ahoodedfigure's Articles

Giant Bomb started around the time I'd begun a new stage of my life. It's hard to put it any other way, since my change in surroundings were pretty dramatic, and the last time I wrote on here was sort of the preamble to another major change. I've since reviewed a lot more games than I had reviewed anything in my entire life before that point and basically seen both sides, in a minor way, to the...

Hey, referring to the prior blog, maybe I was deluding myself! Still, I got the chance to play a lot of games on first release, something I haven't done... maybe ever? Apart from a few big-name franchises I'd really loved, like Phantasy Star, Grand Theft Auto, or Elder Scrolls, I've tended to stay away from the initial release of games, especially now that the price is often a bit much for me....

Thought I'd write a thing. Managed to get an article published for a magazine. It feels good, slightly, for a little while, but I realize this sort of thing is something other people do reflexively. It's like climbing a mountain only to realize it's barely a foothill. Or at least come to terms with that; I knew this was nothing compared to what others do. Personally though, it felt like a miles...

What if I fail. Like, forever. I don't think success wasn't meant to be for me, in the sense that I can see these things I come with mattering in some hypothetical sphere. The articles I'm working on right now may be a bridge to greater things, but I don't think it's guaranteed, even if I do well. Games tend to reduce things to systems, and you can reload if you failed. Like some sort of god yo...

[A different version of this idea will be showing up elsewhere. Stay tuned.]

It's rare for me to feel strongly when I hear someone famous has died; I think about all the people I've known much better whom I've lost over the years and feel I have enough on my plate. But there were a few people who were well-known, whether they were familiar just to hobbyists or were household names, whose loss was a shock to me. I think it had to do with my investment in what they were d...

Played a lot of FTL. At the start I enjoyed it, I was unlocking things and running into impossible odds and dying like you're supposed to in games like this. But what's remarkable is how much luck plays a role in this game. Unlike a game like Spelunky, which has tons of random elements which become predictable when you see how they work and fit them together, FTL's randomness doesn't really cal...

When I haven't been playing Darklands or writing essays of varying levels of clarity, I've pretty much been playing all three of Cryptic Comet's releases. I helped playtest one of the games, but I found each of the games different enough that there really hasn't been any replacement when I want to just sit down for a little while and play a game to its conclusion. They all fall under the strate...

(See below for a correction) Maybe you haven't heard the term "Mary Sue"; I hadn't until a few years ago when fan fiction writers briefed me on what the hell they were talking about. The Mary Sue, loosely defined, is a relatively flawless extension of the writer, whose mere presence seems to conquer those around him or her (not bothering to keep it gendered here, it applies to any character as...

I'm willing to bet most of you probably haven't heard of Darklands. Its messed up publishing history, where it was released with some rather nasty bugs, didn't help it achieve the legacy it deserves, and it doesn't help that it lacks some rather straightforward user-interface choices that would make it a lot easier to play. Yet, it is still one of my favorite computer role-playing games. I thin...

Installation: went OK. It did that thing where the progress bar just sits there at 100% and you're sitting there wondering if something went wrong, but this is just my lack of faith in machinery. Once it was done doing its undisclosed things, it was ready. Manual: Memorized the keys while it was installing, skipped the flavor bits so I could come into the world fresh, although I've already seen...

My Knights of the Old Republic 2 is the first Old Republic game I ever played. Played it before the original Knights, and I played the XBox version, which could not be patched (or if it could it didn't matter since I was never online with this thing). After finishing the Bounty Hunter story mode in the MMO version I thought I'd go revisit this game, which I hadn't played in a very long time......

I've been asked by the illustrious ArbitraryWater to check out two different games in recent memory, Might and Magic 6 and Temple of Elemental Evil. When I try to approach either of these games, I've noticed that something inside of me holds me back, even though I'm curious about both of the titles. I think I've begun to figure out what it is: I'm a bit wary of starting a large endeavor. Same g...

How Free-to-Play Will Impact My Playing Style (by and large, it won't) So, my Star Wars: The Old Republic account is closed, but my particular account going down comes right when whoever-it-is-who-ultimately-makes-decisions-for-SWTOR announced they're moving in a free to play direction. The breakdown of what will be free and what will cost in-game currency is here . On that list, story content...

Been playing SWTOR a lot in the run up to our subscription expiring. I was given a 3 month subscription as a Christmas gift from my employer, and had started up after that employer had been dissolved by a rath e r f a miliar publishing house. For a good portion of that subscription I wound up not playing at all; my other half was more involved than I was. Toward the end though, I guess I realiz...

Slender is an exercise in terror (not so much horror as I've often seen people say) using the Unity engine. If you're curious, get it here . Otherwise, or afterward, I'll talk about it below. Rather than go into Slender itself, which is pretty simple in its setup, I'll mention a particular state I entered into while playing it. Most cultures have monsters, but none come to mind that don't have...

Again, stay away if you're even vaguely interested in playing, or haven't yet completed it. I'll also be talking about a lot of the permutations that one-time-through players may not realize, so bear that in mind too if you want to revisit it and try out other things. A bit like Bastion itself, my knowledge of the game came in bits in pieces. Early on I was warned away from spoiling the game fo...

As many of you are aware, when living part-time in a niche culture you get the worst of both worlds. You're not quite passable as a normal person, because you sometimes use a specialized vocabulary, and get at least some of the references to geeky subjects that out you as One of Those. Yet at the same time you're never quite accepted by Those because you don't know every damned little thing tha...

When people keep talking about having to see something for yourself, having to play a game/see a movie/hear a performance, when people don't try too hard to explain what they saw but just tell you to see it for yourself, you know there's a good chance there's something special beyond that curtain. I don't know what it is exactly, but I think it's the subtlety of Bastion, its generosity, AND its...

I figured my embarrassment at not knowing about all the features here on Bastion helped shame me into downloading the game and trying it out. It's fairly easy to understand, but the text doesn't seem to be helping me in this regard. Not sure what happened, wonder if anyone out there had a similar problem and knows how to fix it. Namely: I added the WTF, but all the text in the game that isn't s...

I've spent a few days getting to know System Shock 2. The narrative seems to bridge back to the original System Shock, and I get that feeling that I should have tried to hunt down the old game, but I'd rather not be tied down by that. I think my mission in playing this is to understand why people tend to think of SS2 fondly, and compare it to Bioshock, often saying SS2 was the better of the two...

I started Bioshock just a little while ago, and completed it today. I already knew every little plot point, and those that I'd forgotten were quickly remembered when I reached their scripted points. I enjoyed the secrets, the audiofiles, the rescuing of innocents, the happy ending. It does say something, either about the craft or the tropes they used, that I was affected emotionally by saving t...

I loaded up both Savage Empire and Martian Dreams after getting them free from GOG. I actually managed to get pretty far in Savage Empire by just charging into the jungle, killing some of the local wildlife, and figuring out pretty early how to get people to "join" my group, but when I reached a river where a raft and some paddles lay, I never could figure out how to get the damn thing to go. M...

Limbo Been playing some Limbo, after "splurging" here . What started out with some pretty cool atmosphere, neat physics, clever, contextual puzzles, weirdness, and fucked up kid death has become a lot of kid death and a lot of puzzles. What stopped me from playing, though, was more that my having squished a little globe wasn't recorded by the automatic checkpoint save the game has. At one point...

In the coming days, I'll tell my friends about how a website announced the release of its new project, and this project is pretty much what colleagues and I have been working on for the past month. Some of my friends will likely tell me that there's nothing new under the sun, that there's no reason to stop working on my own stuff. It's true, to a point. Still, the project is very close to ours...

When you see that word "now", stop. Don't click on the ad, don't read the rest of the link text. Stop and remember that the word now is probably the single most abused word in in marketing, and it gets traction exactly because we assume there is some sort of urgency assigned to the word. Most of the time, there fucking isn't. "Now" is a pet word of marketers precisely because we're trained sinc...

Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii If you ever want to be a pariah, try not only admitting that you like Dynasty Warriors, but that you're playing one of its derivatives (Samurai Warriors 3) on the Wii. I played a lot of SW3 last night after buying it in a bargain bin, and for the most part I'm pleased. The changes to the game's basic formula tend to be favorable; some of the gambling element is lost now tha...

For the last week my gaming time has pretty much been devoted to Legend of Grimrock. Combat is straightforward; you click on a character to cast a spell or swing a weapon, and you get two readied options to choose from, one for each hand. Spells require extra button presses to use the right combination of runes (order doesn't matter, just total combination), although you can have a readied spel...

:05 *Runs in, panting... gibbers... Tries to catch breath... can't... collapses* :15 And apparently their site did, too. Tee-hee. Downloading now... :24 While waiting for the download, (yes, I have a slow connection), I played Fallen London. Reached a very interesting story point where I was asked to either save or destroy someone who had run away with a Clay Man to the depths of the city only...

Below I'll write about a bunch of random crap rather than talking about one thing. I almost did write an essay a few times, but I think I'll save those ideas for later. They'll probably be better written than this stuff, but they'll probably be a bit more ponderous, too. Grimrock I've bought Legend of Grimrock on cheaper pre-order directly from the guys who made it. I would have gone with GOG.c...

Hello folks. I am the proud co-parent of a fine, double-headed baby , and will probably contribute some ducats to a horrifying creature that will speak of the end times . Not everyone's cut out for the role of micro-producer, and as with being a producer in any field, it's a bit of a gamble. Here are my thoughts on all of of this. Feel free to tell your own tales of faith in companies below, if...

I went to level 54, I think, before I started dragons and yelling. The first shout I spent a soul on was the one that MAKES LIGHTNING FALL FROM THE SKY AND SHOCK MY ENEMIES *TO DEATH!!* I fast travel now. Not all the time, but still, I am ashamed... Actually it's a bit more complicated than that, really. All Elder Scrolls games had fast travel. Getting anywhere in Arena was literally impossible...

It's been a long time since I've contributed a significant wiki article to this site. I can't really remember the last time, although I guess during the run up to Skyrim I did several little fact dumps to see what was true and what was just rumor. When this place was founded, I wrote an article about Star Raiders that I like to repeatedly mention was added to a list by GB's Jeff; I guess he and...

So, in the intervening period a lot has happened. I don't need to go into details, but pertinent to one of the themes of this particular blog, I now have a PC capable of playing the games people have been talking about for the past half decade. You might think that someone who has at least been paying attention to all the news of new games would remaind relatively jaded when actually playing th...

