malvasia bianca

E3 is over now. The PS3 looks good; presumably somewhat more powerful than the Xbox 360, but it’s hard to say for sure, and some of the ways in which Sony is promoting its graphical superiority seem, honestly, kind of silly. It can connect to two TV’s? It can do 1080p, not just 1080i and […]

E3 has crept up on me, but press conferences would seem to be going on as I type this. I followed the Xbox 360 unveiling last week; looks pretty cool. There were rumors that the console was going to be a bit underpowered, but Microsoft has apparently changed its mind: three cores each of which […]

One of my friends brough a PSP into work, and he let me play through a bit of Wipeout Pure. (Hmm: the official capitalization seems to be WipEout . Sigh.) Nice screen; a big improvement over the GBA. Good to have an analog joystick. Great graphics; not as good as the current generation of (non-handhold) […]

I just finished the new Zelda game for the GBA, and it’s quite good. A little while ago, I complained about how I don’t like 2D Zelda games as much as 3D Zelda games, but actually this game does a lot to alleviate my complaints. (Kind of spooky, actually.) For one thing, the overworld isn’t […]

I just finished Jak 3, for the PS2. I didn’t play either of the first two games in the series, despite their getting generally quite good reviews: the first one was a platformer, whose only apparent distinguishing feature (as far as I could tell from reviews) was that the main characters had more “attitude” than, […]

Series work differently in video games than they do in, say, books. In books, a sequel continues the story of the previous book in the series. And, to be sure, there are a lot of video game series that follow that same pattern: I just finished playing Jak 3, and it did continue the story […]

I was hoping that I’d be using Fedora Core 3 the next time I wrote an entry here, but ’twas not to be: I can’t get the damn CD’s written. I’ve eliminated all variables, using two different CD writers, two different CD readers, two different sources of blank CDs, two different downloads of the images […]

I used to play go a lot, and I collected a lot of go books. In fact, by the time I was in grad school, I had copies of all but 10 or 15 or so of all the go books that had ever been published in English. (Just under 100 at the time.) The […]

Today’s video game is Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. The first Metroid Prime game was my favorite Gamecube game, and was a real eye-opener for me. It was my introduction to the Metroid series, so I’d never seen its particular brand of exploration before. Games in the series take place in one big world; it’s divided […]

I’ve played through somewhere between a third and a half of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas now. I’m not sure I’m going to finish it, largely because I don’t play it when Miranda is around, but I think I’ve seen enough of it now to say something. It (preceded, of course, by earlier games in […]

As mentioned before, we’ve finished Paper Mario 2. Which is a bit of an event: it is, by my count, the fifth video game that Liesl has ever finished. Though it’s not as surprising as that statistic makes it seem: two of the previous games that she finished were the original Paper Mario and the […]

We’re done with Paper Mario 2 now (and I’m starting Metroid Prime 2 – what an amazingly bad menu system!), so I should probably continue talking about it. It’s such a quietly unusual game, though, that I think I have a couple of entries’ worth of material about it. Maybe it’s not that unusual; it […]

I’m (well, we’re, but more about that some other time) in the middle of Paper Mario 2 right now, and it’s setting off such a cascade of reactions, I figured I’d better start posting about it now instead of waiting until I’m done with the game. It’s not that the game is so stunningly excellent […]

My house has been struck by plague. On Tuesday, Liesl stayed home; on Wednesday, Liesl and Miranda stayed home; on Thursday, Liesl, Miranda and I all stayed home; on Friday, there wasn’t anybody else to pass the cold to (the dogs don’t get colds from us, fortunately, and they stay home all the time anyways), […]

I take back everything good I said about Manny’s fielding. Anyways: Today’s game is Katamari Damashii. (Or Katamari Damacy, as the US version is spelled, though they pronounce it the same way.) It has one, very simple, idea: you roll a ball around, and items that are small enough stick to the ball. As more […]

I intend to post thoughts here on video games that I finish playing. These aren’t intended to be reviews or explanations of the game, and in particular may not make much sense to readers who haven’t played other games discussed in them. Today’s game is Pikmin 2. A sequel to Pikmin, obviously, which is a […]

Nintendo is introducing a new handheld in November, the Nintendo DS. It has two screens, the bottom one is touch-sensitive (a stylus is included, or you can use your finger), built-in wireless connectivity and a microphone, and probably other stuff that I’ve forgotten. I will, of course, buy one when it comes out. I really […]