malvasia bianca

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 […]

My current spate of video game playing began in grad school when my friend Wayne gave me his old NES, together with Super Mario Bros.. If I’m remembering correctly, Jordan later found a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 at a yard scale, after which I was doomed to several years of platforming addiction. Not […]

Whenever I start a new Nintendo game in an established series, I do so assuming I’m going to be disappointed. Their core series made the leap brilliantly to 3D, opening up gameplay in ways that I’d never imagined. And then, with one idiosyncratic exception, Nintendo has mined that gameplay in subsequent installments, not adding anything […]

Over the months of reading server usage states for the blog, I have noticed that many of the search results that bring people here include the word “bianca”. Hmm, I thought, I didn’t recall writing about “bianca red latex”. Is Bianca some character in a video game that I wrote about but have since forgotten? […]

To all you Wii owners, I add my voice to the chorus of recommendations for Zack & Wiki. I’m not sure whether to call it a point-and-click adventure game or a puzzle game: it’s a sequence of set pieces all revolving around manipulating your environment to get to where you can open a treasure chest. […]

xkcd: One person, one vote in the Texas legislature: (Via Lawrence Lessig.) Starlings flocking; it starts to get good at about 2:00, though if that’s not good enough for you, go to 3:20. (Via Cosmic Variance.) Weird Hand-Drawn Game certainly qualifies on the first two counts… (Via Game|Life.) I don’t have much to say about […]

I essentially finished Brain Buster Puzzle Pak some time towards the end of the summer. I’d finished all the built-in levels for the puzzles that I cared about; it has a random puzzle generator, though, which I wanted to explore more. But I never got around to doing that, and then I looked for it […]

Deterministic and probabilistic software product management. Pen tricks. I’ve been doing what he calls “the helicopter” for decades (though in a slightly different way); obviously I have more to learn. Beautiful movies. (Sorry about its non-embeddable nature, and for all the talking and the fact that it’s an ad; I couldn’t find anything else to […]

Apologies for my recent silence; the cause is a combination of watching movies (well, DVDs, mostly Last Exile) and being pretty busy last weekend. But now I am, for once, caught up with my other odds and ends (i.e. reading blogs) early enough at night to actually be able to write something. As I mentioned […]

I ran across a couple of video demos of interesting music hardware recently. Both are basically sequencers with unusual user interfaces: First, Tenori-On. (Found via GayGamer): And Reactable. (Found via Lost Garden, which throws in some neat ideas of its own.) I don’t have much to add; I’m curious how they work in practice. Especially […]

As I mentioned before, I’ve started tagging my saved items in Google Reader. I did this partly because of a general worry about the saved items getting out of control, but also because there were three specific categories of saved items that I was afraid were getting buried: items that I wanted to read but […]

Ninja Town. I love the character names. A great video review. (Even though it’s of a demo of a game I’ve paid no attention to.) Tim Bray speaks sense on drugs. “Um, let’s see… the cost of pushing back a brutal ugly slow path to death is getting high from time to time. Yep, I […]