Some of gaming fandom takes a bit of effort. You try to support developers you like, you get in debates about the merits of certain game features, you try your best to play a game you may not like a whole lot right this moment in the hope that it'll get better. When I game as part of a community, I'll try stuff I'd otherwise not, and when I'm taking someone else's recommendation it sometimes ta...

We all use the term B Movie, but it has different meanings depending on how its used. Some people mean it derisively, to imply that because it's not the grandest that cinema can offer it's not worth paying attention to. The rest, I think, use it with affection. They know that even the weakest production values can hide a strong heart. The same I believe is true in games. Independent productions...

I like Good Old Games. I like their DRM free philosophy, their dedication to hunting down old stuff and making it runnable on current systems, their usually reasonable prices, their refusal to use Geo-IP identification. I find though that the way they promote their games brings about a weird behavior in me that I probably wouldn't have if things were priced statically. As frequent users know, G...

I'm sure there are still English speakers on this planet who, when you say "dungeon", immediately think something like the Man in the Iron Mask up in chains, and would never imagine big treasure chests, monsters, or a bunch of people going IN to one on purpose, instead of trying to escape. For a lot of us though, one of the earliest meanings, really crappy prison is all but buried underneath pr...

In order to give myself some practice reviewing games, I was wondering if I should just make a list of games I have that I haven't played, and people can ask me to play one of them. If you're curious about how an old game plays compared to more recent stuff, or just want to see me suffer, you could recommend I play a game on that list in a PM and I'd do my best to play it and communicate my exp...

Time to go all meta on you. When we first moved in to our new apartment, our landlord asked apropos of nothing if I was into "gaming." This was a 60+ year old fellow asking me this, so I was sort of amused and bemused at the same time. Could he mean, like, bejeweled or something? He didn't seem to be a hard-core RPG player, although looks as always can be deceiving, but I was guessing there mig...

Once you get all the images out of your head that the title gives you, I'm wondering if all the complaints I've heard about specific problems people have with Skyrim , as relatively minor as they seem, could be alleviated by some of the strengths of Rage . Since they're both under the Zenimax umbrella I don't think it's too far-fetched to imagine a future Elder Scrolls game being fueled with Id...

I've been trying to combine a lot of ideas I've been seeing in different games into some sort of Frankenstein dream game that I've been wanting for a while. Since the design right now is a board game, I don't have to worry about my coding abilities to be able to pull it off, which is a relief. The reason I bring this up though, is not to advertise for yet another one of my projects that may nev...

In order for games not to go too crazy with options, and thus break easily, you will often find that quests fall into easily definable categories. My hopes are high that the random questing system in Skyrim allows for enough variation that you won't get bored of it too quickly, but I know that as time passes people will eventually figure out the behavior of that system and it will become somewh...

I've entered my share of contests in my years. For some reason it's not the same thing as a lottery because you're not spending money, but you are spending time being hopeful, and in the case of yesterday, expending effort. As a conclusion to my mild Skyrim hysteria I attempted to enter a contest in which you could write a work of short fiction set in the Skyrim universe. The guy holding the co...

Not sure if I feel like a full writeup on this game, but after playing the hell out of TOME for the better part of a week I have the need to at least spill the basics. I first learned of Tales of Maj'Eyal from Giant Bomb's own Dave Snider when he mentioned it in a video. It took me a little while to even find the thing because of its cryptic spelling, but I finally found it here and downloaded...

Wherein Hooded breaks out a few modded gaming terms and examines them, and fires the dog-zooka as a last resort. Pet is generally considered a term of affection. While many people, arguably justifiably, are trying to recast the role of "the family pet" to a family companion, where the human beings are considered the animal's guardian and not so much an owner, it's generally understood that if y...

I don't need games that are arbitrarily harder, but I like it when there are little requirements that make me feel like it's an actual game universe I'm visiting, and not just a colorful screen where I pull a lever and get pleasure pellets. Maintenance in Games When I heard that Fallout New Vegas was going to have a hard core mode with survivalist traits, I think that was the first time that I...

I've spent the last few weeks playing Might and Magic Heroes: Kingdom S . (I think the colon should be there, I'm not sure.) It's been said before: how do you judge a game that is ongoing and slow to build? Would one have to play it a year before one could give it a review? If so, some stuff could never be reviewed. I think I've got a good handle on its gameplay now and I can tell you what I th...

Wherein Hooded breaks out a few modded gaming terms and examines them, just in time for Sunday services. The use of the word death was the very first schism between common culture and game culture that I was aware of. I still remember hearing on the radio explaining that when kids said "they died," they were just talking about video games. It piqued my interest; I'd done the same thing without...

I have spent the past few days playing Heroes of Might and Magic: Kingdoms (I know it's not quite called that, but the other title is too undignified). I'm willing to talk about it, if anyone wants to hear it. It's both not what you expect, and totally what you'd expect. I'm also thinking about talking about Darklands in depth for any RPGrognards out there. If you haven't tried it yet I think y...

Last time I was a bit dumb and saved AFTER I'd taken a quest for the temple of Julianos in my adoptive home of Satakalaam . The quest was to find a church official who was investigating a self-designated prophet who spoke of the lies of the temple. Kinda cool. So I go to the expert, she tells me about a former lover of the self-styled prophet. I got to the lover, he tells me the questy equivale...

The Survival Kit In Daggerfall , I've taken to counting the saves. You're sort of forced to. Even with all the patches there's still a chance, a dice roll if you like, that your save game will be corrupted, or your game will freak out mid-stream and have to be restarted. It's a game in itself, and not a very fun one, to preserve the work you've done. I've been playing for a few hours now, and m...

Wherein Hooded breaks out a few modded gaming terms and examines them, after an inexplicable hiatus. AI (Artificial Intelligence) We're pretty much alone in the universe. We try to personify all kinds of creatures, inanimate objects, even ideas, and we even pretend we understand more about our fellow human beings than we probably do (although we can still be sadly predictable at times). Most of...

This string of failure is brought to you by Getting Up . See the end of this list for why I have taken a break from this game. Last weekend we picked up our cooperative Gladius game after a long hiatus to see if I could recruit a minotaur early, rather than toward the end of the game. We managed to do it fairly quickly, although the deal was that if I was going to have Langston in my party, he...

I wrote about my impressions of this game a long time ago, I think, although I more talked about its graffiti mechanics in that post if I remember correctly. Getting Up takes place in a city under constant police crackdown, with you being an artist newly kicked out of the house and ready to make statements through ink, paint, fists and the occasional 2 x 4 across the face. I've played it for a...

(With thanks to Tennmuerti for the idea of Tank. Now the Cowboy Bebop theme song is in my head, which is not a bad thing! ) Wherein Hooded breaks out a few modded gaming terms and examines them, then nukes the site from orbit. Farming One of the side effects of the Fetch Quest is the need to gather X amount of Y. In games with random drops, then, you are often asked to kill a certain monster (m...

(Thanks to RaikohBlade and later Astras for heavily hinting about Grinding.) Wherein Hooded breaks out a few modded gaming terms and examines them, at the end of a 50 foot rope, at least. Level It's a pretty utilitarian term that most people are familiar with in real life, whether we're talking levels in a building (floors, storeys, whatever) or takin' it to the next level if you're stuck in th...

Maybe others have talked about this before, but as I remember it, the "Diablo 3's too bright" controversy began when people complained in forums about a public showing of the graphics... a LONG time ago. It became a bit of a meme, I rolled my eyes and concentrated on stuff I was interested in, while secretly thinking that while, yes, it was bright, it was also pretty. Anyway, apparently one of...

(Thanks to BeachThunder for the idea for Boss) Wherein Hooded breaks out a few modded gaming terms and examines them, at the end of a ten foot pole, at least. Boss Probably one of the most commonly known gaming terms, Boss evokes a confusion of images for me. The first time I learned this term I think was through a friend's Nintendo Power, and I thought that the big guy at the end of the level...

Wherein Hooded breaks out a few modded gaming terms and examines them, at arm's length at least. Fog of War To me, the term fog of war has always meant that under wartime conditions, things that seem like simple choices become a lot harder to make. Too many things are moving at once, too many different factors are involved, and sometimes you'll find yourself standing right next to the enemy and...

I am very good at breaking games. I was born to do quality assurance. Not everyone is. Game testing isn't just playing games, but I'm going to assume we've reached a point in the general conversation that I don't have to say that, and move on to what I'm talking about. I play a game today, and true to form I break it. In the credits screen I see a list of testers who played it, and I'm sitting...

Is a turn-based, tactical sports game a contradiction in terms? I like arcadey sports games (and racing games) that are all about momentum; I remember loving the energy of NBA Jam in the arcades or on my old Genesis. When it got to trying to parse all the technical stuff of Madden, I have to admit I couldn't hack it. But I think it was THAT GAME that taught me just how much strategy was going o...

Wherein Hooded examines a few of the less-beloved quest and mission types in gaming. Kitch Fests While not overtly maligned, they're often treated as so necessary and essential that a given MMO will likely base its whole quest structure on this old trope. But I think you only hear this term when people hate a given task; when there's a good story element behind fetching something, it doesn't fe...

One of my first gaming magazines featured a review of Ultima 4. The only photograph was from the character creation screen, just before questions are asked, where you're hanging around in a gypsy wagon. I think the graphics were from the Atari ST version, which were no slouch for their time. I was really interested in the ideas it was talking about, but I don't even think I had a machine that c...

I may have linked this back when it was first published, I forget, but it's a feature on Game Informer where Notch of Minecraft fame and Bethesda Software's Todd Howard interview each other: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2011/06/14/notch-and-todd-howard-the-one-on-one-interview.aspx I wanted to share some reflections I have now that I've watched it through a second time (along...

Salvation? Nah, just old RPGs. So... I was at the local Salvation Army. I always forget about the politics some of their branches have when I go in there, mainly because they have cheap books, and sometimes movies and games. I mentioned I got a China total sim a while ago, and this time I roped Republic Commando and Myst Exile, both of which I imagine some folks would laugh at, but I have my re...

Some people are content to play games as a hobby. I'm not. I write about games here, but I also have journals filled with game design concepts and game mechanics, and a shelf for board game prototypes that my friends (and I) have built over the years. I'm sort of inescapably immersed in games, which leads me to write these articles since I really have no other outlet. Things may change in this...

If we assume that human beings are all rational, almost to the point of robots with squishy parts, we can shrug off a lot of what goes on in business because we still believe that at the end we will make rational decisions and not be swayed by factors that don't have to do with the actual purchase of, say, a game, or its review. It seems clear to me, though, that there's more at work in our bra...

