malvasia bianca

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 […]

Today’s game: Shadow of the Colossus. Developed by the same team that did the excellent Ico, and it shows: Liesl immediately commented on the similarity between the two games’ graphical styles, despite being unaware of the connection. The gameplay of the two games is quite different, however. This game consists almost entirely of a series […]

A bit clunkier than I expected, but I’m sure they’ll fix that in a future revision of the hardware. Anyways, interesting differences between the DS and previous Gameboys: Two screens. Bottom screen is touch sensitive. Microphone. Wireless. Wireless is obviously a good idea; ever since the Pokemon games, Gameboys have been about communication, so we […]

I was pretty excited to get Sid Meier’s Pirates!: I’ve spent many a pleasant hour with the various Civilization games, and the reviews talked about how you couldn’t put the game down, how you’d find yourself playing it at two in the morning. The reality wasn’t so great, however. Its resemblance to Civilization was very […]

I bought a Nintendo DS; the triggers were that we’re going on vacation soon, plus the release of the new Mario and Luigi RPG and the new Animal Crossing. We also got a puzzle game called Meteos, which seems decent so far, and which at least uses the input mechanism well.

And now you can see the video games I’ve played recently. There’s still a little bit of refactoring to do on the code that I’ve checked in, and a little bit more code to write. But the previous constructs held up reasonably well; easy enough to add the new item types (video games, game consoles, […]

Anybody have any good podcast recommendations? I’ve been listening to them for a few months now; the only ones that have stuck are agile toolkit, which can be very interesting but which doesn’t get updated very often, and the Mercury News video game podcast, which I enjoy but might well not listen to if I […]

We ♥ Katamari is a sequel to the excellent Katamari Damacy. (I have finally given up and started spelling the second word the same way as its US publisher.) And it is everything that you’d expect from a sequel: quite good, several minor improvements, slightly worse in many ways (largely but not entirely because of […]

Sitting down to play Jade Empire was a very pleasant experience. I’d just given up on a not very satisfactory game. It had been a while since I’d played an RPG, so I was primed for the experience. I selected a character without too much agonizing, entered the initial area, talked to a few people, […]

I didn’t play any of the Resident Evil games during the last generation. That was probably mostly because I didn’t have a Playstation back then; eventually, RE2 came out for the Nintendo 64, but it didn’t make enough of an impact for me to want to buy it. Also, the genre didn’t excite me too […]

I bought Battalion Wars for the Gamecube a month or so ago. Even as I bought it, I was thinking “why am I buying this when I have Jade Empire waiting to be played?” (Answer: I cut Gamecube games way too much slack.) Anyways, I gave it a try. It’s a sort of RTS, which […]

I finally bought an Xbox a few months ago. One thing it does right: it has a general console settings screen where I can tell it what my audio and video capabilities are. It’s just silly that I have to tell every Gamecube game “yes, I want surround sound; yes, I want progressive scan”. If […]

Fortunately, the pneumonia drugs are working nicely. Compared to my dim memories of what I normally feel like, I’m still probably not doing too hot, but compared to the recent past, I feel great. So: back to our normal subject matter. Today: Shenmue II. The second part of a three-part series telling the story of […]