Games I Want to Make, pt. 1

- A simultaneous turn-based game pitting two players against each other and the game itself. Each turn, players must prepare to manipulate the game’s input against each other without leaving themselves open to harm from either their opponent or the impartial game. – A game where your environment is made up almost entirely of loose [...]

Done With Penny Arcade

This is roughly the same as something I put on my Facebook earlier today, only expanded in a few places and with a few pre-coffee typos cleaned up (and better, post-coffee typos added). A friend of mine asked me to post it somewhere easier to get to than the comments section of a wall post, [...]

Of Sleds and Status

So a few months ago I wrote a post weighing in on the whole “are games art?” thing. It wasn’t exactly a new topic at the time, and several (often smarter) people and articles appearing in industry magazines and sites have gone on to beat the point even further in to the ground, but it [...]

Looking For Sleds In All The Wrong Places

The question of when videogames will have their own Citizen Kane – that is, one that provides the great leap forward from embarrassing hobby to legitimate art form so desperately craved by so many – seems to crop up more and more with each passing month. It’s the bad penny of games journalism, the go-to [...]

Adding Another Zero

For you, a (somewhat off center) video: The feeling of living inside a gigantic, beautifully complex machine of interlocking parts and the dizzy sense of scale that comes with it is pretty much how I feel every time I try to wrap my head around the thinking behind the level design in, say, Mario Galaxy.

The Grand Theft Auto Solution

After yesterday’s post about my issues with the Grand Theft Auto series and wondering aloud what sort of plans Rockstar had for how players can interact with the rather beautiful version of New York City they’ve created in the next installment, it was rather helpful to read to the end of Edge’s monstrous cover feature [...]

The Grand Theft Auto Problem

Grand Theft Auto IV is out at the end of the month. Easily one of the most anticipated games in essentially ever, several stores are already groaning under the weight of pre-orders while still doing everything they can to bring in more. The inevitable backlash against the game hasn’t quite started yet, but it’s not [...]

What’s Next

It probably wasn’t terribly clear (particularly as my methods of thinking out loud are baffling and needlessly complex even to me), but there was a theme to nearly all of last week’s posts: “working stuff out”. Deciding what to do with the restless frustration that keeps me moving from game to game, considering what can [...]

State of Play

Yesterday’s post about my frustration with the games in my collection (and, to an extent, games in general) has had me thinking a lot about the games I actually am playing at the moment, and if they speak at all to a change in what I’m looking for when it comes to how I spend [...]

The Frustration Game

My free time is falling into a pattern lately, one I’m not sure how to get out of. The more I think about it, the more I realize there may not be an exit: this patter is a result of the life and career I’ve chosen, and I am now utterly doomed. I don’t have [...]