I've been playing two games to the exclusion of all others this week. Six Gun Saga The first, as one might have guessed, is the demo for Six Gun Saga . It lends itself well to a type of storytelling in games that I like, where you just get the major plot points and are left to imagine the details. Using the basic building blocks I was given, I imagined a cowboy, my main character, walked into t...

Hey. Below is a replica of my wiki entry for the strategy card game Six Gun Saga, which had been released along with a demo. Links below. In Six Gun Saga, players take on the role of a character in the wild west, gathering bands of lawmen and outlaws alike to complete iconic tasks straight out of movies and novels; through gun battles, story cards, and other methods the leaders accumulate victo...

Doomthief I've been going back and forth between two games, both on the old XBox we have: Doom (Ultimate Edition and II, both emulated through the Doom 3 collector's edition), and Thief: Deadly Shadows. Doom's been a breeze, and I'm still finding little things I never noticed before (or at least forgot). It's not a terribly complicated game, but couched in its linear find-the-key design is ofte...

Good Old Demos (acronym is a coincidence, I assure you) Now that it looks like I may have a working computer relatively soon which is about 6 years ahead of the one I'm currently using (even if it'll still be a few years behind average engines and the current racing models) it's lead me to reflect a bit on my PC gaming life. I've experienced many games through their demos, sometimes exclusively...

There are (at least) two kinds of puzzles out there. There's the kind you find in adventure games which often have a single solution, the kind where you struggle to figure out what the designer was thinking, or figure it out pretty quickly and move on. Then there's the stuff you find in PopCap games, Puzzle Quest, and the like, where skill is still a factor, but sometimes you can luck out, gett...

In the run up to a release we're looking forward to, we have basically two options. We ignore the press altogether, either because we don't want stuff to be spoiled or because we're not interested enough to waste time looking for every little tidbit scattered throughout a hundred different gaming sites (I wonder if it's really a hundred. Never easy to tell); OR, we try to soak up the gravy with...

Steampunk. The term seems to mean a lot of different things, when I've delved in deep. Some swear by the etymology, but there are some settings that attract that Steampunk name that ignore steam power, and frankly I don't mind if they do. Trying to shoehorn a specific thing into a setting just because it will lose the general label seems like an exercise in pleasing the pedantic. Argh, stupid g...

It seems us plebes will get to see the full E3 demo of Bioshock Infinite, which is being released as part of a promotional program hosted by the game's lead designers. My impression so far of the game is that I love the art and character design, and the time period crossed with freakish transhumanism is certainly compelling. The skylines thing, while it looks exhilarating, also stretches my dis...

I bought a bunch of new games earlier (I think I blabbed about all of them below so I don't need to say which), yet the games am I thinking about the most right now are the ones I don't have, especially if they're not yet released. Why is that? I think when a game isn't in our hands, if not at least tried or seen in action in its final form, it is a bunch of potentialities. It could be anything...

This one wasn't set to music Being an EVE Online outsider I can only go by what people have told me. During the recent blowup I knew enough, I think, to understand the reactions of a lot of players, and I wasn't very surprised. I think some depictions of this event, by people who are trying to cover the gaming industry as a whole, miss that there was a long history of disenfranchisement with a...

I have bought: Magic Carpet Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 Crystal Towers 2 I think that was it. The first two I got through GOG; I've played the first few scenarios of Magic Carpet and, despite the controls not appealing to me (I always wind up losing altitude which I have to make up for by flying at weird angles. It's the only flight game that has me wishing I could have up on the mouse actually m...

There are a few cravings I have that follow the major waves of releases. Despite what Yahtzee said I want to play L.A. Noire, Red Dead Redemption is permanently on my yes list, Skyrim's hovering over my head, but other than those, most major releases don't feel like impulse buys for me, whether or not I really intend on getting them or just hoping the stars will align properly. What I wind up a...

Of all the trailers and previews I saw for the top-budget games, as some people who read this space might predict, my interest in Skyrim seems to be the strongest. I continue to follow the development of Star Wars: the Old Republic (the trailer got the most attention but they also had hands-on gameplay available) and Guild Wars 2 (who didn't do the E3 thing this time around) even though I usual...

Though I haven't had all of these reactions exactly, it's hard to say trailers incite fanatical devotion: Wow, that trailer was beautiful! I'm excited for this game! That trailer was beautiful. Even though I know it has little to nothing to do with the game, I get that they're trying to get me excited about the game's themes, and it's working! Beautiful! I'm still waiting for actual game footag...

So, as many of you may have heard, Good Old Games .com has cut a deal with Electronic Arts to widen their library. As their silly ad (found via Rock Paper Shotgun) says, this is huge. Right now they're releasing Dungeon Keeper and Privateer , and will soon include games like Alpha Centauri . I was especially interested to see Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 being released as a single package for like...

Anyone interested in helping me put my money where my mouth is and actually trying to figure out the ins and outs of the Sunry trial in Knights of the Old Republic? It wouldn't happen right away, as I'd have to figure out what condition my save game is in and wait for others to catch up to the trial if they don't have a save there, but since this site allows multi-person FAQ production, I'm thi...

You know those press kits and fan site kits game producers always put out? Sometimes I take them just to see if I can find any useful tidbits, although most of the time they're stuff you can find elsewhere. I have an idea, though, that might be fun. Even though Giant Bomb is a commercial website, it, like any other hosting company, isn't really affiliated with me in any way. I don't benefit fro...

While loading an Old Republic video on their website, I noticed the curious number of "shares" to the side:

Knights of the Old Republic is one of those games that either demands more playthroughs than most could ever handle, or it requires some comparing of notes. There are enough alternate decisions that there's at least an illusion of non-linearity, so some measure of FAQ-ness is required to figure out what you missed the first time through. This illusion of depth is great when you play it the firs...

Alpha Centauri Alpha Centauri has reminded me, several times, that my single victory was a fluke. I always tried Gaians, maybe the tactics necessary for them are beyond me right now, and late in my games I pushed heavily toward capturing worms for use as troops, but those tend not to be very good when you reach the midgame and the defending troops are a lot more resistant to psi-weapons. There'...

When I look at L.A. Noire, something triggers in me. After watching people play it for 15 minutes, and after the QL before, I got this weird clean feeling in my brain, like seeing all those period clothes , artifacts, hairstyles, and landmarks was a fully realized Other World that was still instantly relatable. The amount of detail I've seen so far is extraordinary, and Brad was right, they eve...

Must have been six years ago. I was on the third floor of a local bookstore, gazing at a bunch of genre titles I had no intention of buying, when I saw a guy I hadn't seen for years looking through books one aisle over. I resented him a bit because I had been kicked out of his gaming group a few years back; he had said his core group wanted to keep the numbers down, nothing personal, but it sti...

Alpha Centauri has managed to crush me several times now. I'm all but convinced that my win was due to a confluence of factors that basically meant I lucked out. I started as the warlike faction so I wasn't going to be attacked by that faction, and I started out on a small island surrounded by resource pods, but far away from everyone else except some of the less aggressive groups. All that wat...

AC apparently translates into a lot of things. Advanced Civilization, a game I've played quite frequently is one (and it's related indirectly to the game I'm going to talk about today). Some might think of Armor Class , or Adam Curtis .** Another is Assassin's Creed, which is probably what most gamers think of when they see those two letters together (if not Air Conditioning). Nah, I'm talking...

Yeah, not much similarity there . It had energy depletion, I guess. Starbases. I mean, it might be a decent shooter, but it looked a bit flat to me. Liked the big ship designs, liked the references for what they were (Solaris was the intended sequel to Star Raiders, so that's where that name comes from, and even the original game had the Atarian federation or whatever). I want to just write up...

I'll watch the Star Raiders reboot quicklook, but I get the feeling already that I won't be happy with what our intrepid explorers find. I've already received warning, and if the change in starbase status here is indication, chances are there might be some disappointment: Since I know the ins and outs of the oldest version of this game, I'm pretty sure that something great could come from that...

Where I'm Coming From I made a pen-and-paper RPG character yesterday. Took me a while, and it was pretty tough to get the character I wanted out of all that work. This is for 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons for anyone who's familiar, something that's not quite the same as the earlier editions, more squarely focused on tactical combat than the prior games, for good or ill. As someone who apprec...

So, I downloaded Starfarers , which is this RTS-style spaceship sim similar to Homeworld only top-down instead of 3D, and probably plenty of other differences I'm not really sure of since I was intending to check when I started the game. I must have misread the blog because I thought it was an alpha demo. Maybe it still is, but I get the feeling a more active version of kickstarting. I dunno, y...

UPDATE: Some interesting alternate visions of Episode VI that never happened: http://www.filmthreat.com/interviews/8/ and later: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/12/entertainment/la-et-gary-kurtz-20100812 Not sure I want to talk too much about it, but since I've been into the first three films my whole conscious life, from the time when the whole thing started, I've been stacking up a whole...

Been eating up some of the Rage preview stuff. It just looks cool, and it looks like it could be fun. I'd hate to learn that the components that make up the game wound up lacking flesh, but I'm hoping that, say, the driving game will be fun enough on its own that you can play that for hours without worrying about the main game, and that the enemies don't wind up feeling samey after a while . I...

Gladius and Doom have been the games most played this weekend. I also discovered an interesting game from about 15 years ago that I'll share with you further down. Gladius My significant other and I started a co-op game of Gladius, and our team-up has been surprisingly effective. I'd completed all of one campaign, Valens', and wanted to start Ursula's. My SO has already completed several campai...

I'm willing to guess enough gamers lead lives either too boring or too interesting to want a game like I want, but I'll lay it out right here since I have a mind to. In Grand Theft Auto, one of the things I enjoy the most is imagining actually living in a given neighborhood. The false-fronts of different neighborhoods are everywhere, the record shops you can't get into, the specialty clothing s...

A few things: Since PSN is saying that the credit card data was encrypted, there's a change there's not going to be as huge a blowup as there might have been, but no one is saying anything definite (maybe they can't say anything definite, maybe they never will be able to and have to leave it up to users and credit card companies to find out). This doesn't reduce the seriousness the personal dat...

Just a few weeks ago, the address of one of my email accounts was stolen (along with many other peoples' accounts across several different, popular websites. A list and an excellent essay about this event is here ), and I felt a bit violated by that. I'd given the mailing list I had signed up for very little information, so only the email address had been stolen, although if I'd given the compa...

NO MORE ATTRIBUTES Doing away with the attributes in Skyrim seems like a natural step to me, and not at all a symptom of dumbing-down the formula. Attributes already were connected to skills, and players who wanted to bulk up on certain skills were forced to work on attributes that connected to those skills, whether or not those connections felt like they made any sense. The other things they c...

