I actually beat Mario Galaxy the weekend before Thanksgiving – Rock Band was coming, after all, and touring the world while Princess Peach remained in Bowser’s clutches just didn’t feel right. The level of pure, unadulterated joy I gushed about before lasted right up to the end and beyond, with the final showdown against Bowser [...]
Level Up, Newsweek’s gaming blog run by the remarkably talented N’Gai Croal, is surprisingly one of the best sources for videogames discussion outside of England. It’s surprising because you don’t expect a weekly news mag like Newsweek to bother caring enough to hire somebody who knows what he’s talking about. Also because most American games [...]
Sleater-Kinney were (and still are, despite no longer existing) the sort of band I loved with desperate abandon – loud, messy, and smarter than they were ever supposed to be. I came on board with One Beat, their next-to-last record and one of the first actual protest albums to the then-new Iraq War nonsense. After [...]
I don’t go home for Thanksgiving. Ever. It’s not a holiday I like, it’s not something I can afford, and I’d rather save my travel time and money for the one just around the corner where people give me things. So while my girlfriend goes home to ever-hoppin’ Huntsville to see her family, I stay [...]
It’s always confounded me that “educational games” continues to be this misunderstood and ghettoized area of gaming when there are few better ways teach a person than by having them interact with their subject matter. Nearly every one learns better when they can put their hands on something, and who’s better at getting your hands [...]
11.23D-A-Y-J-O-B
I promised last post to talk a little about CSI: Dark Motives for the DS and what exactly I do. There’s a bit of a balancing act to be maintained here, as on one hand I need to not step on any of the NDAs that rule my life, and on the other I don’t [...]
Two short but sweet games for you this week. They’re from rather disparate genres, slapped together here due to their ever-so-sleight simularities to other games that are important to me at the moment. First is Super Serif Brothers, which is exactly like Super Mario Bros. if there were only one of them and he were [...]
First thing, right out of the box? Nobody does it like Nintendo. No other developer makes games that show such graceful understanding of how a game should play, from the way the controls just melt into your hands to the complex actions they coax out of running, jumping, and spinning. Margret Robinson had it pegged [...]
A quick one this week, and something of a cheat, as both games come from the same source. I can only plead the onset of Sick and the work of mentally psyching myself for Mario Galaxy’s release tomorrow. I’d considering putting something here about how I really mean to be posting more, but with gravity [...]
If you’re the sort who swings through the downloadable games portion of Nickelodeon’s web site from time to time, you might notice that SpongeBob’s Atlantis Squarepantis SquareOff is now available for download. And were you to look at the credits for it (after grabbing the free demo or slapping down some cash for the full [...]