Prepared
I’ve continued to play a ton of Slay the Spire over the last few weeks, though I’ve dropped off a bit. Even when I’m not playing the game I like to think about the game. I’ve been thinking about one…
Category Playing Games
Remains
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…
Pretty Good
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…
Slay the Spire
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…
Wearing War
Not too long ago, and for a lot of the history of video games, the visual quality of a game has been decided entirely on how ‘realistic’ the graphics are. Using photo textures, true-to-life lighting models, and increasingly sophisticated shading…
Fantasy Patch Notes for Dishonored
I’ve been playing a lot of Dishonored over the past couple of weeks, and I’ve been, for the most part, loving my time with it. Of course, the more I enjoy a game, the more frustrated I get with the…
Situational
Playing a game is learning a set of habits, a set of reactions, and trying to tune and optimize those habits and reactions towards those that most frequently successfully achieve the game’s goal. Calling it a strategy might, sometimes, seem…
Live
I mentioned yesterday that I’ve been trying to livestream more gameplay (currently with a tenuous schedule of Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday @ 8pm, ). It’s interesting the sorts of pressures that streaming your gameplay puts on you – it…
Obstacles and Expression
Difficulty can serve several important roles in a game’s design: It can create an aesthetic sense of danger and foreboding, it can make the actions of the player feel more consequential, and it can push the player to vary their…
Invisible Walls
A thing about video games that I wonder sometimes if people really understand is that they’re made to be completed by the player. Dark Souls is made to be completed. Cuphead is made to be completed. The most challenging (or…