Having played Dynasty Warriors to my personal exhaustion, I realize there's still stuff to unlock but I wonder if I'm just going to have to leave it for later. A lot of these unlocks feel perfunctory: I've already leveled my dude to the maximum and finished his story, why would I want to have a 10th level item that I'd never use? Even some of the characters seem a bit extraneous; Jiang Wei, I'd...

Last night I spent some time looking up information on the latest Dynasty Warriors, number 7, listening to Lu Bu's driving metal track while my significant other leveled Xiao Qiao (more like "syiao chiow". Pinyin takes a bit of getting used to) enough to unlock some costumes in our copy of Dynasty Warriors *4*. We've both been playing the hell out of DW 4 since I randomly broke it out a week ag...

I guess what gets me back into EVE, well, reading about EVE, is always their latest update. It seems that every six months they come out with a major retooling for the system, giving it an intriguing name and laying out a list of new features. I managed to listen to CCP's presentation on the economics of EVE, and it seems that they, too, get a bump with every new content upgrade. Understandable...

Re-reading my essay I can see why I got some of the reactions I did, since it does sound a bit more strident than what I usually write. I'm not going to clarify myself in detail; while the tone's buried in there somewhere, I think if the latter, more contentious part of what I wrote is informed in part by what I wrote earlier in the piece, it's fairly straightforward: criticism is OK as long as...

I like to jump into game discussions with a two-fisted, if-I-had-my-way approach, even if I keep from alienating too many people by getting too specific. I want gaming as a hobby to improve, and I want individual games that deserve a spotlight to make the most of the brief time they have our attention. This means I'll often talk about features I like or what more of, and how a game disappointed...

I've been playing on Legendary the whole time. I now remember starting on New Mombasa because that level on Legendary is fun, and just going from there. No wonder my first playthrough was so much easier. I still can't imagine beating the first level on this difficulty, though. Seems a bit too much for me in places.

I'm not sure how many times I punched that prophet in the face, but in the end it took me two hours to beat a single boss. There wasn't much to it in theory, all you have to do is get in close on a floating guy riding a fusion cannon and unload on him, probably exclusively in melee but I never did explore every little option. Clown cars full of endless enemies pour in to distract you, throwing...

When I last left BG2 behind, I had killed a lich with a disrupting weapon that has a chance to kill undead, before the conversation even ended. He was standing on a table when I unfairly murdered him, and thus his loot was inaccessible. I thought that was BS2 and gave up, even after we found out that his loot drop was just cash. I missed many things from the first game, which I think weighed on...

I'm working toward an essay, but in the meantime, I watched: this video (less than 2.5 minutes) via this link and I-- you know what, I just deleted a paragraph or two because this is what it's really about: When I was a kid, I liked giant robots. I am an adult by some accounts, but I still am fond of them, though my mind no longer explodes anymore when I see something cool and new on the mech f...

Something dawned on me while reading through the documentation in Inform 7 , and the comments from random people when a person asked how they could add a multiple-choice system to the game. Some comments were helpful, and some were more about trashing Inform 7. Like the old language COBOL, Inform 7 tries to use natural language for the code, as opposed to what, in speech, would be pretty hard t...

I really want to use the Elder Scrolls just as a jumping-off point for the discussion of fast travel mechanisms in general, but fast travel as a system seems to be one of the points people keep coming back to when talking about the changes over the history of the major TES games. To get my own prejudices out of the way: I like fast travel, except when I don't. Hope that's clear. What I mean to...

So, I beat the main quest for Morrowind and its two expansions. I loved it when it let me, but there were still setbacks and broken quest fragments lying everywhere. Thankfully, the main quests, though still frustrating in places, became relatively straightforward toward the end, reducing the chance for irritation. One thing I've noticed more and more is that Morrowind is exceedingly bad at giv...

I had made a goal for myself: to enter the unenterable Cavern of the Incarnate, which I found during my wanderings throughout Vvardenfell. I found, through UESP, which was sometimes an unfortunately necessary resource when the game refused to tell me what it was thinking, that despite a voice telling me a clue to opening the thing, I had to go through a rigmarole in the main quest to get it to...

Well, I hinted at it in the comments for the previous entry a moment ago, but I was on the path to becoming the Nerevarine, something I can actually spell properly now having seen that word so many times, when I started a quest that demanded three things from a local dungeon. It turns out I had already looted it many months ago, which made me a bit nervous. When I got there, I found the big shi...

My progress in Morrowind continues. I've probably achieved more in this game than I ever have in any game previously, despite a few crashes (one of them completely new to me that told me my disc was damaged when it bloody well isn't. I wonder if the disc reader is failing). I've "liberated" many artifacts, including stuff I haven't ever seen before (though I remember my trusty Skull Crusher , I...

I'm starting to remember just why this game always dies the death before I manage to complete everything I want to complete. It's not any huge wound that kills my enthusiasm, but instead an accumulation of tiny cuts. My Argonian "Infiltrator" has reached level 10, using one of the most reasonable builds I've ever used in any Elder Scrolls game, with major skills being mostly related to thieving...

The wasteland and me go way back. When I was young, before I was even in school, the scare tactics began. I remember seeing a graphic in a newspaper showing Russian nuclear stockpiles, with the missiles looking huge on the graph compared to the tiny American ones. Orson Welles, a man I trusted because he did advertisements for my favorite board game of the time, Dark Tower , starred in an explo...

I'm relatively new to cell phones in general, and most of my phones up until now would simply melt if you tried to depict any kind of 3D graphics or wide range of colors. Now that I have one of those post-N-Gage attempts to make a platform for games, I've begun to think about what mobile gaming is really good for. When I was on the bus ride home, I'd break out my primitive little piece of hardw...

GOG announcing that they're releasing modern-compatible Zork series (sans the multimedia versions that came later), along with Planetfall, has me wanting it just for the sheer audacity of the offer. But beyond wanting to buy that compilation and try my adult brain at those puzzles, I'm not sure WHY I like Zork. The Zork I actually completed was Nemesis, which isn't practically speaking a Zork g...

I was thinking about trying to work these videos, namely the second one, into a discussion down the road about Elder Scrolls in general, but at one point Bethesda's own dragon Todd Howard, lead dude behind Bethsoft's E.S. series for a while now, actually talks about the mechanic, and the lore behind it, that I'm going to mention in the post. Here are the videos. They're not necessary for unders...

I've started seriously playing this forgotten Bioware game, and I'm about a quarter of the way through the Imperial City. I'm experiencing Jade Empire in a way I haven't ever tried before, which actually makes the game feel cleaner and more straightforward, if slightly less customized. The Plan Whenever I've tried to pick up Jade Empire past my first playthrough, I didn't want to have the same...

This is just a note to folks who might be alienated by my attention to Elder Scrolls lately: I'm still into other stuff, and will talk about it when I feel the need, even if it doesn't rope as many comments. I have to admit, I'm not the hugest fan of the Elder Scrolls series (I tend to skim the books unless I think they have direct bearing on the game world I'm actually playing in, for example)...

Yeah, Game Informer's got an article with a code cover. One huge advertisement for the plot side of things, which is cool if you're into that, but if you were trying to guess what I was interested in from the last thousand posts I've made about the Elder Scrolls games, it's the mechanics. NeoGAF, source of many things false, abusive, and sometimes true and cutting edge about games was the sourc...

I haven't played Daggerfall in a while, I think because the bugs prevent me from enjoying its advantages. That, and I think Arena has shown me a different way to do this open-world thing, even if it's not so open world. I'd almost rather try to mod Arena and add a guild system rather than play Daggerfall only to have it crush me with a broken quest, futzed savegame, or clipping problems. DAGGER...

After doing a bit of research in the first Elder Scrolls, I'll give a rundown of my impression of the first three Elder Scrolls games. No doubt some people will have their own experiences, and as far as Oblivion, I've pretty much laid out that I don't have any experience of it except the vicarious kind, but we can all make guesses about Skyrim based on what we've learned about player tastes ove...

As much as I don't want to lose the momentum of our ongoing discussion about game mechanics, I want to do a little research before posting on the next topic, so I'll just follow through with my regular Friday post and start things up in earnest later. Games I've been focusing on: Spelunky (we've reached the 1000 death mark. So proud), Age of Wonders (started up the good-guy campaign with a Dwar...

While there was a wide, refreshing variation of opinion on what people wanted out of their Elder Scrolls/open world fantasy game experience, there was a common thread that I didn't mention in my prior post, but that I'll mention here. The main issue that bothers just about everyone about Oblivion (and probably would have bothered me had I experienced it) was the universal level scaling, where a...

Resolved: After seeing the Skyrim announcement, I'm going to ramble about what I want from an Elder Scrolls game. Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall My experience of the Elder Scrolls began with Daggerfall. Buggy, expansive Daggerfall. I didn't even know about Arena when we bought the second part in the Elder Scroll series and struggled with its terrible, game destroying bugs that would send you falling...

Hey, that letter-numeral of even looks like a five, even though it's probably an invalid character for most people. Gaming has been light this week for me, to be honest. Mostly Spelunky and Solium Infernum. Solium Infernum continues to be a deep experience, in part because there are still little issues to be found among the complex card interactions. It's inevitable, but I imagine it's a bit fr...

Wherein I deign to write very short paragraphs about random stuff that is usually game-related Best of Good Buys I have decided to take a bit of a hiatus from Die2Nite, as the last-minute misanthropy bummed me out a bit. Hope those who've tried didn't think it was a complete waste of time, but feel free to talk negative or positive impressions in the comments (or in your own blogs, of course)....

It's 11 minutes, as I start typing this, until the end of our particular world. Our town kept alive for a long time. Ours was one of the few that made it all the way to day 12 since Die2Nite 1.0 was released. I'm a bit exhausted with the game, especially after I returned home from gathering materials to find all my stuff had been stolen from my house in some petty act of resource gathering now...

Check my previous blog for more information on this game and my referral link if it sounds interesting enough to try out. Depths and Heights "Was good serving with the people who worked through their own prejudices and banded together. I think I learned a lot about a lot of things, including the depths and heights that human beings could behave, even within a game structure. "I think I liked th...

Le Hasard: Most of my time this week was consumed through playing Die2Nite, the zombie survival game I mentioned last week. I've also played a fair bit of Spelunky (playing on a new load, we just got the warp tunnel to the yeti zone), while my S.O. has been playing a ton of Gladius since we got the machine up and running again. Gladius is still fun, although we get a bit of lag that I don't rem...

