malvasia bianca

Conceptis has a bunch of very good mobile puzzle apps; probably my favorite three puzzle types of theirs are Slitherlink, Nurikabe, and Fill-a-Pix, but most of them are good enough that I play the free puzzles every week, and I probably buy one paid puzzle packs of one type or another from Conceptis every week […]

I don’t have a ton to say about The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles: it’s a Phoenix Wright game, and it’s a quite good one. I think, mechanically, it’s probably the best of the series? The rough edges have been filed off (while still leaving you with plenty to figure out), the additions that they’ve kept […]

I never had an SNES, so I’ve played very few games that originally came out on that system. So, while I’ve played Metroid Prime and its sequels, and I’m almost positive I played Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission, I never played Super Metroid. Super Metroid kept on coming up in conversation, though, so I […]

I listen to a handful of role playing game podcasts; almost all of them use Dungeons and Dragons as their system, but there’s one exception to that, Friends at the Table. For a while, I was slowly going through the Friends at the Table back catalog, but over the last half year or so, my […]

I hadn’t heard a lot about Ikenfell, but there was one person whom I follow on Twitter who repeatedly said very positive things about it, in a way that got me interested. So, when I hit a break in the higher priority games for me to play, I figured I’d give Ikenfell a try; it’s […]

I don’t quite know what to make of Umurangi Generation. It’s stylish in a way that reminds me of Jet Set Radio; a rare occurrence, and one I quite appreciate. But, while it reminds me of Jet Set Radio both visually and philosophically, Umurangi Generation doesn’t control nearly as fluidly as Jet Set Radio. Which, […]

At first, I rather enjoyed Nier Replicant. Lovely music, nice visual design (rather reminiscent of Shadow of the Colossus), pleasant enough minute-to-minute gameplay, a pleasant enough mix of plot and quests. And, as it continued, I liked it more; Kainé’s outfit is ridiculous but I liked her character otherwise, and the quartet of your character, […]

I don’t have a lot to say about Signs of the Sojourner. Which is a little surprising, because it seemed provisionally up my alley: I like card mechanics, I like narrative games, I like experimental gameplay, and discussions in podcasts (e.g. in Eggplant) made it sound interesting? Or at least I think of myself as […]

I’m continuing my slow journey through the Yakuza games, with Yakuza Kiwami 2 being this year’s stop. I’d actually played Yakuza 2 back when it came out (well, a year or two after it came out, but that’s close enough for me); reading through what I said back then, I like it more this time, […]

When I first started playing Bowser’s Fury, I thought it had a chance to be my favorite Mario game since Super Mario 64. Now that I’m finished with the game (which didn’t take a long time, it’s pretty short), my feelings about it are a little more nuanced, and there were certainly parts of my […]

I never played Super Mario 3D World on the Wii U. I’ve historically been a big fan of the mainline Mario games, but I don’t like them quite as much as I used to, and in particular the more linear outings don’t grab me as much as the more open ones. I think they’re very […]

Spiritfarer starts off with your character, Stella, taking over the role of Charon, ferrying the spirits of the dead. Though, right from the beginning, your behavior doesn’t feel like any prior conception of Charon that I had: instead of having you ferrying anonymous souls en masse, Spiritfarer has you ferrying a small number of individuals, […]

The Witness is the first game by Jonathan Blow that I’ve played. It ended up being basically what I’d expect from him, though, based on what I’d heard: good game, good puzzles, but with a somewhat annoying opinion about how to play leaking out in spots. In case you haven’t heard the game’s basic idea: […]

Final Fantasy VII Remake really hadn’t been on my radar before it launched. I had played the original, it’s actually the only Final Fantasy game I’ve finished and I do recall basically enjoying it; but I’ve only played it once, and it’s probably approaching two decades since I played it? (I never owned a PS1, […]

A roundup of a few shortish iPad games I played recently: Guildlings I was super impressed with Guildlings when I first played it. The only downside was that it was episodic, and only the first episode was out; I figured, though, that I’d have to wait maybe a couple of months and then I’d have […]

It’s a little bit hard for me to write about Hades: there’s been so much talking / writing about the game that I have a hard time writing without feeling that I’m constantly reacting to what other people think? I mean, it’s not like I’m ever in a vacuum, but here that feels a bit […]

One thing I see periodically on Twitter these days is people who are Twitter-popular but not full-on celebrities complaining about the responses that they get. Maybe it’s somebody providing the 20th identical answer to a question, maybe it’s getting dozens of bad joke responses, maybe it’s a respondent acting overly familiar, maybe it’s a respondent […]

I haven’t played many open world games, so I’m probably not the best person to talk about Eastshade, but the idea of an open-world game about painting without any combat at all sounded neat to me. And it is! I don’t love everything about it, but I am completely on board with the basic idea. […]

Paper Mario: The Origami King is an odd game, and a refreshing one; Nintendo works within genres, but they don’t feel tied to genre conventions, or even series conventions, and so you’ll just run into decisions that seem totally out of left field, but that end up being unexpectedly interesting, and unusally positive. And we […]

I Love Hue Too is, of course, the sequel to I Love Hue. That was a puzzle game about color gradients that I ended up liking a surprising amount, so I was excited to see the sequel. The sequel has the same color gradient matching gameplay as the original, but with one significant change: rather […]