I’ve been playing the beta for Hearthstone, Blizzard Entertainment’s upcoming online collectable card game. It’s actually difficult for me to justify this as time well spent. It’s not that it’s a bad game – quite the opposite, in fact. I…
It is often observed that playing games and making games are different activities. This is kind of obvious, but whatever the technical college advertisements might have you believe, there is more involved in developing a game than playing through it…
Endings are hard. Endings are weird. Our effects as humans, as entities and processes, will outlast our lives, never ending but blending instead seamlessly into each other, on and on, forever. Our stories will outlive the process of our bodies,…
The world is a big place. And just when you think you’re starting to understand how big it is, you find that the world you’ve been living in is just the shadow of something greater, just a two-dimensional projection of…
I ran a fan every moment of every day, for three or four months, over the Summer. Now that the temperature has cooled down, I turned the fan off and immediately began to feel uncomfortable. I could hear too much,…
I didn’t play it. Well, technically I did. I played for 40 minutes or so. That was long enough for me to remember what an unpleasant, albeit intriguing, world that Oddworld is. Abe, the player character, seems to be the…
I like Anodyne. I liked it more than I expected to, in all honesty: I was expecting a solid and aesthetically pleasing retro-gaming experience, but what I found was something much stranger and more beautiful than I had anticipated. Anodyne…
Around this time last week, I discussed how games have a hard time portraying the unreliability of memories because this erodes the player’s ability to trust the information they’re receiving from the game. I’ve been thinking about that, and it…
Sigh. Okay. Well, first, a confession: I didn’t finish the game. I didn’t even reach the 10 hours I’d planned on as giving a game a good solid chance before moving on. I played for about 6 hours. And here’s…
I seem to be hating a lot of things recently. I’ve always been mature for my age, so I think at 30 I may have started to cross over into crotchety old man territory. If I had a lawn and…