It seems I've been in a multiplayer mood of late, so that's what this issue's going to concentrate on. Not too long ago I received a PM of encouragement regarding that old article (still one of my more popular ones) about my proposal for an MMO based in the world of Dune . I remember thinking that I wanted to make damn sure that it wasn't just a theme pasted over old gameplay, that the game mec...

If this is of interest to anyone this might become a regular feature, but it's dependent upon what I actually find that I feel is worth noting (and is memorable enough to mention). Includes my personal game explorations, and stuff I've found mentioned elsewhere. I'll be buying the sequels to the first Age of Wonders because they're discounted at GOG this weekend. I guess some other download sit...

... I probably watch this video series more than any other: Here Derek reviews probably one of my favorite games. I thought I'd add this as a complement to my new list on competitive sports/racing stuff. Thing about Classic Game Room (HD I mean, the reboot of the series) is that, like with other reviewers I follow on a regular basis, even if I don't agree with the reviewer's conclusions or even...

Lessee... I could talk about what I've been reading and watching lately. I mentioned one of the playthrough guys I watched, and still watch, regularly, but I don't talk much about where I get my information on games in general, so I thought I might compare notes with everyone. In addition to the previews Giant Bomb makes of the less well-known games (I've fallen behind on the retro arcade stuff...

What a difference! After struggling through Ishar 1 and Might and Magic 1, I decided to give Might and Magic 2 a spin. It's going to be very difficult for me to go back, especially to Might and Magic 1. Everything is improved. The graphics are more colorful, the NPC interactions are streamlined something fierce, you can identify items fully now, you can get special items in stores on certain da...

I've reached a point now where I can save reasonably often, and have a party that can kill off minor opposition without much trouble. I also broke through a few early barriers and now have more recruiting options than I know what to do with, so I'll just leave them all behind rather than wonder if everyone's compatible, allowing me a chance to pick them up later if I wind up killing off a few p...

OK, now that I got the first impressions out of my system... Ishar is a very free-form and imaginative role-playing game that does its best to alienate the modern player. I LIKE it when saving can't be used as a crutch, but in a game this unforgiving it would be nice if saving was easier. Saving costs money (1000 gold) which you can afford to do all of once before exploring or getting into some...

Reeeaaaarrrrrgggghhhhhh!!!!!!!

You know that story about how Captain Kirk cheated on the Kobyashi Maru test, and they let him pass because he was being all inventive? I bring this up in part because I know some things about the Secrets of the Inner Sanctum in this game, and that's actually pretty appropriate, but also: I cheated. I downloaded the hint books and looked at the Might and Magic I book to see how the hell I could...

Not Heroes, I mean the RPGs. Not a sequel, I mean the original. That game has come a long way since those beginnings, but I've been pleasantly surprised by how much stuff has STAYED IN all this time. I'm not as familiar with VI onward, but I know that over the many years that that series was developed, it kept a lot of its baseline philosophies (gems as spell components, food when you need to s...

Arcanum: Week 2 It's been a bit slow after reaching Caladon. I'd confused Caladon with Dernholm, and was surprised to see a sizeable city filled with yet more secrets. I may hate things about the engine and the inflexible quests, but man, if Arcanum is anything it's generous with its content. I'm now maxed out, with several undistributed points set aside for when I feel a strong need to boost s...

This will contain spoilers of a sort for people who are playing evil the campaign in the fantasy strategy game Age of Wonders. The events are the logical conclusion of the second big choice you make, but if you want to be in any way surprised by all means skip this. Heck, I even mention a well-known feature in TIE-Fighter, and a quest in Arcanum if you want to play those games fresh, too. The B...

A quick Arcanum update: I've not played too much to warrant much comment here over the past few days, so I'll set a post aside until I do. I've been pushing the main plot forward, which meant getting to know the Dwarves. Would be nice if THEY had a rapid transit system in their abode, but I got to be genuinely helpful to them a while back, which was a nice change of pace from stomping on everyo...

My time spent playing Arcanum lately has been pretty short for these two days, but I've found that a lot of the map is pretty empty. When I compare it to Fallout, I liked that Fallout had different types of terrain that were obvious on the map, and that you could sort of get hints where the cities were. What Arcanum does well is that it doesn't have a Luck stat. Luck, if you remember, in Fallou...

Fear and Loathing in Tarant I've entered into a rhythm that has given me quite a bit of coin to spare: I check all the sellers for saltpeter to help me make gunpowder, and glasses and pocketwatch parts to make the lucrative mechanical goggles (which rope more than a thousand a piece on resale), and I check trash bins for flintlock pistol parts (combined with the rare small metal tube it gives m...

The Magi-Tech Issue In this relatively short session I spent a good amount of my time slaughtering undead dungeon denizens. Some of them seem a bit immune to my pistol, which is a pisser since my companions aren't terribly good at combat. At least the percent to-hit didn't drop by about 100% because of bad character point combinations like on a previous save, where I tried to up my magic too mu...

Arcanum: Day 2 I pursued some leads on some mysteries that had come up in the big city, and decided to keep most of the decisions I made. I did use an explore-load tactic to find out what was in one place (it wasn't what I was expecting), but otherwise I've tried to keep whatever consequences resulted from my actions unless my reputation was permanently busted. For the most part, my main proble...

Recently bought Arcanum during a sale. Cost me 3 bucks, which may make any disappointment I might feel relatively negligible. All the while the many impressions I'd read of the game wandered through my head. Some loved it, some hated it, many were disappointed by it. My first real impression was the music, which I promptly downloaded when they posted promotional copies of the mp3's online. I la...

After watching a ton of Minecraft being played on people with better machines than mine, I've really been thinking heavily about game ecologies, really digging Minecraft's logical discovery system-- and it's also struck me how building in the game's survival mode has a point to it, at least basically, because you have to learn some basic crafting and shelter making in order to have a reasonable...

I was lucky enough to have bought and downloaded a game I was happy to see put up on GOG.com, a site that boasted contractually allowed DRM-free purchase and download of a bunch of older but generally superb games. Last weekend, GOG.com abruptly stopped their services (in the middle of a sale) and put up a confusing, brief statement about the state of affairs there. Since then, the press that c...

Some months ago I tried to create a list of [sometimes Massively] Multi-player Online games (Role-Playing Games, mostly) that were innovative. Below, I will list what, at least at the time, I was able to find for the list here on the database: Multiplayer Online Games that Try Something Different Apparently A Tale in the Desert isn't entered... Nor is Atriarch ... Nor is Seeker ... " Love " is...

The Perils of Game Design Software I haven't honestly been playing many games at all lately, other than ASCII Sector . My focus has been more about creating games, and for someone whose coding experience sorta stopped after BASIC and PASCAL, there's a wide gap to cross. It helps when coders out there are nice enough to give creatives the tools they need to make something, but it's rare to find...

Fool's Errand I've been in a more retro mood than usual of late after playing some of my older games, including the fine Ultima Underworld series and Machiavelli: The Prince . While looking around on classic gaming sites (including revisiting the new Cinemaware homepage) I noticed that Cliff Johnson's diabolical puzzler Fool's Errand , along with some of his other games, are free for download f...

Today I managed to beat the main game in Final Fantasy IV advance. I'm glad I wasn't cooking anything while the ending scenes were playing, otherwise I would have missed them (or let the house burn down). At times I felt like the narrative was pretty straightforward, that there wasn't much of a difference between the moon, overworld, and underworld in terms of actual exploration or gameplay, ju...

Initial sketchings of the principle designer of Pac Man here .

So, I've decided: I'm OK with the new X-Com. Or XCOM, I guess. From what I've been able to read I can tell that there is at least potential in the design they have. They're taking some of the elements , that idea that you gain more junk if you risk your crew's lives and stay there to clean up (with a different emphasis on risk vs. reward in this version), commanding a base, and gaining advantag...

Dungeon hacking + robot blasting == chocolate + peanut butter. While playing Aria of Sorrow and FFIV, I found that when the charge light goes on on my Gameboy Micro (the start and select buttons turn red, like two angry, angry eyes) I tend to incorporate it mentally into the game I'm playing. Like with Aria, I found myself rushing to save because it felt as though the game had suddenly imposed...

I've played through what the status screen tells me is a little over 50 percent of the map now. There are still plenty of mysteries, plenty of souls to steal, and I have to say after a slow start I'm damn happy with Aria of Sorrow. What I think really works is that the equipment system and the soul system are separate, allowing for a lot of different combinations of equipment. Yes, please! I DI...

Found a sweet link through this site called The Pac Man Dossier: http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html It is immense and has just about every detail you could ever want. Thank you, internet!

Recently bought a couple of used GBA games: Final Fantasy IV and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. Time to break out the GBA micro again, methinks. They were used games, and I realize that some people have trouble with those. I don't think, beyond buying a Wii that'll emulate it or more surreptitious means, I would have been able to play these games. I guess living in an area where things weren't re...

Ran into the Google Pac Man app by accident. Was damn fun to play it again, especially with a different maze and in the context of "this is history", with all the sound effects in tact. The system I played it on eventually started hitching up, to the point where I actually passed through a ghost at one point, prompting me to shut the thing down. Still, the design is elegant. Here's what I remem...

Fallout 1 and 2 Music remixed by the original composer, available for free: http://auralnetwork.com/releases (Thanks to Berghei ) Otherwise Normally not into cosplay, but this is epic Been playing more of Icewind Dale 2 , and been dealing with some rather annoying, obscure puzzles that either assume I know less than I do, or assume I've got amazing insight. The dial needs to be centered, please...

Icewind Dale II Icewind Dale II has managed to surprise me again with its little touches. Yeah, the game as a whole is linear, but often we want customizability more than just in which order we tackle main quests, which seems to be the substitute some companies like to make for player choice. IWD2 manages to make me feel like the characters I created are part of the game, whether my monk refuse...

Well, I beat the game, and I have to say there were some really nice moments hidden in there that helped counter my initial impressions. I'll probably write more about it when I have the energy, but I'll say right now that I'm glad I got a chance to play that thing. This will be a short note, but there will be spoilers below if you haven't played it (and I mention some vague things about KOTOR...

KOTOR Else Received KOTOR on the XBox, thanks to the same little druid who did most of this epic page, and have been playing the game for a good part of this week on my dusty old gaming machine. At first I was turned off by KOTOR's staid presentation, and anything from the extended universe automatically has to try REAL damn hard to make me not angry, but there have been some interesting touche...

