malvasia bianca

The latest Brainy Gamer podcast is up, and it’s an interview with N’Gai Croal. The whole thing’s great, go listen to it, but in particular one thing that he talked about is something that’s been on my mind: the way that enthusiast press coverage of videogames is heavily weighted towards the preview period. I’ve talked […]

I finished year 2 of Grim Fandango last night (I played it over the course of three nights), and in several ways I didn’t like it as much as year 1. I spent my first play session getting familiar with the environments; what this mostly meant was that I wandered all over the map, repeatedly. […]

In response to my earlier post on puzzles in narrative games, a couple of the commenters noted that contrasting the puzzles in Professor Layton with those in Grim Fandango isn’t fair, because the puzzles in the former game aren’t integrated into the game world in the the same way as puzzles in the latter one […]

Some thoughts on year 1 of Grim Fandango, mostly culled from my posts on the forum: Glottis is one of my favorite NPCs ever. I’m really pleased at how well the graphics hold up, I love the art deco style. Looking at Glottis, my first reaction was “wow, that’s not very many polygons, is it”, […]

One more thought I had overnight about puzzle gameplay: they can have a real social aspect. Watching somebody else play a shooter or a platformer can be reasonably entertaining, but if you’re watching somebody else play a puzzle game (which neither of you has played before), then it’s effectively a cooperative game: it’s almost irrelevant […]

Over in the Vintage Game Club forum, Michael posted an interesting question, “Do modern gamers still want puzzles?”: I’m working on a blog post focused on this, but I wonder if puzzles in narrative games are a relic of a bygone era of gaming – or are they a necessary ludic element? Has shooting replaced […]

I’m very glad that Michael suggested Grim Fandango as the introductory game for the Vintage Game Club, because adventure games and I go way back. I can’t remember the exact sequence of events, but I’m fairly sure that I was aware of the Colossal Cave adventure before we even owned a computer: I think my […]

I didn’t have much luck getting Grim Fandango working under wine; some of my colleagues suggested VirtualBox, so I thought I’d give that a try. And it worked better (helped by one amazing piece of blind dumb luck); not perfectly, but well enough that I should be able to participate in the inaugural run of […]

I was all excited to start playing Grim Fandango, so when my copy arrived today, I figured I’d spend the evening getting wine to work. Which took a little bit of doing, enough to create a blog post out of, but ultimately I got to where I could launch the game and go through the […]

Apparently I’m not the only person who feels like playing through old games and talking about them with other people: Michael Abbott and Dan Bruno noticed my throwaway comment on the subject, and, a weekend of e-mails later, the Vintage Game Club is formed. Our first game will be the classic LucasArts adventure Grim Fandango. […]

The original Smash Bros. was a mind-opener for me. It (and its sequels) may still be, in its own way, my favorite multiplayer game; I’m admittedly not much of a fighter aficionado, but I haven’t seen anything else with quite its brand of chaos. (Well, maybe Power Stone 2 (and presumably its predecessor, which I […]

I’ve been going through the back episodes of the Brainy Gamer podcast, and I must say that I am extremely annoyed with Mr. Abbott. The problem is his game recommendations: he has the most infuriating way of talking about games that I was aware of and favorably disposed to and turning them into games that […]

One frustrating aspect of my Rock Band experience: account management. Maybe all of this makes more sense to people with more multiplayer Xbox 360 experience, but here’s what I’ve gone through since buying the game: First, we played anonymously, because there didn’t seem to be any way to create characters from the multiplayer screen. (At […]

Miranda and I formed a band today on Rock Band. We are going by the name “The Brosstones”; perhaps not the best, but I’d neglected to think about possible band names in advance. (Alas, the other Bross has yet to join us; she did spend a fair amount of time this weekend playing DDR, for […]

I’m very glad I ran into this right after finishing Half-Life 2.

I’m rereading The Phenomenon of Life, by Christopher Alexander, in preparation for reading the other books in the series. And, again, I’m blown away by it: if the book contained nothing but the pictures in it, it would be worth it. But, of course, there’s a lot more to the book than pretty (beautiful, profound) […]

Via a link from Niels ’t Hooft, I ran into Sean Malstrom’s Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy. By far the most interesting explanation of Nintendo’s business strategy that I’ve seen, and it turns out that he has a whole website full of articles like that. Which I’ve spent most of the evening reading. A warning: […]

I managed to avoid playing any of the Half-Life games in the past: I’ve been almost exclusively a console gamer since 1998, and the few computer games I’ve played since then are ones that can be played with a touchpad (my hands and mice really don’t get along), which pretty much means that PC FPSes […]

I spent the day at this month’s Bay Area Go Players Association tournament. It was my first tournament in recent memory playing as a 1 dan; I had a record of 1 win and 3 losses and got the impression that 1 dan is a more accurate rating for me than 1 kyu, but that […]

Rock Band arrived today. Despite her lobbying for Mario Kart Wii as our next game purchase, Miranda was plenty excited to see it show up; she helped me carry it in from the car (which was actually pretty useful, the Amazon packaging makes it just bulky enough to be very awkward to carry by yourself), […]