malvasia bianca

I would not be the person I am today were it not for Mario. At some point in grad school, a friend of mine gave me an NES (during the mid 1990’s; I was a bit behind the times), and the original Super Mario Bros. and the third in the series completely blew me away, […]

(Yes, I know that none of my readers care about this. Sorry.) Two recent news items: In the last week of August, the top 10 bestselling games in Japan were all for the DS. I can’t remember ever seeing the top 10 bestsellers all being for a single system. Sony now says that they’ll only […]

I used to like first-person shooters – in the distant past, I seem to recall having enjoyed Doom, Marathon, System Shock, Dark Forces, and GoldenEye, for example. The last few times I’ve played FPS’s, though, they really haven’t done much for me. I’m not sure why the big change – part is probably that I […]

Project X: Cup Noodle clearly has to go on today’s one-click list. Jackson Pollock. I would seem to be getting into interactive flash sites. House of dominoes. The Foundation replacement saga. Quite a storefront. Our money is badly designed (and getting worse). Nice manhole cover, too. A much longer talk than I usually tolerate on […]

Guitar Hero is a music game that comes with a guitar-shaped controller. There are five “fret buttons” on the neck, and a strum button on the body. (It’s somewhat inconsistent on the model it uses – sometimes it pretends to be a guitar with a single string and five frets, and sometimes it pretends to […]

My first computer was an Apple ][+. I can’t remember exactly when we got it; some time around fifth grade (1982), I suppose. I used it through the time I graduated from high school (1989); I got a Mac (SE/30, woo-hoo!) when I went to college. I have very fond memories of (among other things) […]

I’m mostly done with Brain Age now: I’ve unlocked everything, and while I think I’ll finish all the sudoku and might still do a few more rounds of some of the other exercises, I’m starting to get bored of it. (But I still want to try to get 12 on Low to High, or get […]

God of War is a quite well done beat-em-up. Basically, you wander through a mostly linear, pseudo-ancient-Greek world, beating the crap out of tons of monsters that appear in your past, occasionally taking a break to either solve a bit of a puzzle or fight a boss monster. I’m not sure that there are any […]

I think I made the right decision to give up playing go: I just don’t want to spend one evening a week doing that. But I was just looking at a picture of a game in Hikaru No Go (nine moves into the Ota vs. Akira game), and memories came back. It can be a […]

This will not, I think, be the most useful discussion of Knights of the Old Republic, simply because I can’t help but viewing the game through the lens of Bioware’s latest, which had the benefit of a couple more years of experience. With that warning in place: Fun game. I kind of nibbled at the […]

It would seem to be E3 time again; hmm. I suppose the world does not need another blogger talking about it, but I have nothing better to do. Besides, I never got around to talking about the name “Wii”. Which is a stupid name. I know they’re trying a blue ocean strategy, I think that’s […]

Sorry I’ve been so quiet over the last month or so. One reason is that I’ve been spending a fair amount of time playing Knights of the Old Republic. It’s not that I was blown away by it: I was just enjoying it enough to want to finish it while realizing it was a long […]

Today’s game: Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, for the DS. It’s the sequel to Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, for the GBA, and is not entirely dissimilar to the Paper Mario series. The gameplay is quite similar to its predecessor; in particular, the DS’s special features are almost entirely unused. (It could easily have […]

I was listening to Herbert Grönemeyer’s first two albums in the car today; as they always do, they reminded me of the game Trinity. It is by far the strongest association I have of any piece of music with any other work. (Other than soundtracks, of course.) Which is pretty weird – the two have, […]

If memory serves me well, about a year and a half ago I was feeling kind of down on video games. The start of this generation had been quite nice (largely because of the Dreamcast), but for the last year or two, it had seemed like the best I could hope out of a game […]

I’m now fully populating the database with information from my collection. It took longer than I expected; I’ll keep that in mind the next time I plan to work in a unfamiliar area. (It wouldn’t have been so bad, of course, if I were working in chunks larger than an hour or two at a […]

When playing a video game, I usually start a new game once, and continue an existing game twenty or so times. So why do so many games default to “new game” every time I boot it up? Maybe they could even use the annoying logo time during boot to look to see if I already […]

The GameCube version of Animal Crossing was one of the most addictive games I’ve ever played. I didn’t normally play it for hours at a stretch (though I did that more than once), but I played it for at least ten or fifteen minutes almost every single day for about a year. You live in […]

Meteos is a DS puzzle game. It’s in the “objects falling from the sky” genre; a new take, enabled by the touch screen. The goal is to line up three blocks of the same color (either horizontally or vertically); you can do this by moving blocks up and down in a column using the stylus. […]

For the week of January 16 – January 22, eight of the ten bestselling video games in Japan were for the DS, an outcome I would not have believed half a year ago, let alone at launch. The only reason why the hardware chart for that month doesn’t show a similar skew is because Nintendo […]