Watching E.R. today, I saw them go behind the counter and steal a coffee from the microwave. In the real world that's practically theft (yes, even if you're an FBI agent), but in games it's expected for us to peek around corners and kype stuff. I remember going into every house in, say, Phantasy Star III, trying to find hidden chests and stuff under the bed. We know that these places are laid o...

In my possibly never-ending quest to find Wizardry 8, I came across my CD carrying case devoted to games. I'm beginning to think Wiz 8 has ceased to exist. Magic! Here's what I did find: Icewind Dale II , which we installed for research purposes. Grim Fandango Thief II (not sure where my first Thief is. Makes me hope Wiz 8 is still hiding somewhere. Fallout 1 and 2 The Curse of Monkey Island (n...

Went looking through all my old junk for Wizardry 8 and... didn't find it. Bitter about that. But I did find a J-month 1997 PC Gamer demo disc with Monkey Island 1 and 2 on it (encrypted, for sale for 20 damned dollars). Also found this list of games . Check out the list and report back if you have any of those games you want to recommend me to play. I'm a bit wary of early 3D games, so I usual...

Third Review Done Put my time where my mouth was and reviewed Adventure for the 2600, of all things. Check it out ! :) It includes a link to an interview with the game designer that came out in '07, as well as a few other nostalgia links for those wanting to learn a bit more about humanity's ancient past. Was fun to play it again, and it'll probably be my go-to online game when I want to kill (...

I was wracking my brains trying to figure out what the name was of a fun space exploration game I'd played some years ago. I only played the demo, but I got a lot of mileage out of it, and it tended to have a different, more immediate feel than a lot of the micro-managey games out there. BUT I COULDN'T REMEMBER ITS NAME! I Know! Let's call it Super Star Empires! Many games suffer from generic t...

I want to write more about oldschool game ecologies and what we might learn from them now, but just wanted to share this screencap I just made: Easter Egg for all seasons It feels a lot different when you managed to do it on your own (especially having to fight with a bat to prevent it from ruining your chance. That microdot is hard to find if you drop it!). Here's a map by Maurice Molyneux on...

Got some time in with the old XBox recently. By XBox, I mean the old one. Tried out some stuff that I'd sorta been wanting to get back to. First was GTA San Andreas. After watching Red Dead Redemption trailers I sorta wanted to roam around and explore things a bit. I felt at the time that GTA would be the best fit for that and, after a few experiments to figure out what the best of my saves was...

Chronicling my life so I can remember I was once a human being; pay it no mind unless you're curious. I made a bunch of new entries or additions for older games here. The bounty system is a bit wonky but I've managed to get a few extra points out of it, and now my ranking is lower than my age, at least for the time being. I would love the title of historian here, even if that meant nothing beyo...

"Gilgamesh, what you seek you will never find. For when the Gods created Man they let death be his lot, eternal life they withheld" I have to admit that I like collection games. I like sidequests, too. But often there's a tension in the narrative that makes these sorts of activities a bit absurd. My best personal example was when I remember Cloud of Final Fantasy VII traversing the main map wit...

In my continuing desire to experiment with this new thing called Giant Bomb, I made my first Forum Topic . Ever. It probably should have been a blog, but I didn't want to call attention away from the blog entry below . That's why this here entry is so short. Experiment result: no, the Forum tab does not light up with a "NEW" sunflower.

In this essay I briefly, obliquely discuss Heavy Rain, Mass Effect 2, and Persona 4 in relation to the tones of some of their endings. Please don't read any further if you want to preserve some suspense for the endings in any of those games. There Is no Perfect Ending + Siddown, fashionistos! I really don't like a lot of the divisiveness in game conversation. I think avenues get cut off when pe...

I just surprised myself by actually typing out a complete review of most of my general impressions of Spirit Engine 2. It's like... my second review ever on this particular web thing after the strangeness of Mondo Medicals . Now, apparently, you can embed video in a review, which blows my mind. It's not like I'd vlog the thing, and I don't even have a proper mo-cap, camera or mic so I wouldn't...

One of the problems you face when you're expected to create a more realistic game engine is that the amount of detail you need to supply increases quite a bit. Most people don't care too much whether or not a tiny pixel character has a snooze mode, or if they gasp in horror when, say, their friend is being carved up by an especially resilient chainsaw. But as we demand more of our games, detail...

That Meat Circus had me saying all kinds of horrible things to my innocent TV (and imagining throwing my controller through it), but in the end, I won. Didn't get a full collection list, ended at 97 or so, but I just watched a youtube clip and that was enough not to make me want to punish myself to find all the stuff I left behind at camp on an earlier save. I'm OK with how it ended, and I actu...

Two words: Meat Circus Thanks for dropping by. For your troubles, a disturbing video . Or, if you look at it another way, baby's first zombie apocalypse.

A note on Spirit Engine 2: A lot of people seem to think that grinding is a necessary part of RPGs. They really aren't, but they are for a certain type, where the level system demands a certain plateau of ability from the player characters. Grinding is often demoralizing for me if I don't enjoy the combat, and at times (on Hard) I've had to grind a bit in Spirit Engine to have the right level a...

For some reason doubleclick is hooked up to new blogs. Weird. Anyway: I've been playing Spirit Engine 2 for a few hours now, and I have to say I'm enjoying it quite a bit. You have a party of three characters, each character being of three classes, and of three roles within the story. The classes are knight, gunner, and priest, while the roles I'd classify as the friendly, the wise guy/gal, and...

I've moved this article off-site. Thanks to those who participated!

Nothing from Bioware, but a fan put together a pretty sharp trailer modeled off the cinematic trailer from the pre-release blitz that I think was featured on Cartoon Network: Obviously the hi-resolution stuff wasn't possible for this one. Did anyone get their hands on the art book for Mass Effect 2? I bought the first one separately and enjoyed it; I'm wondering if the second one was worth a pu...

OK. I've seen people play both the original Mass Effect and its sequel now. I was impressed with both, but especially impressed with the latter. I have issues with both, and I guess because ME2 is so much better in many ways I feel like it could be even better, especially how the final mission was executed. That's not why I'm writing this, though. I'm writing this as a challenge to people who a...

Here's a letter I sent along to Bioware, using the information on this page : Hello. I'm surprised, given the strong critical and player response to the female Shepard in Mass Effect, that Mass Effect 2 is still being marketed with only cursory mention of there being another gender option for the main character, and that the character is voiced by Jennifer Hale. Jennifer Hale's work was very st...

Imagine my confusion: I see an ad for Brink, a new FPS that takes place on a floating city with class struggle as the central theme, and right after I make my joke in the comments it occurs to me that this sounds A LOT like a game I contributed a bit of content for on this very site. I was amazed to learn that they seemed to only have dudes now, when the game I remember reading about had a chic...

Not sure how many of you out there are pinball fans, but I got to put a lot of time into an almost gameless system's Space Cadet pinball. You know what I mean? For PC users with Windows I think it still comes standard, at least for XP machines. It's a table from Full Tilt Pinball , which was developed by Cinematronics and published by Maxis, which now has a more goofy graphic replacing the cool...

Grumble Not sure why my blogs are relegated to the MORE tab... I see. If you attach a blog to a forum, it becomes a forum post as far as this thing is concerned. Weird. Didn't attach this one to the forums on purpose, and it popped up in the Blog tab again. Adventure of Adventure Game Making not so Fun So, I've been thinking about experimenting with making an interactive game. Something simple....

Anyone who wants to play Mass Effect still shouldn't read this blog entry, as I go into detail about a specific moment in the midgame. People who have finished it, or at least cleared Feros, though, don't have to worry about it even if you haven't cleared the whole thing yet. So, I've been checking out Mass Effect as though it were a movie, completely detached from any decision making and just...

Quick note. Been watching Mass Effect in one of my latest over-the-virtual-shoulder-money-saving-vicarious-gaming-experiences, so I've been soaking up a bit of the ephemera that the marketing of the game has brought about (man, do I want some action figures). Ran across a poster that's some nice rendering of a main Asari colony. Problem is the name: Illium . You would have thought a company run...

If you were curious about Press Your Luck, it was one of my personal favorites growing up, along with Jeopardy, Classic Concentration (both with Alex Trebek on them when I watched them), The Price Is Right, and Scrabble (oh, but that theme song was evil, Chuck). Here's the first part of the episode that made Press Your Luck especially famous. Listen for the Whammy sounds, as well as the beeboob...

Play-tested the Hell Out of It The Golem artifact is expensive, but powerful Just finished a session of last-minute bug hunting for Cryptic Comet' s new game, Solium Infernum . I've helped people test and develop stuff before, but this worked especially well for me because the developer made it clear that my finds were helpful, and that some of them were key to getting the game running properly...

I'm not going to even bother posting this on the proper page, or with the proper tags, because of the craziness surrounding the game. I will say that for the longest time, the dedicated server issue simply baffled me. The people who were pro-change sounded a lot saner than the people who were against, and there wasn't much in the way of coherence for the pro-dedicated server crowd. At least I f...

It's pretty much a given that when you go back into gaming's past and try to play the old stuff, you're likely to run into trouble. Backwards compatibility is the bane of many programmers and always threatens to be incomplete as hardware and software change. I keep this in mind during my struggles with Good Old Games. Some of the problems stem from our having bought a low-end, substitute monito...

"This isn't D&D!" While paging through the interesting but overpriced "30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons and Dragons," I came across a passage written by Ed Stark regarding the adaptation of the Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition ruleset to a computer game. An early draft of the rules was sent to Bioware, and Bioware was to develop a game to roughly coincide with the official relea...

What a Difference 10 Gigs Make. I'd show you a different screen, but I'd rather you discover new screens on your own! I've finished Machinarium . Past the demo hints I mentioned, I actually never used the hint system even once, which I'm pretty proud of. I'll have my reflections about the game up eventually, and maybe log a review of it just for fun. When finished with that, I wondered where my...

The Progress of Adventure Games Bleak AND beautiful at the same time. Adventure games have, for a long time, been in the process of streamlining. I think this comes from the old parser days, where people found it frustrating to have to guess what the designers were thinking. They tried to make things more accessible through point-and-click interfaces, allowing you various verbs to interact with...

I MAY have a chance to play the XBox version of Psychonauts in the near future. I'm looking forward to the chance. Ever since I learned that a lot of the games I liked from Lucasarts were all masterminded by the same dude, I've begun to understand the whole Psychonauts obsession people have. I played the demo for the PC a month or two ago... I think... and barring control difficulties I enjoyed...

