malvasia bianca

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 […]

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? […]