galaxy Animal Crossing Boom Blox Endless Ocean Rayman Raving Rabbids Super Smash Bros No More Heroes Super Paper Mario Wii Sports Wii Play Zack & Wiki Metroid Prime 3 Zelda Super Monkey […]

One meme that’s been floating around in my twitter feed recently (and elsewhere, e.g. it got mentioned in the holiday Confab): there are a lot of us who like being part of a conversation about video games, who like talking with others about whatever game we’re just playing or just finished. But we don’t manage […]

I learned about the game Achievement Unlocked from Ludus Novus, and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It’s a game that looks like a single-screen platformer, but is in fact all about unlocking achievements: rather than traditional platformer goals, your only goal is to unlock the 100 achievements in the game. And these […]

Animal Crossing: City Folk is a marvelous game; I’m very glad that the series is out on the Wii, I recommend it to anybody who hasn’t played a previous iteration. It is, however, in no significant sense a new game, so I don’t see any reason to spend further time talking about it here.

I had the pleasure of being one of the guests of the special holiday edition of the Gamer’s Confab. I haven’t listened to it yet (and wow, that’s a lot of podcast, it won’t come close to fitting into my commute during this abbreviated work week), but I thoroughly enjoyed participating in the recording of […]

As our third game, the Vintage Game Club chose Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee. Which has the distinction of being the most actively annoying game that I’ve played in several years. For one thing, it’s a really difficult game: it’s not unusual to find areas that you’ll have to play through dozens of times before succeeding, and […]

At any given time, I’m normally in the middle of one game that I don’t let Miranda watch; but that slot in my schedule has been open ever since I finished No More Heroes. I was planning to finally get around to playing BioShock, but recent events have rendered my 360 unavailable. Any suggestions? My […]

Art Style: Orbient is the first new game (i.e. not a repackaging of one previously published) that I’ve purchased via download. (For the princely sum of six dollars.) And it’s a delightful little game, and one that makes me happy about the increasing variety of mechanisms by which games can be disseminated. It’s a very […]

I just got a copy of Call of Duty 4 in preparation for tomorrow’s VGHVI play session. I figured I should get my fingers used to the game first, so I went to play it tonight; I launched the game, futzed around with the menus, started a game, and it froze. (Soft, not hard, the […]

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started playing No More Heroes. I was astonished by Suda 51’s previous game, Killer 7, but I didn’t really expect more of the same: for one thing, my brain isn’t imaginative enough to contemplate what more of Killer 7 would be like, and also the reviews had […]

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 […]