Like many I held out hopes for Scribblenauts being revolutionary, but I think the big problem is it didn't learn the lessons of its predecessors, the text adventures of old. Put succinctly: Scribblenauts got the nouns down. What it forgets is the verbs. Parser commands in those old games were difficult because they not only had you worry about nouns (that were, granted, already in the game worl...

I wasn't familiar with the original, and I only came upon Elite II many years after it was made, but in playing it realized just why so many people loved it. It was one of the first of the multi-role space sims, bringing new depth to space combat and resource management that was begun by the old Star Trek games and games like Star Raiders. Here's a BBC article and video with gameplay: http://ne...

After getting MDK to work on my laptop, I decided to see what I could do with the Might and Magic six-pack, since I was sort of eager to see what the older games had to offer. I'd played Might and Magic 2 a long time ago, and then talked about a year ago here about World of Xeen, which still rocks if you ask me. Starting with 1, I tried to get them to work using the tools that Good Old Games ga...

Regarding the sale at Good Old Games , I concentrated on the sale since it was about to expire, plus grabbing one extra (about 22 bucks, all told): Thanks to everyone who gave me their input (in person, in email, and here at GB)! I've already got in mind what I might get for my next round of purchases, based largely on the kind recommendations of folks like you :) (Notice how that phrase is amb...

I watch a lot of game videos. Stuff here, but also older stuff showing me games that I never had the chance to play when they were originally out. I caught a video recently showing an old Might and Magic game, which is apparently for sale as part of a cool set offered by Good Old Games . I admire Good Old Games' commitment to refurbishing old games so that they work on XP/Vista machines, and th...

Philip Zimbardo stumbled upon a problem in human behavior that he wasn't quite expecting. He'll put it better than I can (distracting sound effects notwithstanding): Here he talks here about the Milgram Experiment, which many of us have probably heard of, and he talks about his own experiment that addressed similar issues. He got a bunch of students who elected to take part in the program (who...

Thanks again to all of you who recommended I get the Game Boy Micro. I've been revisiting all my old games since then. I managed to make it to the very last stage in Su per Mario Bros. 3 , starting from the beginning. But... that Bowser. Mario needs to take a shotgun to that guy while he's asleep and end this cycle of torment forever. Speaking of torment, Mario's trial-and-error style can reall...

In what has to be one of the stranger stories on research I've seen, a doctor with a question mark at the end of his name released a study about what the best tactics would be for a society to emerge relatively unscathed from a zombie attack. He said pretty much wipe them out, as quickly as possible. There's some contention, but given that this is based on the old style zombie, the shambling, s...

Seems the video game industry may have some trouble soon, according to a conference that just concluded in Edinburgh: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8201332.stm It says the combination of games with a large production staff take longer to produce, limiting income; multiple platform development also increases the difficulty for the same piece of software to get decent exposure; and the co...

--And boy is my clicking finger tired. Kabbage Boy is bound to be a strange surprise , though. :)

Coupla things: Forum Behavior Folks say it's (1) poor forum etiquette to "necro" or post on an old topic, even if you have something new to bring to the discussion, but at the same time it is (2) bad form to start a new post about something that has already been talked about before. In reverse: It's frowned upon to start a topic that already exists, yet it's frowned upon to contribute to a topi...

OK, now Grow is really updated. :) Eyezmaze just released a new version of the classic GROW ver. 3, including some bug fixes to make it compatible with the latest version of Flash, a hint button, and a new hidden ending. If you got frustrated by the old one, it'll actually give you more hints the more you try, and if you've never played it before, now's your chance to experiment! Update: And if...

Dune as a somewhat traditional massively multi-player online RPG The Road to Dune Note: This post has been moved to the specialty forums, decreasing the chance that it will be seen by anyone unless they happen to already be looking for Dune-related posts. Hell, I'm interested in Dune and would never think to crawl through the Dune franchise page to read a Dune forum. It was a nice run, though,...

For those of you who want a little light-hearted diversion, the latest game from eyezmaze.com is up (actually has been for a while now). It actually breaks with a few of his old rules, and it follows his latest convention by making some of the alternate paths very detailed. I got fooled a few times into thinking I'd found the right path, because there was so much going on. Even when I didn't qu...

Below I'll embed a classic video of Computer Chronicles, featuring hosts Stewart Cheifet and endearingly enthusiastic Gary Kildall . Chefeit was right there up until early 2000, showing how quickly the industry was changing, even despite the tanking of the video game industry before this show was even broadcast. Even for someone who grew up with this stuff it's always jarring to see the suits,...

If you haven't played or watched Bioshock, but plan to, go ahead and skip this blog entry. Also, this is pretty much a love letter to the game, so I'm not going to be nuanced about it. While there were tons of things that bothered me about what I saw, what's below is what I keep coming back to when I think about the game, so I thought I'd share it. I'm not sure what I want to say here, other th...

Sometimes online, casual games are good. Kongregate tends to attract more interesting games than your standard repetitions of old themes, though they have a tendency for being interesting on the surface with a drop off in reward after a while. Ran into this trebuchet simulator, things were OK, but then: The physics model seems to think,. and I may be wrong, that throwing three of a rock at once...

Have a good weekend and watch the skies.

So, thanks to some of the user suggestions I decided to track down a gameboy micro, and I bought it. It's PINK, so that's probably why it was still for sale, but not like that bothers me. Got it used for like, 35 bucks or so, so I think that's a decent enough price. I guess I bought it because I wanted a system that could play my long-forgotten Gameboy Advance (why do I keep typing Game Boy wit...

I hate to bury my humanist essay below (please check it out if you have the time and inclination), but I thought I'd let people know about Strategy First's offer as a favor to folks out there who want to try out some games they may not have heard of before. If the idea of spending money doesn't appeal to you, though, skip to the end of this entry to see a neat video reel for a clever, freeware...

a netsuke dragon I've been interested in foreign cultures since I was a little kid, looking at my Our World atlas, hearing stories my dad told of foreign countries and cultures, and watching programs depicting such on TV. Like many Americans I've actually had little experience actually traveling to foreign countries, but like many of us I'm also curious about the outside world. My attentions sh...

In the tradition of sitcom clip shows, I wanted to write down a list of my blogs so far so I could keep track of everything I've talked about. If you want, feel free to take a look and even comment, but part of the reason I'm doing it is just to get everything straight in my head :) The Current Age: Gameboy Advance: What are my options? - Everyone's into giving advice II When the World Ends - G...

How Game Boy Advances were born (although if you get GBAs wet, they just die). This is a call on those in the know to help out some random person on the internet. Let's say I live in [Europe] and let's say that I have a ton of old Game Boy Advance games I'd like to start playing again. What are my options? Since the new DS doesn't have a GBA port, I would have to buy one of the older DS systems...

The last stand, as the servers chug to a stop When the World Ends Has anyone hung around an online community long enough to see its last moments? Enjoy some highlights from the last 24 hours of Tabula Rasa : http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2009/03/analysis_tabula_rasas_final_mo.php This article first caught my attention through another article: http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2009/03/...

Seems my upgrade to Firefox 3 has freed up some of those lag issues and the image function works again, so I'll stop trash talking and get back to not updating my blog with esoteric commentary. I like that Giant Bomb has chosen to go with the personal reviewing style, a style I think more reviewers of popular media should at least try. While there is always something to be said for the detached...

Good Morning Forehead Crusher I guess the profound maturity and complexity of Persona 4 has sorta made me back down from my previous stridency regarding pop culture entertainment in Japan (although it's too bad some people can't handle the themes that are coming up in P4, I'm happy the designers had the guts to talk about these issues). With that in mind, I took it upon myself to try playing a...

Hey. I'll try to keep this relatively short. I've noticed in RPGs there is this tendency for min-maxing, which is to say trying your best to be very, very strong in a few things, and running roughshod through the game, finding all the avenues that are in line with these strong attributes, and even finishing the game that way. In Fallout 3, I remember Jeff saying he was good at-- conversation I...

The gaming connection is tenuous, but if you've ever been curious about the cold war official story about nuclear war survivability, in contrast to the world that games like Fallout show us, see Duck and Cover . The Prelinger film that caught my eye, and prompted me to link this in the first place though, is here , and thankfully has little to do with video games. Yet. If you eat meat, like I d...

Finally, some substantive discussion about violent video games! Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse? And in case Vinny and Jeff need to practice their RPG skills before they reach the boss in Persona 4, they could try this: http://www.sophiehoulden.com/games/thelinearrpg/

(Since typing seems to go only slightly slower than normal, I'll still ramble now and again, at least. And the video page is strangely less hard to navigate than the information pages, except for them getting rid of the sift-through-types-of-videos-while-you're-watching-another-video function, which I miss. ) A Little of the Ol' Rope-a-Trope When compared to GB, this Dragon Age promotional site...

Well, I really hope this extreme slowness is just a buggy phase, because if this site is going to be as slow as it is for me now, I'm not sure I have the energy or time to wait while every page chugs into focus. This site has been a big of a drain on my resources from the outset, but for the most part I've been able to keep things going. But if this new face is how things are going to be, I don...

I love games that let you experiment. Feel sorry for the little people though :) And the bunny! Should I post some of the moon footage I've found online, or would everyone like to find it on their own? Eh. This instead:

The AV Club continues to surprise me with a lot of interesting , hidden games . I'm sorta proud of myself that I discovered Spelunky before they did. That's it. I've died more than a thousand times, beat it three times, and still have stuff to unlock. I've also used the person I was trying to rescue as an offensive projectile, shot down a flying saucer with a rock and then squished its parachut...

No rest for Yu I like randomly generated stuff. It's sorta like peering into the unknown, or at least a jumbled up version of the known. I've spent many hours with Nethack and other roguelikes, watching as a bunch of ASCII characters or graphical overlays march toward me and tear me to ribbons. One of my favorites is Doom , for example. Derek Yu (co-creator of Aquaria ) has put the peanut butte...

Galactrix in particular It gave me a ship! I tried out the Galactrix (milk tricks? someone who dominates with milk?) flash demo. I like that you can control the direction that the pieces fall in, because it almost answers a problem I had with Puzzle Quest, where you'd have an OK combo, or even a regular move, and then all this stuff would fall in that would set your opponent up nicely. At least...

Electronic Arts has a site called Pogo, with board game translations for games like Scrabble and Monopoly. I'm a board game designer, so I'm a bit ashamed to admit that I recently had a Monopoly craving that needed fixing, and I found Pogo had a Monopoly game set up, ready to go for free, zero commitment, and I didn't even need to register to play it. Eventually I ran into problems, the kind of...

