malvasia bianca

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Justice for All is the second game in the Phoenix Wright series. It’s very similar to its predecessor, which is a good thing: its predecessor was excellent. So go and read my review of the first one, and come back. They tweaked the game mechanics slightly. For one thing, they added […]

I’ve talked about Etrian Odyssey before. It’s a dungeon crawler, which isn’t my favorite genre, but it also has the gimmick that, as you play, you have to draw the map of the dungeon on the bottom screen of your DS with your stylus. And I love (and miss) drawing maps while playing games, so […]

Ayse Sercan’s thesis work sounds really cool. I’m just linking to this list of Ruby techniques so that I’ll be able to find it a year from now when I’m in a position to better use it. More good stuff from Karl on copyright. Rice paddy art. Echochrome looks like an Escher video game. Quite […]

Amazing walking wind-powered sculptures. Impressive optical illusion. Oh yeah? I’m building a topos in my attic. Not easy to make a shift like this. I’m a sucker for things like this. Given that I am interested in some sort of physical training and don’t seem to be getting around to restarting aikido, maybe I should […]

I wasn’t too excited about Super Paper Mario when I first heard about it. I certainly enjoyed the 2-D Mario games when I first played them, but the state of the art has changed, and nostalgia only takes me so far. So I’ll occasionally play a 2-D platformer and enjoy it, but I figured New […]

I don’t know how I missed this interview with a Microsoft bigwig about Xbox 360 failures. Even if you have zero interest in video games, it’s a stunning display of interview stonewalling. My first reaction: how can they possibly think that responses like this are a good move? My second reaction: but what if this […]

I just fired off a letter to my local paper’s video game journalists, in response to a question they asked in their latest podcast. And, of course, blogging has trained me to never type something longish without thinking about whether it could be considered even vaguely relevant for the blog! So: a lightly edited version. […]

Punch-Out (or rather, Punch-Out!!, which actually apparently came in two versions, Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream and Punch-Out!! Featuring Mike Tyson, identical except for the sprites and perhaps sounds of the final opponent) is an NES game that I’ve been hearing about for a long time. So when it showed up on the virtual console and […]

Puzzle Quest is a combination of two genres that I quite enjoy separately, but never expected to see together: RPGs and puzzle games. Seemed like just the thing for me and, probably for Liesl; which latter guess proved correct, as evidenced by the fact that she’s sitting on the sofa playing it as I write […]

After my post yesterday, I picked up Gradius III again; this time, on my first try, I not only made it through the first level for the first time, I made it through the second level on that same first try. The latter is a fluke, but I am managing the former fairly reliably now. […]

Just started playing Etrian Odyssey and Gradius III. And both are kind of kicking my butt. I seem to remember being decent at the latter’s predecessor, and finding its initial levels routine; not sure how much of my troubles are that the sequel may be harder, how much are due to my declining powers, and […]

Wii Play is a fifty dollar game packaged with a forty dollar controller. There’s not much point in buying it if you don’t need an extra Wii controller; if you do need an extra controller, however, is it worth paying an extra ten bucks to get the game as well? My answer: sure, why not, […]

Forget Halo 3, GTA IV, and all that: it’s starting to look like the real reason I’ll get an Xbox 360 this year is that there’s an RPG coming out for it starring Frederic Chopin. Yes, that Chopin. From IGN’s capsule summary: Three hours prior to [his death], Chopin saw a dream of a fairy-tale […]

I felt a bit uncultured never having played Grand Theft Auto III. I’d played GTA: SA, and was quite impressed by it, but I thought I should go back and see where the series really took off. And, for a while, I wished I hadn’t. GTA: SA drops you off right in the middle of […]

Lego Star Wars II is a very lightweight adventure game based on the original trilogy of movies, with everything made out of Lego. Mostly fluff, but a fair amount of humor, and the whole package is really quite fun. The best part, for me: it’s very easy, and has a cooperative multiplayer mode. This meant […]

As presentations about how the world is changing go, this one is well done.

Wii Sports is supposed to be key to the system’s mass appeal. Rather than targeting gamers, it’s designed to appeal to everybody; rather than forcing you to control the game by manipulating two joysticks, a D-pad, six face buttons, and four shoulder buttons, it lets you just swing the controller back and forth. (Side note: […]

I was pretty nonplussed when I first started playing Elebits. It’s sort of a weird mix of Katamari with a first-person shooter: on the one hand, you have a gun that you use to “capture” these elebit creatures that are hiding and running around, but on the other hand you can also use the gun […]

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is an old-style courtroom-based adventure game for the DS. It’s set in the near future, and apparently legal norms have changed somewhat: as far as I can tell, rather than people being innocent until proven guilty, they’re guilty unless you can prove during the (at most three-day trial) that some specific […]

I was kind of looking forward to the Xbox 360 Elite announcement. I’m almost positive I’ll buy a 360 at some point this year: I doubt the Wii and DS will be enough to keep me happy this year, and it even seems likely that the 360 willl have more games I’m really interested in […]