In a previous article, I mentioned Minecraft, a retro-styled independent sandbox game which is quickly becoming a bit of an internet sensation.  I recently started playing it, and I’ve been writing an account of my experience starting out in the game.  The following chronicles the first four days (and nights) of game time, and my [...]

http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/2010/04/22/thoughts-on-difficulty-settings/ Some fairly interesting commentary on variability in video game difficulty settings.  I would agree that Half-Life did have some strangeness to its level of difficulty (as I recall, I finally found the balance that I liked by using console codes to specify the exact percentages of damage that my weapons and enemy weapons would [...]

The Difficulty of Difficulty It’s a very good article, which outlines many of the different types of frustrating difficulty that people encounter in games, and it makes a good point about the difficulty of a game needing to feel fair to the player.  I would add to that the notion that the difficulty should feel [...]

The most compelling case should be for game-ness An excellent article, especially in the last two paragraphs.  Overall, I think I agree with most of the points in the article, especially the notion that games should be considered an experience in their own right, rather than having to specifically measure up to already-established art forms.  [...]

RPS pretty much says what needs to be said: You Maniacs! Perhaps the biggest, most frustrating flaw a game can have is when it doesn’t allow you to actually play it.  Regardless of the price, I would never purchase a game using Ubisoft’s amazingly draconian new DRM scheme (lose your internet connection, get booted out [...]

Writing up the review of SFIV led me to examine a few additional thoughts I have regarding the game, and gaming in general. First, I think it’s worth spending a bit of time defining exactly what I mean when I refer to games primarily as entertainment.  For me, games, like movies and television, serve primarily [...]

From Ars Technica: Why we quit: the moments that push us away from gaming There are also a lot of good examples of issues with frustration in games in the user comments on the article as well.

… if you have a setting that falls below even Very Easy, generally speaking, this means that a brain-damaged sack of rocks could fall over onto the keyboard and still win.  When someone who has at least a bit of skill at Street Fighter II can’t beat the final boss on kindergarten-level difficulty, chances are [...]

A few nights ago, while browsing on gog.com (an excellent site to find and purchase older games, for cheap, drm-free), I remembered that I still had the original retail copy of Unreal Tournament 2004 lying around on a shelf somewhere.  One quick reinstall later (luckily, everything works just fine under Vista), and I quickly started [...]

Let me just take a moment to wish you all a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2009!   I do apologize for having nothing new to post here during December, mainly because it was almost all more of the same – me being engrossed in playing (and modding) Fallout 3 to the general exclusion of other [...]