While Roger Ebert continues to view video games at arm's length, his readers continue to write thoughtful letters about the potential of video games (and how most movies based on them miss the point): http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081216/LETTERS/812179997 While it's not for everyone, text-based games probably provide the greatest opportunity for games to break out...

Beam of light Edit: The discount I mentioned earlier has expired as of January 3rd, so I've changed the facts of this entry to represent this. One of the games that taught me that big titles don't have the monopoly on craft was Aquaria , and I started out my blog mentioning it for that reason. It's got great art, an interesting story, and a lot of little discoveries alongside its more obvious C...

Maybe you all have heard of this already. I just found out about this through TED . The Technology, Entertainment, Design conference, is a sponsored, rapid fire presentation of the cutting edge of human thought, including everything from the guy that debuted the touchscreen application people now have on their I-phones that lets you scale in and out, to biomedical advances, socio-economic theor...

I don't know how many game designers read GB. I guess this isn't really a game DESIGNER'S site so much as a game consumer one, although there's overlap. This is interesting anyway: There is a contest in which 1-5 people aged 18 to 28 years old could win $10,000 dollars for a creative game concept which addresses the problem of the skyrocketing national debt in the U.S. Take it as it's given, I...

Hey. This was for the Frankenstein's Monster concept page, but I found out there was a page just labeled Frankenstein as a character, and it's regarding the same guy... I guess you could argue both ways as far as Frankenstein's Monster being a concept or a character, but where does it start, where does it end? The article below isn't much, but it contains a point I've wanted to make about Frank...

During my random retro stumblings I happened upon a really cool video. Ignore the screechy, terrifying singing at the beginning if you want (recommended, skip to 00:38): I love the guy on the banjo in this film (or the playtester); I keep wondering what kids were watching this guy, thinking this would be the perfect job, when in a year all these guys may not have been working there any more due...

The Red Ryder BB Gun The Plymouth Iron Windmill Company in Plymouth, Michigan had been making farm windmills for years when in 1886, the company decided to include a promotional item with purchase: an air-powered rifle. Later, when the company was about to close down due to slow sales, they noticed that the popularity of the air rifles they were giving away greatly exceeded the popularity of th...

Whew, done. At least for now. I'm going to re-read the section in Levy's book and add some other facts as recorded by J. Martin Graetz. I am more than a bit proud of this article (let me know about any errors, omissions, whatever): The History and Impact of Spacewar! (1962) Spacewar! was one of the first graphical video games in existence. There were games before Spacewar!; two frequently cited...

New Hope for the JSF Program The United States military's new fighter jet, the F-35 Lightning II, was declared yesterday to be too expensive to mass produce, according to leading defense expert Cesar Wilhelm. Wilhelm stated that plans to make the plane were to have been set aside or possibly scrapped altogether, due in part to the current challenges that face the military, but also due to signi...

For the expanded article, see above. Sorry to those who commented on this post but I wanted to get it on a more appropriate forum just to help diminish any ambiguity...

Interesting policy discussion today, maybe I'll talk more about it when I know which way the wind is blowing. For now, though, I'll post a link that makes my vision blur and my heart skip a beat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e974ie5ilj8 :)

The work of the maker of Grow (Grow Cube is my favorite of these, with possibly Grow Rpg second) has long been a fascination of mine. His latest creation is something I still go back to to spend a little time. I've gotten the calico trap, anyone get any higher score than that? One of many possibilities Do flash game makers count? Or is it usually only products whose distributors will sell adver...

Not to bury my previous post (maybe I need two accounts), but apropos of the recent fooferah about Little Big Planet users making games that look like games we know: Looks fun :) Jordan Mechner linked the above in one of his blog entries. I've been writing little capsule reflections on the XBox games I own. One of my favorites in the list is Sands of TIme . Speaking of Mechner, here's an essay...

Some people say President Obama should lighten up on video games now that he doesn't have to please the video-games-are-the-source-of-evil crazies. I say I'll personally introduce him to whatever generation of consoles are out when he retires, as long as he spends his presidency saving our country from economic collapse: I'm willing to hear a few ignorant things about video games if we're able...

Gladius still is a tug of war with me. Some of the matches I only find are hopeless by actually going into them and realizing the guys are too tough, but others have been evenly matched battles that actually had me on the edge of my seat, making damned sure I hit the swing meter button at the right time to ensure I didn't lose. In one very close battle with a squad of amazons I was within one h...

Is it an exploit if I hire a dude, take all his stuff, then kick him out of the school, then sell his stuff at a profit? Yes. Somewhere a samnite warrior is crying.

I got to to play two games this weekend (other than a little Puzzle Pirates ): Getting Up and Gladius . First I'll talk about the latter two a bit, then go into specific topics that came up about games in general that I'd like to talk about. Gladius Played a ton of Gladius this weekend. Played as both the starting characters, after being disappointed with the ease of difficulty on the barbarian...

So, the bargain bin has yielded three games. It could have been fourth, but no matter how much I think Jet-Set Radio Future might be cool, I think I'm just afraid of button combo based trick skating as a barrier to my exploration of the city. Time will tell, they're about 10 bucks a piece in that bin of bargains, and I think I'm the only person left in The City with a plain old XBox. Anyone wan...

The censorship madness in Australia, through Ben Croshaw .

I have to say, despite the bugs and questionable design decisions, Halo 2 was an all-around improvement over the first game. Narratively it's a lot more interesting, and it even has cinematic touches with the usual subtitles showing you what you're looking at. The environments varied a lot, and there was no flood overload like in the first game (although they were still annoying, and not as sho...

Finally beat the thing last night. Had I written the prior entry knowing about what the final level was, I would probably have said something about my dread of what was to come. In a way, my ignorance helped me cope with the shockingly painful Warthog Roller Coaster Ride of Reseting. Absolutely horrible. You spend the whole game training to fight, then the climax has nothing to do with fighting...

OK guys, seriously, fuck off! Started playing Halo, the first one, through a generous donation. I like the weapon mechanic, where you can just have two at a time, and the variance of weapons is well balanced, so that you can find the right weapon for the job if you think hard enough about the situation. Never in my gaming life have I come across such a useful pistol as the standard issue sidear...

The Computer History Museum has just posted a movie-sized lecture by Will on game design. Say what you like about Spore or the Sims, I think he's one of the more savvy and approachable game theorists: Anyone out there have strong feelings about the guy's ideas? No comments will mean no :) And as a side note, Yuji Naka of Sonic fame has a new company, but for the life of me I can't get the messa...

Read the article here , and hear a recording of the actual emergency call here . Yes, I am evil.

This is in response to a post Jeff Gerstmann made about the recent crackdown on game makers who clone original work for profit. Cloning is akin to copying, so it may be a clear example of unacceptable activity to some, but the issue is crazy deep. Jeff went into the idea that the prosecution is not so much because they have a strong case, as that the plaintiffs know that the programmers, who ar...

I totally see where Jeff was going with this: Say what you like about the production quality of this video; this woman's voice SELLS :) I'm sorry, but I still love pinball. That looks like a lot of fun. Thing I liked about pinball was its depth, and that you got out of it what you put into it. Even with that Maxis pinball game that all Windows machines seem to have now, or that Android game fro...

While some of us fire volleys back and forth in the Games are/n't Art scuffles, some folks still insist that games are complete wastes of time. I'm definitely preaching to the choir here, so the following letter is less an attempt to convert folks than it is to bring up the old cliche: that saying something is like a video game is a code word for saying something is bad. I mean, we still say th...

I'd managed to put off a blog entry for a few days, because I didn't want to do too many at once. Apparently that has transformed into weeks without anything. Pretty stupid tendencies I have. It's a pretty big blog, but just skip the parts you don't care to read, even if that means the whole thing :) Stuff that's come up: Los Colores del Diablo y La Ciudad de la Forja I was reminded of an earli...

Indeed. Starting up the second in the Mondo series, Mondo Agency by Cactus Games , I was, like before, captivated by the imagination behind the game's presentation. As I played I had in mind my review of the first, Mondo Medicals , asking myself if I was too harsh. I couldn't move past that 2-3 barrier the last time. While I love the mood of these games, Mondo Medicals' puzzles were mean. They...

I've got the Bombcast on right now, listening to a bunch of guys talk about video games. Going to write a simple blog that I can do while listening to them at the same time. This is for people who wanted to know what the heck is going on on this screen in Star Raiders. Die, you slippery little Zylon bastards! The plus in the center is the aiming cross hair for your targeting computer. The plus...

There's no right answer, here At one time or another, a good chunk of the Giant Bomb staff has revealed that they're color blind. I think this is great, because I'm color deficient too, so I always hope that they'll at least mention when a developer isn't making the game accessible for the likes of us. Actually, there's a sizable portion of the general population that has some sort of differenc...

I'm not sure if anyone has said anything about this in the forums; I tend not to go to them too often unless I have to. I would like to suggest a few things to make moderator recruitment a little clearer for the recipient, though. If you're going to time the message to expire, include a time limit, or at the very least, suggest that the offer doesn't extend forever. While I was debating whether...

Who's laughing NOW!? Paranoid from dealing with Star Control 2 's ninja-like assassination of my desire to play, I assumed that I had somehow lost levels in World of Xeen , and spent a bit of time trying to figure out why. The save game system is such that in addition to the little blurb you use to describe the saved game, you also get a tally of your current highest level. I saved in one reall...

So, I'm playing Star Control II, mining my own planets, when the game decides to slowly end on me, in a way that means my numerous saves are now useless. It wasn't an immediate "this is what happens because you didn't do this" cue card like you'd usually see in modern stuff, but a slow, plodding event that I couldn't figure out, and thought that I had partially remedied. When I finally find out...

Independent of the Giant Bomb video that mentioned Star Control 2 , a friend of mine brought my attention to the freeware clone of the game made from the source released by the creators. I remembered having downloaded the game before for my off-line gaming PC, but the thing requires certain files to be downloaded actively for reasons I don't quite understand. Off-line meant I couldn't play, app...

I love the title screen, even! I've been playing World of Xeen when I should be doing other things. I broke it out, what was it, like a week ago I think. I've already gained about 20 some levels for my elf -less party of adventurers, and I've already found a very interesting site in the northwestern corner that basically tells the story of the preceding Might and Magic games. Really, really nea...

So, one of the first questions I'm asked when I'm signing up (other than my gender... is this a dating site or can we not worry about gender here?) is my, I guess, console/PC alignment. I looked at the choices and had to pick neutral. Really, if I had a choice, it would be something like " retro " or whatever word that would fit better than that. Indie? I look at all of these reviews and am exc...