malvasia bianca

In honor of the release of the Wii version of Okami, I urge all of you who own a Wii (or a PS2) and who haven’t played the game yet to go out and buy a copy. More here, but the short version is: it’s an adventure game based on Japanese mythology with a beautiful […]

A bit video-heavy today. The power of continuous improvement. A cool-looking physics “game”: (Via BitWorking.) Zefrank on complicated stuff: Falco PA! (Via Game|Life, which also links to a Guitar Hero version.) An fun variant on presenting minigames. Time to add The Muppet Show to my Netflix queue. (Via Cosmic Variance.) Brian Dettmer book autopsies. (Via […]

Eternal Sonata is a quite good Japanese RPG for the Xbox 360. Unfortunately, the main lesson that I’ve learned from it is that I don’t particularly like JRPG’s; I won’t say I’m swearing off of them forever (in fact, I’m glad I played this one), but I won’t give them the benefit of the doubt […]

I recently learned that a Bay Area Go Players Association has been created, with the goal of ensuring that there’s at least one go tournament a month in the bay area. (And, so far, they seem to generally be holding their tournaments quite close to where I live.) I missed the first tournament, but the […]

Half a year or so ago, I retrieved my Nintendo 64 from a friend’s house, since I thought Miranda might enjoy some of the games on it. The one she settled on was Harvest Moon 64, a delightful little farming simulator. So, when Christmas came by, I thought she might want another Harvest Moon; I […]

I still haven’t figured out Cursor*10, but it has some neat ideas. (Via GayGamer.) An ActiveRecord tutorial; a nice little introduction to the concepts, I liked the way they get their hands dirty with showing you the SQL. Yeah, that’s kind of the way I feel about Obama… For no particular reason, a random bit […]

I’ve talked enough about Zack and Wiki that I’m not quite sure what to say here. It’s a puzzle-solving point and click adventure game, with excellent use of Wii motion-sensing controls and a great sense of humor. And a great set of puzzles: Liesl and I thoroughly enjoyed working through them; I was continually amazed […]

Portal is a first-person puzzle game. The controls are like a first-person shooter, but your gun shoots portals onto flat surfaces (walls, floor, ceiling): you can have one blue portal and one orange portal, and the two teleport you from one to another. The game starts out with simple puzzles: you need to get to […]

Mass Effect is the latest RPG from BioWare, makers of the excellent Jade Empire. Like that one, it’s an action RPG: combat takes place in the middle of the environment you’re running around in, and different characters don’t take turns attacking each other. (Though the details are quite different: in particular, the combat is based […]

Pretty sand pictures: (Via Backreaction, which has links to more.) Those are some big crystals. Van Jacobson on networking. More than an hour long, which is why it took me more than a year to get around to watching it, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff here. You’re probably already all aware of Why’s […]

I just started Eternal Sonata. It’s a Japanese RPG on the Xbox 360 that takes place in the dreams of Frederic Chopin as he’s about to die from tuberculosis; how could I pass up a concept like that? A few hours in, I’m quite happy to be playing it. At the core, it’s a not-too-outlandish […]

When I went to download the Devil May Cry 4 demo just now, I was amused to see its genre given as “Stylish Action”.

I bought my first single this week, “Still Alive” from Portal: Or at least my first online single; I dimly recall buying a few 45 rpm singles when I was a teenager, out of bemused curiosity that they existed. Buying online singles isn’t something I’d been planning to do. For one thing, I’m the sort […]

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is the first Zelda game for the DS, and Nintendo decided to go whole-hog. No D-pad and buttons for them: you move by touching the screen in the direction you want to go, you attack an enemy by either drawing a slashing motion or by touching an enemy. Which […]

Reviews of three games that don’t deserve a full post: Beautiful Katamari If you’ve played its predecessors, you know what to expect, and you’ll probably be disappointed. More of the same; the music is still good, but no track was nearly as good as, say, Everlasting Love from the second game. They continued to ratchet […]

I (correctly) didn’t think that I’d have enough video games on consoles I already own to get me through the holiday break, so I got an Xbox 360 a couple of weeks ago. Some notes: I messed up a couple of cables when installing; probably because I’m conditioned to think that they’re all broken, it […]

Beautiful libraries. (I think I linked to a similar gallery before, but this one’s better.) From Pink Tentacle: the chopsticks bra and two bathroom–related entries. Remarkable underground temples. (Via tecosystems.) If video game systems start doing head-tracking, watch out: (Via Games Are Art 2.0; the good stuff starts at around 2:30.) A fun word-association game. […]

Ken Robinson’s TED talk on “Do schools kill creativity?” You can also watch it at its web page; I like the chapter markings on the full-screen version of the video player on their page. (Not the embedded one here.) I heard about this talk via two separate routes: Presentation Zen and Evolving Excellence. Two blogs […]

My thoughts on Super Mario Galaxy got long enough that I spun the first part off into a separate entry. In short, we’re back to linear platforming, with tons of jumping, done very well. One question that any platformer has to answer is: what non-core player abilities will it mix in? Jumping is great, but […]

Picross is Nintendo’s name for a certain genre of picture logic puzzles. Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation, and it’s easy enough to find places where you can play them online (this site seemed like the best of the first page of search results): the game consists of a grid, together with a set of […]