malvasia bianca

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 […]

Elite Beat Agents is a music game for the DS. It takes its mechanics and much of its style from a Japanese game called Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan; apparently, however, Nintendo of America thought that my country’s youth would prefer secret agents to male cheerleaders dressed in black, and American pop to J-pop. (Imagine that.) The […]

The life of a Mii. Neat pictures. (And a bit more discussion.) Line Rider Super Mario Bros. 1-1. I do not like that my government does evil. Planarity is a neat idea. Though I admittedly didn’t feel like playing it for too long. I played Boomshine for a while, though: it’s sort of a humane […]

A few short flash games that I’ve run into recently. (All via Game|Life.) Nothing fabulous, but I enjoyed spending a bit of time with each. Binary turns out to be kind of fun. Not great: aside from the limitations of the subject matter, I found it went too quickly from a bit too easy to […]

Given that I’ve been back from vacation for a week, I suppose I should get around to blogging about what I did during those two weeks. After all, there’s nothing more fascinating to read than bloggers talking about trips they’ve taken! Which, among other things, included playing video games. Bringing us to the topic of […]

I am happy: I’ve managed to max out everything on Grow Cube.

I didn’t realize it was possible to beatbox while playing the flute. Gyoza stadium sounds awesome. Star Wars in ASCII. I spent a pleasant hour last weekend watching Ben and Fitz’s poisonous people talk. (And then caught myself exhibiting one of those symptoms on a mailing list last week. Sigh…) I suppose you’ve already seen […]

I just finished the latest Zelda. Summary: a good game, quite well done. But not a great game, for two reasons: the previous games in the series, and a certain other game in the genre that came out the same year and that is much much better. The good: it’s a Zelda game, with all […]

Miranda’s reading rather more comfortably now than she was in the past; at least partly because of this, she’s noticeably expanded the range of her desired sphere of competence. Examples: We’re finally letting her play Animal Crossing, because she’s reading well enough that she won’t constantly be nagging us to help her play. And she […]

Bully is the latest free-roaming game from Rockstar, the makers of the Grand Theft Auto series. A quite pleasant experience. Lower-key in many ways compared to the only exemplar of the latter that I’ve had the pleasure of playing. A smaller environment, not as long a game, much less over the top in terms of […]

I seem to have been letting Wii experiences build up; time for a dump. I’ll probably forget some things, but hopefully I’ve remembered most of the things I want to say. I’m not planning to go out and buy more minigame compilations, but I’m definitely glad I got Rayman. The minigames vary in quality, but […]

Random Wii thoughts one week later: I would have expected to feel stupid saying “Wii” all the time, but I actually don’t mind. I guess Nintendo wasn’t completely insane when they decided on that name. Zelda is very good so far, except for the early fishing sequence. (I’m seven hours in, I think I’m a […]

I didn’t manage to get a Wii on launch day, but I was more successful today. I got to a Best Buy at around 7:10, a mere 2 hours and 50 minutes before it opened; that was good enough to get me the 19th of 26 Wiis that they were handing out. Fortunately, I had […]

It turns out that getting to my local Target at 6am wasn’t good enough to get me a Wii. Sigh. I guess I’ll get a copy of Bully to tide myself over until I manage to find one.

I finished Okami at the end of last month. This left me with a three week gap to fill before the Wii release; what to do? I’d been thinking about Lego Star Wars II, but, for whatever reason, that wasn’t grabbing me at the moment. FFXII was tempting, but I’ve been thoroughly annoyed by Final […]

Some random comments, after four weeks of Netflix membership: One movie at a time works if you’re sure you don’t want to watch more than one movie a week, and if you don’t mind missing occasional weeks due to shipping vagaries. Neither of those proved to be the case for us, so we’ve switched to […]

Okami is an amazing game. In some sense, it’s quite derivative: it’s working well within the Zelda genre (complete with sonic homages to its predecessor), so it’s not as novel as some recent games, but there’s more than enough new presentation in the game to keep me happy, combined with a thorough rethinking and improvement […]

I would seem to be in a quiet mood these days. Not feeling much like blogging, not feeling much like programming at home. Maybe because I’ve been programming a fair amount at work; I was worried that, with the new larger group, I’d have almost no programming time, but now that things have settled down […]

As a Nintendo fanboy, I must of course comment on the Wii launch news. Packing in Wii Sports makes sense for their market-broadening strategy; wouldn’t it have helped if they could have included a second wiimote, though? The controller prices are exorbitant. I wish I didn’t have to wait until November 19th. The news that […]