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 […]

Christmas 1968 with The Going Thing I came across this recently and thought that it was oddly fitting for the type of music featured on Fallout 3’s Galaxy News Radio, especially the track The Christmas Waltz.  When I first heard it, I couldn’t help but conjure up images of walking the wastes in power armor, […]