Death is omnipresent in games, but they mostly don’t like to acknowledge that. Dying in games is just a way of keeping score, a nice easily understandable failure state, something to be avoided, not experienced. In life, death is omnipresent…
I was in Los Angeles and I saw Candide. It had Kelsey Grammar and was generally a great show, but I’ve always had a bit of a hard time warming up to Candide conceptually. I may actually have a hard…
I’ve been playing Cuphead. If you’ve somehow managed not to hear about this game, Cuphead is a 2D platformer styled after the cartoons of the 1930’s – although I frankly think it manages to realize that aesthetic far better than…
I have been spending the last 10 days or so playing way too much Slay the Spire. They say write what you know, and right now my brain knows nothing but the pleasures of building a badass deck to kill…
When I was a child it was popular to tell kids they could grow up to be anything. I think it was, anyway, I vaguely recall that being a thing that was said, but I might be thinking of something…
I recently played through Alpha Protocol, which is an experience I don’t know whether or not to recommend. It is not a good stealth game, but it is a hilarious stealth game: Once you actually level up your character the…
Why don’t I make more games? Of course, I’ve been working on EverEnding, but that’s a long term project and hardly precludes the idea of pursuing side projects. I’ve even tried to take a break of a week or a…
It’s easy to stop seeing things. Playing Super Hexagon, it’s easy to get lulled into believing you know what the pattern is even when you haven’t been looking closely, to dodge what you believed the obstacle was only to run…
This is the last of a month of daily Problem Machine blog posts. It’s been a tiring month. I’m looking forward to never writing another word for the rest of my life, or at least a few days. I guess…
It’s a tough banana to split, knowing how much better you could be while trying to convince yourself you’re good enough. The more one improves the more capable one becomes of seeing room for improvement. Now, the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests…
